The Achiever's Trap: A Growth Leader on Burnout, Healing and Letting the Old Self Go

Andy Johns spent about 17 years in startups, landing at companies including Facebook, Twitter, Quora and Wealthfront, where he became president and was in line to be CEO. He describes the outward record as a success while his emotional, psychological and spiritual health was close to its worst. In his telling, the cliche was true: as his professional and financial position peaked, the rest of his life sat near the bottom.

The first crisis hit in 2010, when he was at Twitter in his late 20s. Johns describes near-constant panic, panic attacks, depression and terrible sleep, to the point that he would quietly grab his laptop and leave the office at 10 a.m., and once had to bow out of speaking at an all-hands. He had what he calls a good poker face, so few people could see it.

He names two causes. One was the slow accumulation of pressure and what he calls an addiction to achievement as a way to feel whole, which made him the frog in the slowly heating pot. The other was old pain resurfacing: his mother, who was bipolar and spent time in psychiatric hospitals, died when he was 10, and as a child he learned that hitting a home run or earning straight A's brought love from everyone around him.

Asked how common this is, Johns says that after two years of writing openly about his experience and hearing from hundreds of people in tech, he believes at least 50-60% of tech employees who have been in the industry five to seven years are experiencing some form of psychological distress. Many dismiss it as everyday anxiety, he says, because it creeps up slowly. He bases the figure on his own surveys, anecdotes and research on entrepreneur and high-performer wellbeing.

His own path went from Wealthfront, where a heart scare at 35 made him step away rather than become CEO, straight into a founding partner role at an early-stage venture firm, which he calls his sixth startup in a row. Three years in, after conversations with doctors and other experts, he spent 45 days in a mental health institute. The money he gave up was in the high six figures to early seven figures a year.

The lesson he draws is that adaptations formed in childhood exist to help us survive, and his attachment to achievement did exactly that when he was heartbroken. But if you are unaware of the subconscious drivers behind them, they can reverse course and become detrimental to your present life. Leaving his career, he says, was a response to recognizing that his early adaptation had gone awry.

Johns separates micro transitions, such as moving to a company that matches your values, from the large transitions he focuses on. For the large ones he offers a simple framework of four steps. First comes suffering, since big life changes rarely happen without it, which is why "rock bottom" is part of the language of recovery communities. Second comes a long search for the truth of why you suffer, digging through your subconscious, history and relationships.

Third, once you see the root cause, you can begin self-compassion, because you often find your suffering was not your fault. Johns says a child's mind tends to interpret unnurturing experiences as "this happened because of me," leaving shame at the core. For him, leaving his career and entering a 45-day hospitalization were acts of love toward himself: "I wasn't running from something, I was running back towards myself."

The fourth step is compassion toward others, because understanding your own conditioning lets you see the same thing in everyone. Johns describes the brain as autobiographical, a prediction engine that presents us to the world based on what happened in the past. He likens identity to a foundation under everything else we build, from where we live to the career we choose, and says rewiring that foundation may or may not change the structures built on top of it.

Lenny observes that many people would avoid this journey because it threatens to change everything about them. Johns agrees and says that is the ego at work: as soon as it senses a challenge to its authority, it pushes the challenge away. He describes the process as a death before dying, the end of the old Andy whose identity rested entirely on succeeding, a self that still believes it is protecting him.

He distinguishes between necessary suffering, such as aging, physical ailments and losing people we love, and unnecessary suffering, which he argues is largely made up in our minds. The goal, in his view, is to minimize the unnecessary kind. Seeking the truth takes years and daily dedication, he says, much as the structure of Buddhist practice reflects.

Because the process is so hard, Johns believes things usually have to get quite bad before people find the courage to begin. Early on, the search is driven by fear of going back to how bad things felt. Later the tone changes, and you are pulled forward by a vision of the future that inspires you. Either way, he says, nobody else can do the work for you.

For most people in the West, Johns says, the first step is a therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist or counselor; some people turn to religious or spiritual leaders. When he was stricken by panic and afraid he might harm himself, he reached out to a therapist. A good one, he says, acts like a router who can send you on to specialists in somatic work or in nervous-system management through breathwork.

