Basko the Bali dog, the myth of Burnout and the pursuit of purpose
No.123
Monday 28 November
Hi, it's David here.
Really great story tellers have the ability to share a story that is personal to them yet at the same time make you feel as if it is personal to you.
Community Member, Ted Guidotti is a great storyteller. He has not only had twenty odd years experience, he has filled them with great experiences.
I am always interested in what he has to say and as always, curious to hear what you think.
Co-Founder at?BeenThereDoneThat
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Hi, it's Ted here.
The team asked me if I’d like to share something with the BeenThereDoneThat community, so I decided to write about me, my dog and maybe you….
Bakso the Bali dog, the myth of Burnout and the pursuit of purpose.
Our dog, Bakso, thinks it’s his job to chase deer. He didn’t choose this job because it pays well, or because he thought it would make his parents happy, or even because he’s really all that good at it. He chose it because it makes him happy. It makes him feel alive. It gets his heart racing, spikes his senses, and somewhere deep in his 5,000 years of Balinese DNA, it’s in his nature. You know what it never does? Tire him out. Never. Not once in four years has he ever looked out into a field full of deer and said, “Nah, I’m good. I think I’ll go sniff out some truffles or something.”
Now, if you were Bakso, and you had to spend two-thirds of your life in a high-rise translating numerical data into meaningful action, you might not feel as alive as he does while on the scent of a whitetail deer. You also might not be terribly happy about being compared to my dog, but it may be worth your time to read on, because the one simple lesson is this: Burnout isn’t about being exhausted or overworked, it’s about being misaligned. True for you and true for Bakso.
Sometimes a frog’s got to jump.
Ok, so now I’ll take a minute to compare you all, and myself to a frog. You know, the kind of frog that unknowingly boils itself to death in a pot over time. This analogy is probably more about me than you but I suspect it may ring true for many. What made me a good creative were two things. A squiggly, nonlinear, tangential mind and empathy, the ability to understand what someone other than myself might be thinking or feeling. But as I grew from a creative into a creative leader, I was asked to flex other muscles and master the art of other skills, like organization, politics, hiring, firing, managing teams, and shepherding and selling other people’s work. It’s not that I wasn’t good at it or at the very least competent, but it gave me little time to chase deer. To do the things that made me feel alive. I wasn’t just tired of doing what I was doing, I was champing at the bit to do more of what I was made to do - relate and create. It wasn’t exhaustion that burned me out, it was the perpetual friction of being a squiggly peg re-relegated to a square hole. I was decidedly misaligned, so I jumped out of the pot and landed 10,000 miles away in Bali, Indonesia.
Rediscovering your deer.
So how do we align, or realign with our true purpose? Our natural inclination might be to look inside. Seek within ourselves. Reassess by retreating from the world and trusting our own gut. My move has always been to self-solve, but too many of us become so self-reliant, we often lose ourselves. Unable to see what’s right in front of our noses. Sometimes the best way to see yourself more clearly is through the eyes of others. People who understand you deeply but also have just enough distance to see what you can’t. What I rediscovered in Bali is that community is one of the most powerful catalysts of personal clarity. The good news is, you don’t have to move half-way across the world to find it. There are tribes springing up all around us who believe that the collective wisdom of diverse thinkers isn’t just great for solving creative briefs, inspiring corporate culture and tackling global challenges but also for achieving personal clarity and propulsion.
I’d like to introduce you to just a few.….
As always, we are curious to hear what you think.
Community Member at?BeenThereDoneThat
ECD/Writer at?Elevation Barn
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