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Summary
The blog post explores the theme of burnout by drawing a parallel between basketball dynasties, like the Golden State Warriors, and personal or professional burnout. It argues that burnout stems from losing sight of long-term goals and focusing too much on short-term results. The author reflects on the importance of enjoying the process and maintaining perspective, noting how dynasties take time to build and sustain. Ultimately, maintaining long-term focus and finding joy in daily actions are key to avoiding burnout.
Burnout is losing joy in the grind while expecting results you can’t fully control in a certain timeframe
Me with Shravan and George at Game 4 of Warriors-Spurs in May 2013
Me with Shravan and Ricky at Game 4 of Warriors-Kings in April 2023
Preface - April 2026 ⬇️
Preface, April 2026
With the Warriors' play-in game exit, Steve Kerr's uncertain future with the Warriors, Steph Curry's knee and ankle uncertainty, Jimmy Butler's ACL recovery uncertainty, Draymond Green's contract uncertainty, and Kristaps Porzingis and other players' free agency uncertainty, the Warriors' future is well, very uncertain. And that by definition means that the dynasty is over. Dynasties mean certainty and inevitability. Steve Kerr has referred to it as a "fading dynasty", but I think at this point, it's fair to say that it has faded. The 2015–2025 Warriors dynasty changed basketball forever though, and I imagine in 10 or 20 years, I'll be telling my daughter about how good they were.
In life outside of basketball, AI drastically changing our work lives and world certainly feels inevitable. The meteoric rise of model intelligence feels a bit like the Warriors coming out of nowhere to win their 2015 championship after AI felt relegated to similar obscurity to the Warriors' 40 years before that. The question is, will we mostly see OpenAI and Anthropic as the Warriors and Cavs (with Google as the Spurs), or are things wide open like they have been?
In terms of building things myself, both of these seemingly conflicting statements are true:
- There's never been a better time to build things
- There's never been more uncertainty for the things you build as things change and shift very quickly, so long time horizons are impossible to consider.
Previously, when I talked about burnout being a mismatch of expectations and time horizons, I hadn't really considered that building FAST with LLMs could also be a setup for burnout. To counteract that, I think we need to think more than ever about what the long-term invariants and core principles are.
Preface - October 2024 ⬇️
Preface, October 2024
Okay, finally hitting publish here. Working on it with ChatGPT 4o with canvas and listening to 4 or 5 different summaries of this in NotebookLM convinced me that I couldn't let this post go unpublished. While this is still a work in progress, as the Warriors' season starts tonight, hopefully some human out there will find this message valuable.
Preface - September 2024 ⬇️
Preface, September 2024
Third revisit is the charm? Writing this in a 3:45a Flow Club after our baby woke me up at 3:23a and I couldn't fall back asleep. Three things made me want to revisit this draft and try to actually publish it:
- My wife and I had a baby and I feel like I've grown enough perspective to add to this post to make it worthwhile for someone out there.
- The Warriors dynasty—at least the Curry-Klay-Dray-Dre dynasty—ended with Andre Iguodala retiring in October 2023 and Klay Thompson signing with the Mavericks in July 2024.
- o1 was released and can help me edit the point I was trying to make from 1.
Preface - June 2023 ⬇️
Preface, June 2023
Since shying away from publishing this, several things have happened:
- The Lakers eliminated the Warriors from the Playoffs and we saw the likely birth of a new dynasty in Denver.
- The Warriors traded Jordan Poole for Chris Paul.
- Ricky wrote this post on his love for basketball, which inspired me to revisit this post originally from April 2023.
Preface - May 2023 ⬇️
Preface, May 2023
As large language models carefully craft essays probabilistically with just enough whimsy sprinkled in to sound human, I wonder: is writing by hand, prompt-free, still the best way to convey thoughts? Perhaps if they are as disparate as drawing connections between: the Golden State Warriors basketball dynasty, burnout, and time horizons. Take THAT ChatGPT!
April 23, 2023
Sitting in Section 203 as the Sacramento Kings inbounded the ball with 10 seconds left on the clock and the Warriors clinging to a 126-125 lead, probabilities ran through my head like a poker player calculating the odds of her top pair on the flop holding up. Is this a coin flip? Given how efficient both teams had been in terms of points per possession, does that make the Kings more likely than not to win the game? Wait, if the Warriors lose and go down 3-1, didn't I just see a stat recently that teams historically have only come back to win a series from 3-1 like 5% of the time? What are the chances this is Steph, Klay, and Draymond's last year together? It's almost certainly Dre's. Is this the end of the Warriors dynasty?
Thankfully, Harrison Barnes' shot bounced off the back rim and my panic subsided as the crowd at Chase Center erupted in jubilation. Dynasty not over yet.
The end of the dynasty
Now that we can definitively say that the Warriors dynasty—at least the Curry-Klay-Dray-Dre dynasty—ended with Andre Iguodala retiring in October 2023 and Klay Thompson signing with the Mavericks in July 2024, if we didn't celebrate it while we had it, it's definitely worth taking time to celebrate it now. But how did it start?
A lot can happen in 10 years. In 2013, Steph Curry not only wasn't a two-time MVP and four-time champion—he wasn't even an All-Star yet. He had just signed a 4-year, $44M contract extension that was deemed risky at the time given his injury history, and was arguably one of the biggest all-star snubs that season. I remember conversations with my friend George, pictured on the left above, about how Steph Curry (my favorite player) and Kawhi Leonard (his favorite player) would be All-Stars someday and how they both got snubbed in 2013. Even as huge fans of Steph and Kawhi as we were, I don't think either of us dreamed big enough. A lot can happen in 10 years, and big things start small. Things that feel inevitable start small, and there were lots of little things along the way that played major roles, but didn't seem crazy at the time: signing David Lee, drafting Steph Curry, drafting Klay Thompson, hiring Mark Jackson, Steph Curry getting injured, drafting Harrison Barnes and Draymond Green, trading Monta Ellis for Andrew Bogut, firing Mark Jackson and hiring Steve Kerr, moving Draymond into the starting lineup... Generational companies and lifelong relationships also start with a series of small things.
