High Agency Burned Me Out
I built a company by adapting to every problem. That same instinct kept me in a CEO role I no longer wanted.
I hated being CEO of the company I founded. Unfortunately, I was very good at keeping it alive. For years, I called that agency. It took me even longer to admit what it had become.
In late 2020, nexlabs, my first company, had its strongest month of the year.
Two months later, I showed the board a slide saying our business model was not scalable. I proposed selling, merging, or handing off parts of the company.
Technically, it was a strategy deck.
In hindsight, it was an escape plan. Not for the business. For me.
I started nexlabs because I wanted to build products. Several of them failed. The agency and services work survived.
Clients kept coming. They kept paying. So we kept doing more of it.
Revenue is persuasive that way. It does not ask whether the work that survives is the work you wanted. It simply rewards you for becoming better at it.
Eventually, nexlabs became a large company with 100+ people. It also created a job I dreaded.
My days became email, hiring, performance reviews, sales, collections, and more email. The creative work I had started the company to do had almost disappeared.
I loved the people. I hated managing them.
Those facts were not contradictory.
It just took me years to understand that both could be true.
In fact, caring about people made management harder. Every performance decision had a face attached to it. A missed target was not just a number. It affected someone’s career, family, and future.
I have always defined agency as taking ownership, adapting to reality, and finding a way to win. That instinct helped me survive failed products and unstable markets.
Then agency became avoidance.
It became the source of my burnout.
I did not recognise it as burnout at the time. Burnout is easy to miss when you can still perform.
Instead, I treated every feeling as another problem to solve.
Hire a stronger leader. Design a better structure. Delegate more. Build better processes. Become a better version of myself.
I kept believing that the next solution would finally make me free.
But every solution kept me inside the same problem.
I hired senior managers, then struggled to give them enough room to lead. I wanted someone else to take ownership while still believing that I had to remain in control.
The problem was no longer just the company or its structure.
The problem was me.
Part of it was obligation. Employees had built careers with me.
Investors had trusted me, sometimes with their personal money. Walking away felt like declaring that their sacrifices had been wasted.
But part of it was ego.
I had built my identity around being the founder who adapts, survives, and keeps going. Admitting that I wanted different work felt like admitting defeat.
So I kept fixing the company instead of confronting myself.
I spiralled for years.
COVID made the cost impossible to ignore. My work became pay cuts, layoffs, and questions about the future for which I had no credible answers.
I was exhausted. I was no longer excited.
Yet I could still calculate the runway, make the cuts, and keep the machinery moving. I was performing like clockwork. I called myself a wartime CEO.
Competence can camouflage withdrawal.
My burnout was difficult to recognise because I remained highly effective at preserving a future I no longer wanted.
Then Myanmar’s military seized power in February 2021.
The danger was real. Banks stopped functioning. Revenue collapsed. People I cared about were arrested.
But the crisis also gave me something I had never granted myself:
Permission to leave.
I moved to Bangkok, resigned as CEO, and became a board member and shareholder.
Nobody blamed me because the external reason was undeniable.
The coup did not create my desire to leave. It made that desire defensible. To my shareholders, but most importantly, to myself.
This is not an argument for quitting whenever work becomes unpleasant.
Founders impose real costs on other people when they confuse a difficult season with destiny. Duty matters. Persistence protected jobs and customers. Perhaps I could have learned to lead differently and stayed. I cannot prove the counterfactual.
But the opposite mistake is real too.
A capable person can become so practised at changing reality that every doubt becomes a bug, every feeling becomes a management problem, and every sign that the role is wrong becomes evidence that they should try harder.
High agency helped me build a company.
It also kept me trapped inside it.
Agency is the power to change a situation.
But if every feeling becomes a problem to solve, how do you recognise when the situation itself is what must change?
Originally published on X.