Andy Johns: evaluation

Transcript context

…In a post that you worked on for my newsletter back in the day, you shared this story of, I think maybe it was at Wealthfront where you were giving a big presentation. Maybe share that story? Sure. I can share that. It actually goes back to ... This is 2010. I was at Twitter at the time. I was in my late 20s. Again, my career was going really well. I was starting to string together a series of successful experiences, and I was suddenly hit with near constant panic, panic attacks, depression. I was having a very, very difficult time sleeping and just managing my emotions as a whole. It got to the point to where there were several occasions while I was at work where I could tell that I was about ready to have a breakdown of sorts, and I would just grab my laptop, throw it in my bag, and pretty quietly just walk out of the office even if it was 10:00 AM and I'd only been there for an hour or two. That happened on multiple occasions. There were some occasions in which I was set up to go and speak to the entire company during an all-hands session, and it was something where I just had to come up with an excuse and bow out of it because at the time, I was already completely overcome and overwhelmed by this near constant panic I was experiencing, but I had a really good poker face, I don't think most people could see it. To give a little bit of an explanation and to tie first question together with this, there were two major things that contributed to me having a pretty acute case of burnout and needing to step away from my career as I knew it. The first was just the slow and steady accumulation of the pressure, the stresses, the anxieties, the emotional ups and downs that came from having such a strong commitment to my career, and frankly an addiction to achievement as a way to feel good and to feel whole, but I was so focused on my work that I had slowly become the frog that was boiling in the pot, the typical analogy of you don't realize how bad things are getting because it's happening to you slowly until it happens quickly, right? So on one hand, I was not only struggling emotionally and psychologically because of the pressures of the career and climbing the ladder and just the common existential angst that comes with being at a startup and not knowing what the future holds. What I later came to understand was that I was also starting to experience and to address old emotional pain that I'd buried for a very long time, stemming back to the death of my mom when I was 10. She was severely mentally ill. She was bipolar, had bouts of psychosis, and had spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals. I can remember going to those hospitals as some of my earliest memories as a kid. So there was a lot of disruption in my childhood, a lot of neglect, some occasional abuse, and then it culminated with the loss of the most important female figure in my life when I was 10. Of course, like anyone else after that, I was in a lot of pain emotionally, but as a kid, you don't have the tools or even the capabilities to effectively process something as significant and traumatic as an experience like that. fter that, I was in a lot of pain emotionally, but as a kid, you don't have the tools or even the capabilities to effectively process something as significant and traumatic as an experience like that. So my mind did what the mind of most children will do, which is it finds a way to bury it or to ignore it. The thing that I had latched onto that made me feel better was that anytime I hit a home run or scored a goal or got straight A's and was just basically a stellar student and a stellar athlete, I was showered with love, not only from my family, which is fantastic, but from society at large, especially within the world that we live in. So I learned very early on that if I wanted to feel good, I needed to achieve, and that if I wanted to love myself and be considered lovable by others, I needed to achieve. That pulled me out of a darkness that I was in for several years as a kid, and I'm glad that it did, and it led to an excellent experience in high school, in college, and then well into my 20s, but eventually, those emotional wounds are going to come to the surface. They're going to come up for error, and when they do, it's going to be difficult, and that's what happened with me. So it was really two things coming together at the same time. It was the growing pressures of an escalating career within the dynamic industry, but then also, I think, the natural maturation of my mind and of adult development such that it was time for that old pain to come to the surface, and when it did, it was very disruptive and it's something that I'm still continuing to work on to this day.…

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