The Silent Killer Of Motivation And What To Do About It

3 "Good" Habits That Secretly Lead to Burnout, Fatigue, and Exhaustion

What if the path to burnout isn't paved with failure, but with success?

It's a strange paradox. You work hard to become competent and reliable. You become the person everyone trusts to solve hard problems. You're essential. By all external measures, you are succeeding. Yet, you find yourself ending your days feeling completely drained, exhausted, and with a nagging sense of emptiness.

When I was a Principal Engineer at Amazon, my calendar was a wall of meetings where I was "strictly needed." And I was. I spent my days giving guidance, acting as a consultant for other teams, and helping people do their work. This was a core part of my job description, and people were always very appreciative. By the end of the day, I had no energy left to be productive on the things I actually cared about. This happened day after day after day.

This is the "Curse of Competence": when your reward for being good at your job is a calendar so full of helping others that you have no time left for your own growth. Paradoxically, being really good at one part of my job robbed me of the motivation and energy needed to achieve more.

We tend to blame burnout on overwork or a toxic environment. But what if the cause is more subtle? What if the very habits you cultivated to achieve that success are the ones silently killing your motivation? I've come to believe that some of the most dangerous professional habits are the ones that look like virtues. They get you praise and make you feel needed, but they quietly drain the internal motivation required for long-term success and satisfaction.

A simple reaction to this problem might be to become less competent or harder to reach. But the solution is more nuanced than simply ignoring people. You need to understand the specific "good" habits that create this trap and replacing them with more sustainable ones. Here are three of the most common culprits and what you can do about them.

1. Being the Human Search Engine

Becoming a Subject Matter Expert (SME) is one of the most common pieces of advice for getting promoted.

It’s intoxicating.

Being the person with all the answers provides a powerful sense of validation and importance. People seek you out. You get invited to every important discussion. You feel indispensable. This habit is reinforced by praise and the ego boost that comes from being the smartest person in the room.

But your reward for being the expert is a day of a thousand paper cuts. Your focus is constantly shattered by a stream of "quick questions" from others, preventing you from entering a state of deep work.

You spend your day in reactive mode, servicing everyone else's priorities while your own important projects languish. This leads to stagnation, and the feeling of being a cog in someone else's machine is a primary driver of burnout.

Actionable Advice: The tactical, short-term solution is to reclaim your focus by batching your availability. Schedule and advertise "Office Hours" two or three times a week to handle questions in dedicated blocks.

But the real, long-term solution is to take a higher-level view: your goal isn't to be the SME, it's to make your team the SME. Invest your time in creating durable artifacts like high-quality documentation, tutorials, or recorded demos that answer common questions. Identify others on your team who are interested in the subject and actively mentor them. This creates a triple win: you get credit for growing others, your teammates experience growth and gain visibility, and the company reduces its reliance on a single person.

2. Being the Hero

This habit is fueled by adrenaline and praise.

When a crisis hits or a colleague is stuck, you jump in and fix it yourself. When a new, difficult project comes up, you raise your hand immediately because you know you can handle it. You become the hero who swoops in to save the day, building a reputation as someone who is "clutch" and fearless.

It's a powerful identity to have.

The problem is, this approach doesn't scale. By always being the hero, you create a culture of dependency where you are the single point of failure. More importantly, you rob your teammates of crucial opportunities to learn and struggle. Your own motivation suffers because you're stuck fighting the same fires over and over instead of advancing to more strategic work that would further your career or fuel your growth.

Actionable Advice: The highest-level advice for escaping the "Hero" trap—and the "Human Search Engine" trap—is to actively work to remove the dependence on you. This is counterintuitive. Many people worry that if they automate their tasks or make their knowledge widely available, they will obviate the need for their job.

But the reality is that most companies have way more problems than people.

If you are stuck because you are constantly needed for the same fires, you are not free to move on to bigger and better things. If you successfully automate yourself out of a job, you are now free to find the next, more impactful problem to solve.

This means shifting your mindset from solving problems to improving the system so that problems don't happen in the first place. Instead of just fixing the problem, ask "What process or system failure allowed this problem to happen, and how can we fix that?" Instead of just answering the question, ask "How can I make this answer available so no one ever has to ask me again?" By operationalizing your knowledge and making heroics unnecessary, you create real, lasting value and free yourself up.

3. Performative Competence

This is the most deceptive habit of all. It’s the drive to constantly perform competence for others. This can manifest in surface-level things like maintaining a perfectly clean desk or achieving "Inbox Zero."

It can also be more subtle. It's prioritizing the work you don't mind doing, the easy stuff, the quick wins, while procrastinating on the one thing you know is truly important. The problem is that stuff is high in ambiguity or is work you simply dread. You’ll happily close out five small, easy tasks instead of starting the one hard, messy one.

This gives you a steady stream of "wins" to report in your status updates. It feels good. But eventually, the easy work runs out. You're left facing the big, important task you've been avoiding, but now your motivation is completely gone. You've spent all your energy on the performance of work, not the substance of it.

Actionable Advice: Reframe the dreaded tasks as a gift to your future self. The work you don't want to do is almost always a source of future stress. By tackling it now, you are relieving a burden from the person you will be tomorrow, next week, or next month.

Think of it this way: "Future Steve is going to be so grateful that Today Steve dove headfirst into this problematic part of the project first." This mental shift changes the task from a painful chore into an act of kindness for the most important person you have to answer to: you.

Conclusion

Motivation is the ultimate renewable resource. When you have it, you feel like you can accomplish anything. The irony is that our very drive to do a good job leads us into ruts that drain this precious resource. We become the expert, the hero, the master of the to-do list, and while these habits earn us praise, they slowly empty the tank.

The reframe isn't to stop doing a good job. It's to find a way to get the satisfaction of doing good work in a way that fuels your motivation, rather than depletes it.

By empowering your team instead of just answering every question, by improving the system instead of just fighting fires, and by tackling the hard, important problems first, you create a virtuous cycle. Doing great work gives you energy, which you can then reinvest into doing even more great work.

That is the fuel for a long, satisfying, and impactful career.

What are your thoughts? Is there a "good" habit that you've realized was draining your motivation? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

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