Moment 8 - Julian Hearn on How He Avoided Burnout Whilst Building Huel

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  One of the big things in our society at the moment is this topic of mental health.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:09Steven Bartlett?

  And founders and entrepreneurs go through very high pressure,

• 0:16Steven Bartlett?

  I guess, high pressure journeys in order to try and achieve this objective. How do you protect your own mental health? And what have you learnt over the last couple of years about keeping your mental wellbeing in check?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  If you go too mad in terms of hours, it's gonna 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 gonna 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 ultimately, somebody asked me a question at a place the other day. There is no way around it. You're gonna have to put the graft in. You're gonna 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, like in the evenings trying to make up for, because you think it's like a reward mechanism, I suppose.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  You think I've put all these hours in, what am I getting back out of it? I'm not just gonna 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're indestructible. You keep going, but eventually it will catch up with you if you're not careful.

• 1:27Steven Bartlett?

  Did it catch up with you?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31Steven Bartlett?

  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 can just speak to a human being. I can just hammer it away. And you know, I'd look at other people and think like, ha, ha, ha. And then people would say to me all the time, you're gonna burn yourself out. And I never believed a word of it.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  I never believed it either until I started to get super tired, right? So I just thought, oh my god, you know, like there was, when I tell you what the signal was when I stopped going to work. There was a couple of times where I'd 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 stopped going to the gym and stuff like that. And just like going to the gym, we used to look forward to it because it gives you a bit of a lift, a bit of a buzz.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  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, doctor said um chronic fatigue syndrome.

• 2:31Steven Bartlett?

  Um.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  And uh and then the the obviously the problem with that is it's not clearly defined as being an actual thing. There's no clearly defined sort of um medication.

• 2:42Steven Bartlett?

  Um hum.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Basically 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 uh, and this was probably eighteen 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 we're like, yeah, you're just you're just fucked in terms of, you know, your ability to 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 to to put me back on an even keel.

• 3:16Steven Bartlett?

  Um chronic fatigue fatigue syndrome.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:19Steven Bartlett?

  What did he just, what what did he say, the doctor say about that? Sounds like something that I I need to do my very best to avoid.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  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 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 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.

• 3:57Steven Bartlett?

  Um hum.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  And eventually that does catch up with you. But I think it's just you've just try and 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's 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 is more self-sufficient. And I think that at that stage, you can take the foot of 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.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  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, it's not another year's time, it's another three or four years' time. And if you're at full pace for another three or four years, you're really going to struggle.