"It's just a phase."

I used to say the same thing until I realized it's not.

Apr 21, 2026

Dear readers,

Last week I sat across from a friend at dinner and watched him say the exact words I used to tell myself. He had no idea what was coming. I did.

Happy reading,

Xaver

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Last week I met up with a good friend of mine.

We were invited to a padel tournament for founders here in Munich. Before it started, we grabbed dinner at a restaurant nearby.

Something was off. He looked different than the last time I saw him. Tired. Flat. Like someone had slowly turned the volume down on him over the past few months.

So I asked how he was doing.

He said things were a little stressful. New kid at home. A lot going on at work.

But the more we talked, the more I could see how deep it really went.

He co-runs an e-commerce company - Finance, HR, Legal, Ops. All of it. The business is doing well, generating millions in revenue, but they’re still only about a dozen people. And to make things worse, a key colleague had just left. No replacement yet. So all of that landed on his plate too.

His head was completely full. He told me he doesn’t even know how to switch off anymore.

I recognized it immediately.

That feeling of doing everything at once. Everything somehow still working, but just barely. Then a strong team member leaves and suddenly you’re absorbing their responsibilities on top of your own. You’re drowning at work, and when you finally get home, there’s a partner and a kid who need you to be present - really present - and you’ve got nothing left to give.

I sat there listening to him and it felt like looking into a mirror from a few years ago.

The thing nobody tells you in that moment is that the situation won’t fix itself. You can’t just push harder and hope it gets better. I tried that. It doesn’t work. It just delays the crash.

What I told him - and what I genuinely believe - is that the first step isn’t some big strategic overhaul. It’s much smaller than that. It’s admitting to yourself that the way things are running right now is not sustainable. Not as a dramatic realization. Just a quiet, honest acknowledgment: this can’t keep going like this.

Because as long as you tell yourself it’s just a phase, you won’t change anything. You’ll keep absorbing more. You’ll keep saying yes. And your body will eventually make the decision for you.

I don’t know what happened after that dinner. We played padel, had a few laughs, and went home.

I didn’t give him a framework or a five-step plan. I didn’t coach him through it over dessert. That’s not how it works when someone is in the middle of it. You can’t optimize your way out of a state you haven’t fully admitted you’re in.

But I did say one thing that I think landed.

I told him that the moment everything feels equally urgent is the moment you’ve already lost the plot. Because when you’re responsible for Finance, HR, Legal, and Ops - and now also for the gap your colleague left behind - your brain starts treating everything like a fire. And when everything is a fire, you stop distinguishing between what actually matters and what just feels loud.

That’s the trap. Not the workload itself. The inability to see clearly inside of it.

I’ve been in that exact spot. At e-bot7, there were stretches where I genuinely believed that if I stepped away from any single thing for even a day, the whole machine would break. It felt like holding up a ceiling with my bare hands.

But here’s what I only understood later: the ceiling wasn’t actually falling. I just couldn’t tell anymore.

When you’re that deep in it, your perception shifts. You lose the ability to judge what’s truly critical and what’s just noise that got promoted because you were too tired to push back on it. And because you can’t see clearly, you keep saying yes. To every meeting, every decision, every problem that someone drops on your desk.

Not because you’re bad at saying no. But because in that state, everything looks like it could be the thing that breaks if you don’t personally handle it.

The real danger isn’t burning out from too much work. It’s burning out from too much work that didn’t need to be yours in the first place.

I think about my friend often since that evening. I hope he finds his version of the pause I never gave myself. The one where you sit down, look at everything on your plate, and ask - honestly, without the hero complex - what would actually happen if I let some of this go?

Usually, a lot less than you think.