Why we get worse at our jobs the harder we try
Yesterday around 2:13pm, I found myself staring at a Google Doc like it had just insulted my mother. The document hadn’t done anything wrong, really. It just wasn’t behaving. My ideas were half-baked. My tabs were multiplying. And I was bouncing between Slack, Asana, and my inbox like a squirrel on a sugar crash.
That’s when I realized... I was trying to out-work burnout. Again.
There’s this lie performance marketers love to tell ourselves: I just need to push through.
But what if pushing through is the problem?
Because that kind of frantic midweek energy?
It’s not strategic.
It’s not focused.
It’s dysregulation.
When we ignore our body’s signals, exhaustion, anxiety, irritability, and override them with caffeine and productivity hacks, we’re not being resilient. We’re just frying the circuit board and calling it ambition.
In advertising, this shows up when we start clicking around inside accounts looking for some magical fix. Launching things just to launch them. Rewriting headlines that were never the problem. That kind of twitchy, reactionary mode is the opposite of strategic work. And it’s what happens when we deny ourselves a real pause.
The worst part? It feels like you're doing something. But you're really just self-soothing with activity. Like shaking a broken vending machine. Or cleaning your room instead of breaking up with the guy.
Burnout isn’t just bad for you, it’s bad for your ads.
Every good campaign starts from a place of calm curiosity. It’s when you’re regulated that you remember to ask the right questions. What does the audience actually care about? Is this problem upstream or downstream? Should we even be running ads right now?
But if you skip that regulation step, if you don’t let yourself reset, you start solving the wrong problems faster. Your ROAS drops, your confidence tanks, and you blame the platform, the client, the phase of the moon.
I’ve made more mistakes from working too hard than not working hard enough. Most marketers aren’t lazy. We’re just scared of stillness. Stillness makes us feel unimportant. Like the work will forget about us if we stop.
But sometimes the bravest thing you can do on a Wednesday? Close the damn laptop. And go for a walk.
I’ll never forget something Nechama (our VP of strategy at AdVenture) once said. We were talking about burnout, and I expected her to say what most people do: “I just need a vacation.” But she said the opposite. For her, the antidote to burnout was learning. Reading a new book. Taking new courses. Listening to a new podcast. Arming herself with new tools and ideas. That’s what brought her back to life.
For others, it might be movement. Or deep breathing. Or even just sitting in the anger of not having the answer and saying: I am resourceful. I will figure it out.
And you will. But not if you’re clicking around like a maniac convincing yourself you’re being productive.
You may even need all these tools to return to a place where you can effectively do real performance marketing.
Some days, the most professional thing you can do is take the walk. Leave the desk. Put the phone down. The work will still be here. But you might come back to it with your actual brain online.
Because you'll be able to return to the work with more insight and less desperation.
If you’re burning out in the name of performance marketing, you’re not doing performance marketing. You’re performing as a marketer. Big difference.
Forward this to the teammate who keeps saying, “I just need to get through this week.” Or don’t. Maybe they’re already taking the walk.
And if your team’s been making marketing decisions from burnout instead of clarity, it might be time to rewire that system. Our courses teach tactics that are built for the field, AND they give you a calmer, clearer way to think about the work. That’s where real performance starts. Check out our free trial available now!
See you on the other side,
Isaac Rudansky
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