Ryan DeissCo-Founder & CEO, The Scalable Company

How To Grow As An Entrepreneur Without Burning Out

5 Feb 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:15

In this segment of Ryan Deiss's YouTube video, the speakers compare entrepreneurship to an endless marathon, highlighting the anxiety of not knowing when the effort will pay off. They argue that this uncertainty can lead to burnout. To counteract this, they introduce Dan Sullivan's "horizon line" metaphor, explaining that many entrepreneurs chase a moving finish line, constantly comparing their current state to an ever‑shifting goal. The solution offered is to set deliberate intermediate goals—breaking the long journey into a series of smaller races—so entrepreneurs can measure progress against past performance rather than an elusive future horizon, thereby reducing stress and preventing burnout.

Chapters

If you run a marathon, you know it ends at 26 miles. But like, for entrepreneurship, it's just someone saying run and like, I'll tell you when to stop. Just that idea almost sounds torturous of like, just run. It's like, well, how long? It's like, run. And I think that's what makes a lot of entrepreneurship painful. Not knowing when something is going to end. Or in other words, wondering whether the investment you're currently making today, the thing you know you're going to lose, the money, the time, the effort, the sweat is going to actually pay off to the thing that you hope is going to happen. And you don't know when it's going to happen. Yeah, I mean.
And this is why you have to be deliberate and you have to set intermediate goals. And this is something that Dan Sullivan taught me. He said that most people think about their goals like the horizon line. And if you think about the horizon line, it's something that's real. You can see it, it's out there, it's a place. But unfortunately, it also moves the closer that you get to it. And the mistake that we make, especially as entrepreneurs and any high performance people, is we're constantly comparing where we are now against that horizon. We're always moving the finish line when we should be comparing where we are now against where we've been. So, yes, the race is long and yes, there technically is no finish line. The good news is you can choose to break it up into a series of races and decide where you want the finish lines to be, because after all, it's your race.