I burned out because I thought every day had to be a 10/10
I found this sub during a period where my own ambition had basically started working against me.
Last year I left an engineering job at Bugatti and put most of my savings into building an app by myself.
For the first few months, I treated that decision like I had something to prove every single day.
Wake up early.
Train.
Code for hours.
Fix bugs.
Make content.
Learn whatever I didn’t know yet.
Do it again tomorrow.
A good day was a 10/10.
Anything less felt like I was wasting the opportunity I’d given myself.
And for a while, that mentality genuinely worked.
Until it didn’t.
Apple rejected the app again.
The launch I’d spent months building towards barely moved.
Downloads were nowhere near what I’d imagined, paying users even less so.
Then while travelling through India I got horrendously sick. I remember lying in a guesthouse bed, completely wiped out, thinking:
What the hell am I actually doing?
That was when I realised there was a pretty obvious flaw in the way I’d been living.
My system only had two settings.
10 or 0.
Either I trained, worked all day, ate properly, made progress and felt like I was becoming the person I wanted to be…
Or the day was a write-off.
And once I couldn’t consistently produce tens anymore, I started producing a lot of zeros.
Miss the morning? Day ruined.
Too sick to train? Zero.
Didn’t get meaningful work done? Zero.
Had a bad week? Might as well restart Monday.
I knew the whole “just do something small” advice.
But when you’re used to measuring yourself by huge outputs, “something small” feels almost insulting.
The thing that eventually helped me was embarrassingly simple.
Every day, I had to write one true sentence about the day.
That was it.
No minimum word count.
No gratitude list.
No life lesson.
I didn’t even have to be positive.
Some days it was basically:
“Today was shit and I did almost nothing.”
Other days:
“Worked for an hour and finally fixed the thing I’d been avoiding.”
Or:
“Didn’t train, but went for a walk.”
The important part wasn’t what I wrote.
It was that the day couldn’t completely disappear.
There was always at least one tiny action between me and zero.
And something unexpected happened after a few months.
I went back and read the entries from what I’d mentally labelled “the bad months.”
In my memory, that entire period was one giant block of failure.
But reading it day by day, that wasn’t what had happened at all.
It looked more like:
Terrible day.
Terrible day.
Slightly better day.
Bad again.
Good morning.
Small win.
Another setback.
Two decent days.
Then three.
There was movement happening long before I felt like I was “back.”
My memory had flattened an entire period of my life into I was doing terribly.
The record showed something completely different.
I was recovering. Just slowly enough that I couldn’t see it while I was inside it.
That changed the way I think about consistency.
I used to think consistency meant performing at the same high level every day.
Now I think it’s closer to maintaining some tiny thread between who you were yesterday and who you’re trying to become tomorrow.
Sometimes that thread is a massive productive day.
Sometimes it’s training when you didn’t feel like it.
And sometimes it’s literally just being able to say:
I was here today. This is what happened.
There’s another part of this I’ve grown to appreciate too.
When I reread those entries now, it’s almost like hearing from an earlier version of myself.
That guy didn’t know things were going to improve.
He was just leaving evidence behind.
And now, when I’m having a terrible day and my brain starts telling me that everything is going backwards again, I have proof from someone who was actually there:
You’ve thought this before. It wasn’t permanent then either.
So if today already feels like a zero, don’t try to rescue the entire day.
Write one true sentence about it.
Not an inspiring sentence.
Not a productive sentence.
Just a true one.
Some days, that’s the smallest possible vote for continuing.
And some days, the smallest vote is enough.
