The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 8 - Julian Hearn on How He Avoided Burnout Whilst Building Huel

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this clip Julian Hearn, Founder and CMO of Huel, explains how he avoided burnout whilst building the company. We also cover some of the common symptoms of over-working and what we can do in order to find the fine balance between grind and burnout. Episode 35 - https://g2ul0.app.link/lAXApeNoLgb Julian: https://twitter.com/julianhearn?lang=en https://www.instagram.com/julianhearn/?hl=en

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the united states and i'd be recording a lot more over in the states they put a massive billboard in times square um for the show so thank you so much amazon music um thank you to our team and thank you to all of you that listen to this show let's continue one of the big things in our sort of society at the moment is the topic of mental health yeah and founders and entrepreneurs um go through very sort of high pressure um i guess high pressure journeys in order to try and achieve this objective how how do you protect your own mental health and And what have you learned over the last couple of years about keeping your sort of mental wellbeing in check?

If you go too mad in terms of hours, it's going to catch up with you eventually. So you will get yourself burned out if you're not careful. I'm a lot older than you, so I'm probably going to get burned out easier. You could probably go harder than what I can for longer, but you do need to take into account that when you see it coming, you've got to try and take the foot off the accelerator

a little bit but you know ultimately somebody asked me a question uh a place over there you know there is no way around it you're gonna have to put the graft in you have to put the hours in it's gonna have to be for a sustained period of time to make these things work but try and keep an eye on yourself because if you start i don't know i probably started going out too much you know like in the evening trying to make up for um because you think it's like a reward mechanism i suppose you think i've put all these hours in what am i getting back out of it i'm not going to sit i'm so i probably burnt a candle at both ends went out a bit too much and midweek weekends and you just think yeah you can do it you can do it, you're indestructible, you keep going,

but eventually it will catch up with you if you're not careful. Did it catch up with you? Yeah, yeah. And what were the symptoms of that? I'm asking for myself here because, do you know what? What you said there is very accurate. I, at one stage, thought I was indestructible. When I was like 18, 19, I thought I can just, I don't need sleep,

I don't need to speak to a human being, I can hammer it when and you know i'd look at other people and think like haha yeah yeah and then people would say to me all the time you're gonna burn yourself out and i never believed i never believed either until i started to um get super tired right so i just thought oh my god you know like there was when i i tell you what the signal was when i stopped going to work. There was a couple of times when I just I'd get up in the morning, get on the sofa and didn't go in. And that was not me. So, yeah. And then like stop going to the gym and stuff like that. And just like going to the gym, you should look forward to it because it gives you a bit of a lift, a bit of a buzz.

And and then I go to the gym and I dread going because I know I'm going to be even more tired when I come out of it. And it wouldn't do that. So I think I went and saw a doctor. The doctor said chronic fatigue syndrome. And then obviously the problem with that is it's not clearly defined as being an actual thing. There's no clearly defined sort of medication. She basically said, like, you need to change your, you know, like sleep patterns and stuff like that and sort yourself out. Take some time off.

I said, I can't take too much time off of stuff to do. So it was just a case of, and this was probably 18 months, two years ago. So I think I'm sort of back to normal now. It does take a long time. And some of those days were like, yeah, you're just fucked in terms of, you know, your ability to get stuff done. So luckily, the team's a lot bigger now. So we've brought people in.

I gave up the CEO role. And so all those things have contributed to put me back on an even keel. Chronic fatigue syndrome. Yeah. What did he say, the doctor say about that? Sounds like something that I need to do my very best to avoid yes indeed uh I think that uh some people there is no I don't think it's even a clear I think it's one of these one really quite a woolly ones people say it's not even a thing but for me

it was like very clear that I was not the same as what I was previously and uh so yeah I think it probably was burning the candle at both ends and you know like know, like I'd go, I'd do a day's work, go out in the evening, get up in the morning, go to the gym, do a hard session, go to work, do it again. And like, that was a bit too extreme because of this sort of feeling like I could do anything. And, uh, eventually it does catch up with you. But I think it's just, you've just try you in the early days of a startup it's a sprint for sure you could die the following day basically if if the company if you don't do certain work the company could fail so you are scared of failure in terms of this baby you've created it needs nurturing you know you've got to try and nurture that baby as best as you can and if you don't feed that baby that second it could die so you you keep you keep feeding and then eventually the the baby becomes a toddler and it's more self-sufficient. And I think that at that stage, you can take the foot

off the accelerator and that you need to try and get to that point and notice that point and then do take your foot off the accelerator. Because if you try and keep going full pace, full pace, it turns from a sprint to a marathon. So we're in that sort of marathon stage now. We sort of can see the future of being, I've got this, you know, it's not another year's time. It's another three or four years time. And if you're at full pace of another three or four, you're really going to struggle.