On choosing, Johns calls it speed dating, and says the most important factor is feeling safe. He compares it to a rescue dog cowering in the corner of a kennel: you cannot teach it tricks until it feels safe in someone's arms. His slightly controversial addition is to find someone at least as intelligent as you, so you respect their insights, although anyone in real distress should simply see whoever is available as soon as possible.

For people who are not ready for therapy, he recommends an "ancient technology known as pen and paper." You can write unstructured, or, if you want structure, list the recent situations in which you reacted most strongly, then keep asking why. A reflexive reaction points to something underneath it, and you will know you have hit the truth because it feels either deeply uncomfortable or like an epiphany.

Johns says day-to-day stress is normal, but there is another category that works as a flashing red alarm. Drawing on research and an analogy to animals, he says to watch the core functions: diet, exercise, playfulness, socialization and sleep. If sleep is always poor, relationships are frequently strained or physical health is failing, he argues, that is undeniable evidence that something is damaging your wellbeing.

His own signals included a near heart attack at 35, when a Stanford cardiologist warned he would become another 40-something CEO with a broken heart, years of poor sleep, and teeth he had broken from grinding so badly that he had them redone twice. He kept moving forward anyway. He recommends Bessel van der Kolk's *The Body Keeps the Score*, whose message he sums up as: when mental health problems show up, look to the body.

Lenny notes that accepting "it's not my fault" sounds easy but is not. Johns says a deep self-belief is one of the deepest grooves in the neural pathways, so rewriting it takes time. It starts with the awareness that comes from truth, which lets you spot a conditioned response and intervene. His example: a boss once told him to just say thank you when complimented, and he now looks people in the eye and says exactly that.

Some people take brute-force routes such as a seven-to-ten-day silent Vipassana retreat, psychedelics or extreme physical feats. Johns ran ultramarathons during his career and now sees them, in part, as medicine; he often cried at the end of long runs. He stresses that the pattern is the same across methods: awareness based on truth, followed by daily practice.

On timing, he points to teachers who describe long journeys. Eckhart Tolle spent about seven years in the valley between his sudden collapse of identity and becoming a spiritual teacher, and Johns believes the Buddha and Pema Chödrön had similar seven- or eight-year paths. For him, step four came easily after eight or nine years of his own on-and-off work, and he says it simply happened once the first three were done.

Lenny asks whether a VP of Product who wants to keep a successful career can stay on that path. Johns says it is a spectrum and that, he is confident, 90-95% of people who feel a tug to change need micro transitions: changing jobs, downsizing a house or ending a relationship. Those are still hard, and he stresses there is no moral judgment about who should dive deeper. The radical rebuilding of identity, he estimates, happens to well under 1% of people.

What holds people back, he argues, is the inertia of society. We are born with a need for love and connection and also as unique individuals, but from a very young age the adults around us tell us who to be. Fearing the loss of love, we push down our individuality in exchange for acceptance by the pack, a trade Johns connects to a Carl Jung line: "The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, it'll tell you."

Real change therefore means consciously deciding to go against the grain and risking not being accepted anymore, which he calls terrifying. That, he says, is why suffering matters as a trigger. He is not even sure it is a free-will choice and half-believes the path was laid out for him before he was born.

Johns says you are on your own to find what relieves your suffering, because people are so different. He tells of a month at an animal sanctuary in northern Thailand, where a worker who struck him as liberated, part farmer and part sanctuary employee and a practicing Buddhist, told him everyone is trying to reach Bangkok but follows somebody else's road. Johns reads the Buddha's own story the same way: he left the palace, tried extreme asceticism, and arrived at a middle way that was his own path.

To listeners who feel a call toward a new chapter, Johns promises it may be the best and the worst thing that happens to them, but that those experiences define a life, and that they are not alone. Asked how he is doing, he says he still has ups and downs. He used to treat life as a mountain to climb, but most deaths on Everest happen on the way down, and he now tries to float like a whitewater rafter in "mummy mode," letting the current take him rather than fighting it.

He was in Vietnam when they recorded, having arrived about ten days earlier because the current seemed to be taking him there, and his luggage was delayed. Lenny predicts the episode will be a Trojan horse for people who came for product and growth advice. To reach Johns, listeners can find him on Twitter as Clues Dot Life, on LinkedIn as Andrew Johns, or through Clues.Life.