Before I became a pilot, I was a musician and composer. I still am to this day of course, but it's not the same as it was. And unfortunately I don't know that it ever will be. The reason for that? I burned out. And I burned out hard. It took quite a while for me to truly realize how much that affected me, and I wanted to share what I learned with you so you can hopefully learn the easy way.
The When and Why
Story time! I've wanted to fly since I was a wee lad, so when I was finishing up high school I researched it pretty seriously. However, the opportunities that exist today (at least in the US) were not nearly as abundant, and the cost was too high to justify that risk. By the time I finished high school I had some skill as a musician though, so I set my sights on working in the film industry as a composer. I got my degree in music composition, and from the time I started to the time I graduated four years later I took exactly zero breaks from music. At first this was a total blast; I was getting a lot of interest from students in the film department because there weren't many people offering up original music. As a result, I had a steady stream of film projects after a few months. I obviously also had to keep up with the work from all my classes, writing music for my lessons as a composition student, and practicing to keep up my skills as a percussionist. The combination of all of this put sleep at the bottom of my priority list. At the peak of my time as a student I was running on roughly a pot of coffee a day and an average of between four to six hours of sleep. I thought I could catch up on the weekends by sleeping in until noon, but this was all just a recipe for big time burn out instead.
I continued to push my limits, but by the time I was up for graduation this had taken a major toll on me. I began to find it harder and harder to come up with inspiration for film projects and writing music in general. After I graduated, I seriously contemplated whether or not I actually wanted to write music for a living. I tried to keep going and worked on a handful of projects, but ultimately I just fizzled out completely and had to step away. The constant work on projects with almost no breaks and the years of sleep deprivation had finally caught up to me. I waited about a year for my creative spark to come back, but it didn't so I decided that I needed to figure something else out. I remember very clearly watching the movie Flight with Denzel Washington; there was a shot of him boarding the plane and looking down the aisle at all the passengers stowing bags and getting settled into their seats. While arguably not the greatest aviation film, there was something about that shot that very strongly reignited my urge to pursue aviation as a career right then and there. Perhaps it stirred up all of the great memories I have as a kid flying to and from various vacations and being more excited for the flights than the actual vacation. Fast forward a few years and here I am.
The Hard Lessons
While this experience gave way to a great career, it taught me a few hard lessons. It also resulted in me having to sideline music creation for several years. This affected me a lot more than I thought it would, but that's a topic for another time. Ultimately three lessons surfaced: The first two are that we need to allow ourselves to take breaks, and that we need to prioritize sleep. I will save the third tip for the end because it might just be the most important tip of all.
Take Breaks
Whatever it is that you do for work, make sure that you give yourself breaks instead of forcing yourself to work nonstop. This might just mean getting up and taking a short walk, or calling out for the day. Maybe it means taking a vacation. Whatever the case may be, you have to allow yourself some time to recharge because you'll just end up resenting whatever it is that you're doing regardless of how much you love it. This holds especially true for people who aren't thrilled with their jobs. Obviously there will be times where we've got something like a deadline to meet so it isn't always completely possible to step away for longer periods of time, but it's something that we should strive to do whenever we can.
Note: Part of the trick here is allowing yourself to be ok with taking those breaks! They won't do you any good if you spend the time thinking about how you should be working instead.
Prioritize Sleep
These days there seems to be lots of glorification in avoiding sleep in the name of productivity or "hustle" as it's commonly referred to today. I was one of those people that saw it almost as a challenge to see what I could do on a lack of sleep. Folks, I can pretty much guarantee you that sleep deprivation will exponentially accelerate the path to burnout. I'm all for hunkering down and getting stuff done, but we can all be better about getting quality sleep in the process. Sleep is so important to our body and our mind, and depriving it of this necessary function does so much harm both in the short term and the long term. Lack of sleep reduces our immune system's ability to protect us, puts strain on our cardiovascular system, negatively affects mental health, and so much more. I feel way better when I get a solid night's sleep, and I will continue to make it a priority every day. Obviously there will be days where we don't get as much sleep as we need, but I've found that these circumstances are much easier if I get enough sleep in general.
The Most Important Lesson of All
In order for this last lesson to make sense, we have to first define something I like to refer to as a true passion. A true passion is something that you love to do, something that adds to your sense of purpose in life and feeds your soul in the best possible way. These are things that we love to do, things that allow us to decompress and bring us joy even after the toughest or darkest days. In my humble opinion, this is something that is quite important to have in today's world. I suspect that many of the people who have relationship or substance abuse issues for example may not have something like this to turn to, so I urge anyone and everyone to discover what truly makes them tick. My true passion is music but it could be virtually anything for anyone.
Now that we've got that definition out of the way, here's the lesson: don't be in such a hurry to make a living out of a true passion that you lose your love for it entirely. Before you read on, go back and read that line one more time.
Sometimes, these passions are best kept as hobbies. Take this with a grain of salt; I don't want you to think that I'm telling you not to pursue a passion as a career. This is in fact probably a touchy subject because so many people land on jobs they hate when they could be doing something they love. In an ideal world, all of us would be making money doing what we love. What I absolutely do believe is that it's important to be cautious and truly give some deep thought to whether or not you want to make a career out of a true passion. When these true passions provide our income, they become an obligation. When they become an obligation, they can very quickly lose their luster. All of a sudden, you now hate what you used to love, and you're potentially left without a way to decompress after the toughest or darkest days. Even if you decide to go after a true passion as a career and even if you love it more than literally everything else on the planet, there will still be a trade off. I will freely admit that flying has lost a bit of its magic, but I knew that this was inevitable considering I'm on a plane like four days a week.
I am lucky in that I love aviation probably as much as I love music. This was one of the biggest reasons I chose to pursue it. However, I was able to go into it with a much better understanding of how pursuing aviation as a profession would affect my passion for it. Music creation, on the other hand, is far more powerful to me in a way because it's a very personal way for me to express my creative self. It brings me great joy, allows me to decompress, and adds to my sense of purpose to a degree (aviation does too but in a different way than music). While I don't regret initially choosing to pursue it as a career, I do regret not recognizing sooner what that choice was doing to me and I am ultimately glad that I've found my way back to it as a hobby. Which, by the way, took something like five years. That's a long time to go without something that truly brings joy to your life.
Conclusion
Hopefully this is of some help to those of you that may be experiencing some burn out or worried that you might be starting to feel burnt out. It can happen to anyone with anything, but I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that it is so important to first determine whether or not the risk is worth the reward for making a true passion a career. I'm lucky that aviation is something that provides me with great joy and fulfillment. But, it took sacrificing another true passion to get to this point, so I implore any of you facing this dilemma to truly put some thought into it before going after a true passion.
Lastly, here's a small shameless plug for anyone curious about my musical side. The last thing I wrote for myself before sidelining my creativity for those few years is this piece here. You can hear a little bit of a recording of air traffic control from LAX both at the beginning and at the end, probably signifying the moment I decided to run with aviation over music (whether I was consciously aware of it at the time or not). There's a few other pieces on there (including the very first film I ever scored) and I've since started uploading to that channel again in the form of some tracks that I call Cinematic Meditations which are tracks inspired by film music that can be played in the background during meditation sessions. I upload music to the channel when I want to, and I don't force myself to write when I don't want to because that both takes the fun out of it and actually diminishes the quality of whatever I write. I use the channel simply as a means to share my creativity with the world, and I hope that people enjoy listening to it whether it's only 30 people or 30,000 people.
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