"The thing you can’t fix is motivation. If someone’s just unmotivated, if they don’t want to apply themselves fully, if they have other things going on in their life, then you just have to cut them off at this point.
One of the things that’s less talked about is often you’ll meet the right person at the wrong time. They just have internal problems—life problems, home problems, health problems, things that are going on—that make them not capable of functioning at the level that you need.
And that’s a sad situation, but it happens all the time.
On a related note: People say, “Oh, I’m burned out. I need to take a break for a month or two and recharge.”
In my experience, that’s largely not true. Usually burnout is a sign you’re working on something that either isn’t working or you don’t enjoy the work fundamentally. Just taking time off won’t fix it.
If you’re really enjoying what you do, generally that’ll give you more energy and more motivation.
There are rare cases—like I know Elon is famous for flogging his teams until four in the morning and calling staff meetings at odd hours of the night and doing crazy death marches. That’s the culture that he sets and builds—that’s fine. In those situations, I could see certain people burning out.
But even there, what they’re saying is, “I cannot sustain this workload in the future.” So even there, taking time off doesn’t work because when you come back, he’s going to put you to task the same way as earlier.
So generally when someone says, “I’m burned out,” I just read that as, “I want to quit.”
Even if they don’t necessarily realize that themselves."