Why does all of this matter? Because my friend George in the first photo never got to see Steph Curry or Kawhi Leonard become All-Stars or NBA champions.
Basketball Tangent ⬇️
Receipts, as the kids call them. Sorry, Ricky and CP3. Was hoping Warriors could win a championship for CP3. Maybe if the league hadn't vetoed the CP3-Lakers trade and maybe if CP3's hamstring had held up in the 2018 playoffs against the Warriors, we wouldn't even be talking about a Warriors dynasty.
After that Warriors-Kings game, I couldn't help but think back to the beginning of the Warriors' run. I was here— well not here here, but at Oracle Arena 16 miles away, 10 years ago for a Warriors-Spurs playoff game. Why do sports matter at all? Because they teach us about life and let us celebrate the ups and downs condensed into a few hours at a time. Because they make us feel like we're a part of something bigger. Because we want to be able to tell our kids someday that we saw Steph Curry play while they insist a player who may not even be born yet is the greatest to ever touch a basketball on Earth or Mars. (Sep 2024: or argue with your daughter someday about who changed the game more, Steph for the NBA or Caitlin for the WNBA). But mostly because you can literally see mere centimeters or milliseconds change the course of a team's championship run or decade-long dynasty.
As baseball tries to woo back younger fans by speeding up the pace of play, I'm generally a fan of games evolving. We don't need the game to be exactly the same for sports greatness to be timeless. Humans are great at making history rhyme.
10 years ago, the Warriors were the young upstart team facing the San Antonio Spurs coming off 4 championships much like these young upstart Kings are facing the Warriors coming off 4 championships. Harrison Barnes, who missed that shot to potentially keep the Warriors' title dreams alive this year, was the leading scorer for the Warriors in that Spurs game. Steph, Klay and Draymond were 25, 23, and 23 in 2013 playing against the Spurs' dynasty core of Duncan (37), Ginobili (35), and Parker (30) with future star Kawhi (21). Today, the Kings with Fox (25), Sabonis (26), and Murray (22) are playing the Warriors' core aged 35, 33, and 33 with a promising young star in Jordan Poole (23). The Kings just ended a 16-year playoff drought, whereas in 2013, the Warriors had just made the playoffs for the 2nd time in 19 years (and first since the “We Believe” year in 2007). Edit, Sep 2024: Well, maybe it was a bit premature to call Poole the future Kawhi. But hey there's Podz, TJD, JK, Moody, and still-somehow-only-28-and-now-is-shooting-again Kevon Loonajuwon! Kings fans, I'm not sure what to say, but maybe you're one Monta-Bogut unpopular-at-the-time trade away from a dynasty.
Most things that are really valuable take time to build—whether we’re talking friendships, families, basketball dynasties, or companies. They say you overestimate what you can do in the short term and underestimate what you can do in the long term, but what that overlooks is that in the short term, you can easily lose sight of the long-term goal, which leads to burnout. We’re not great at perceiving how fast or slow we’re going—only acceleration or deceleration. When we stop feeling progress day to day—that’s when it’s important to focus on the long-term goals. But if you don’t love the process day-to-day, you can lose yourself chasing those long-term goals, and if the difference between a dynasty and a footnote, between success and failure, or between being able to argue about sports with loved ones or just having to sit here writing about them are all ultimately out of our control, you have to try to love it all.
On Burnout and Perspective
I previously drew parallels between burnout and sports’ injuries— we should take preventative steps to avoid them— prehab is easier than rehab. As an individual, losing sight of the long-term goal and trying to win it all with a single short-term move without looking forward to the future is what leads to burnout. Burnout can mean a lot of things. The Mayo Clinic defines it as “physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity”. Most of the time when we talk about burnout, we focus on the former part of that sentence—“physical or emotional exhaustion”. But those are really the manifestations or symptoms and don’t really need much explanation. The part that’s worth double-clicking into here is “a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity”.
Every season that doesn’t end with a championship can feel like a failure, but if you zoom out, the progress becomes clearer. Maybe that’s why Steph Curry always seems to have more fun than anyone else—he knows that the journey matters just as much as the outcome. When I’ve faced burnout, it often stemmed from expecting a specific milestone by a set time. What helped me recover was finding flow in the small, daily actions—paradoxically, focusing on the small things often realigns you with your bigger goals. Ask yourself: if you were doing the same thing 10 years from now, with everything else different, would you still want to be doing it? Does the process itself make you happy, regardless of the result?
Friendships and relationships that span over a decade are rare, and I will always cherish them. Hopefully, in 2033, there will still be basketball to watch—maybe even with 38% gravity, making shots and dunks all the more spectacular! Both friendships, a personal love of the game, a shared love of the game, and a collective love of the game are excellent antidotes to burnout. Whether you’re chasing a championship (or not two, not three, not four, startup success, or any big goal, remember: the path is unpredictable, luck and factors out of your control play a huge part, even for the best in the world. Zoom out to the big picture, and zoom in to find joy and flow in the small things, and you never know what you might build.
Thanks to Amanda, Ricky, ChatGPT 4o with canvas, o1-preview, and NotebookLM for reading/helping me edit drafts of this.
References and Inspiration
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