Why You’re Burned Out (Even Though You Love Your Work)

**Justin Simon** (0:00)
Hey everybody, before we get started, I wanna thank my friends at Hatch for producing this episode. You can get unlimited podcast editing and strategy for one flat rate by visiting hatch.fm. All right, let's get in the show.
Welcome to Distribution First, the show where we flip content marketing on its head and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week, I share playbooks, motivations, stories and strategies to help you repurpose and distribute your content, because you deserve to get the most out of everything you create. Hey, friend, welcome to this week's episode of Distribution First. On this week's show, I have my buddy Jake on from VideoScale, and we are going to talk about all things automating, eliminating, and delegating tasks. If you are in content creation, if you're in marketing, or if you're just running a business, you have to be able to do these three things if you want to survive. And Jake is coming on to show us how to do that, because Jake doesn't just run VideoScale. He runs multiple businesses, and it's literally how he's able to survive and how he's able to thrive in his businesses, is by doing these two things. So Jake, welcome to the show.

**Jake Prieur** (1:21)
Yeah, thanks for having me. And I'd like to add, it's what also keeps me married and being a good dad, because if I couldn't automate, delegate and eliminate, I certainly wouldn't be running multiple things, but also stay married. So it keeps me sane, it keeps me in a good marriage and a present dad as well.

**Justin Simon** (1:38)
No, I love that. And I think at the end of the day, that's why I was happy to have you on and really talk about this because I think part of the Distribution First mindset and why I love it is the goal of simplifying down to what's necessary. And really the reason why I want to do that is not to just simply grow it at all costs. I think marketing and business, a lot of times it's like, oh, just growth for gross sake, we got to do all these things. It's just constant up and to the right. And I think when you're in your own business or when you're working for somebody else, it starts to realize like, why are we doing the things we're doing? What is the point of doing this? And a lot of times, unfortunately for folks, I've had this happen in my career, you got to learn the hard way. And so you burn yourself out, or you go into a point where you're just hit a wall and you're like, okay, there's got to be a better way. Because what we are doing is not working.

**Jake Prieur** (2:27)
Yeah, no, I think that was the, I had to learn it to figure it out too. And that's definitely something you learn as either a solopreneur or a small business owner, where maybe you're leading a small team, is that you start off with all the hats, and then you start making enough money where you say, well, I can hand off some of these things. And the more you go through that process, you start to realize, let's be honest, I'm only good at like three things. Why don't I just focus on those three things, and then hand off these other things to people who are not only better at them, but they probably come alive by doing them. Like, I don't like writing text for my social posts, but I know some people are really good at it, and they love doing that. I am mediocre and I hate it. I could pay them, you know, whatever, $20 an hour to do it for me. And so you kind of go through this over time, this process of, like we're going to talk about, of automating what you can, delegating what you need to, and then eliminating all the unnecessary things. But at this point, and I'm still going through the process, you're never done with it. More things get out of your plate, and so it's kind of a continuous circle of having to go through that process. So yeah, I'm excited to get into this and see if we can help some people out.

**Justin Simon** (3:32)
Yeah, absolutely. So let's start there. I think one of the things, I probably got into the idea of delegating when I started managing my first team. And so I think that's maybe some of that. When you're an individual contributor on a team or you're working for yourself, you kind of are just doing the work. And it's not until you really either have some team members or get so much put on your plate and maybe get a little wiggle room, whether it's budget, headcount, etc., that you can start to even think about delegating. Like I know early in my career, delegating wasn't even a... Delegating meant I wasn't valuable.