Why Being Bad At Things Can Lessen Burnout
The burnout you’re blaming on “too much work” might actually be about what kind of work you’re doing. I just recorded a podcast conversation with Patrick Lencioni (author The Five Dysfunctions of a Team) and it lands squarely on what I hear from you every week: you’re not necessarily burned out because you’re working too hard, disorganized, or “too sensitive.” You’re burned out because you’ve been spending too much time doing work that drains you. I feel the same way. And if you have a different brain, this is especially important.
I'm writing today to share Pat's Working Genius assessment and tools. Lencioni created Working Genius because he was in a weird, confusing place. Not in the obvious way—he wasn’t miserable at work. He loved his company, loved the people, felt lucky to do what he does. And yet, day after day, he’d find himself getting irritable and grumpy, almost like his mood was flickering between “I’m so energized” and “I can’t stand this” without any clear reason. He didn’t even talk about it much, because it felt slightly ridiculous. Why would you be cranky in a job you actually like?
Then something happened that will sound familiar if you’ve spent years trying to override your own wiring. In our conversation, Pat described a day with three meetings. In one, he was teaching leadership to a group of Catholic priests and he was having a blast—fully alive, engaged, on. Immediately after, he had a meeting where he needed to push a team to do better and he felt himself turn grumpy and frustrated. Then he moved into a creative meeting to brainstorm a podcast idea and he was happy again. A colleague named Amy (who, as it turns out, has the genius of “Wonder”) watched this emotional whiplash and said, essentially: “Why are you like that?”
Pat’s first internal reaction was, “What is wrong with me?” The anxious achiever’s classic reflex. Am I broken? Am I unstable? Do I need to just get it together?
Instead, he got curious. That curiosity—plus his own natural love of invention—became a model. Pat realized there are different kinds of work, and we don’t all get energy from the same parts of the process. In fact, some types of work can reliably drain you, even if you’re technically “good at them.” And if you’ve been rewarded your whole life for pushing through, you can become dangerously competent at the very things that deplete you. Which means people keep handing you more of that work, because from the outside it looks like you can handle it.
Pat said he’d always wanted a “WeaknessFinder.” I want the same thing! Not in a self-flagellating way, but because it can be just as liberating to understand what you’re not meant to be great at as it is to understand your strengths. So many of us walk through life thinking, “If I’m not good at something, I should fix it.” We compare ourselves to the people who excel at it and quietly assume our struggle means a character flaw. Working Genius interrupts that shame loop by naming something that anxious achievers almost never give themselves permission to believe: some things are hard for you because that’s how you’re wired, not because you’re lazy or defective. And so, I want you to be boldly bad at something in 2026. Just let it go!
The six kinds of work (and why they matter for your nervous system)
Working Genius breaks work into six types: Wonder (W): Pondering. Asking big questions. Seeing what others miss. Invention (I): Creating ideas from nothing. Loving the blank slate. Discernment (D): Gut instinct. Integrating variables. Good judgment. Galvanizing (G): Rallying people. Selling, motivating, pushing momentum. Enablement (E): Helping. Supporting. Saying “I’ve got you” with real energy. Tenacity (T): Finishing. Pushing through obstacles. Getting it over the line. Most of us have:
2 Geniuses (work that energizes you)
2 Competencies (work you can do fine)
2 Frustrations (work that drains you)
Now add anxiety to the mix. Anxious achievers often interpret “draining work” as a personal failure, then overcompensate, then burn out, then blame themselves. Working Genius gives you a language for the pattern before it turns into a spiral.
One of the most useful lines from Pat was about burnout. His view is that burnout is often about too many hours spent doing the work that drains you. I think burnout is often about anxiety. Well-meaning people will try to “fix” burnout by taking the parts of your schedule that you love and removing them so you have more capacity for the parts you hate. If you’ve ever had a job where the things that made you feel alive slowly got crowded out by the tasks that made you want to crawl under your desk, you know exactly what he means.
This connects to something deeper Pat talked about too: the difference between fear-based achievement and joy-based achievement. He said that when he hears someone described as a “high achiever,” he sometimes thinks of it as a warning sign—not because achievement is bad, but because there’s a big difference between achieving from joy and achieving from fear. Two people can look equally “successful” on paper while having totally different inner experiences. If you’re achieving from fear, you’re often chasing affirmation, trying to finally reach the point where you feel “enough.” And the awful truth is that the goalpost never stops moving.