In this candid monologue, Shanli Liu, CPA, CTP, recounts a period of severe burnout while running a business that generated $4.4 million in monthly revenue. She describes the paradox of outward success versus internal dread, and how she realized she was trapped in "productive procrastination"—spending time on low‑impact tasks to avoid risky, high‑stakes decisions. By auditing her own and her team’s time, she discovered that most effort was wasted on activities that didn’t move the business forward, and that only a handful of people were actually making progress. Liu introduces a new mindset she calls "productive failure," which encourages entrepreneurs to deliberately attempt difficult, unfamiliar tasks, accept a roughly 50 % failure rate, and learn from both successes and setbacks. She outlines a practical framework: audit the number of big decisions made in the past 60 days, shift focus from low‑impact chores to high‑impact experiments, and continuously make bold moves even after achieving scale. The talk concludes with a challenge to CEOs and business owners to stop relying on time‑management tools and instead cultivate a culture of risk‑taking and learning, ending with a call to subscribe for more content.
Chapters
What I want to share with you today is why when our business was doing $4.4 million a month, I looked at my husband and told him I wanted to end it. And the one tweak that I made to how I worked and how I lived that helped me not need to end something that was making us a lot of money and instead be able to turn it into something that I enjoyed. And so if you are doing $100,000 a month, half a million a month, $2 million a month, $3 million a month, whatever, If you feel like you want to quit right now, I hope that this video is for you because I felt that way too. And this is what helped me get past it. So back in 2019, I was feeling extremely burnt out and I was not happy with what I was doing, but there was this illusion of perfection, right? So it was like everybody from the outside was like, you guys are killing it. You're like winning all these awards. You guys are donating to charities. Like you're doing all these things, right? You're the perfect couple. You're fit, all this stuff. And I felt like shit on the inside, which is the crazy part. And the reason I felt that way is I was just— I had literally no time, right? And so it's funny because people always ask me about time management tools as an aside, and back then I probably had 5 times as many as I have now, and I felt way worse. That's a whole nother video where I'll talk about why those don't work. But either way, I didn't feel like I had any time. I was extremely burnt out. I was exhausted. We had literally gotten to the point where we made a decision that we wouldn't even do date nights. Nor would we have friends. We literally made the decision. We were like, we don't have time for friends, right? It's crazy. But we were doing anything we could to just grow these businesses. And it essentially sacrificed all of our lives. And I remember we were on a walk one day and my husband looked at his phone and he was like, holy crap. I was like, what? He's like, we just had like the biggest month to date. And I was like, what is it? He's like, we just did $4.4 million. And I was like, Instead of feeling excitement or happiness or anything like that, I just remember my stomach dropped and I felt this feeling of dread because I knew I wanted to end it. And I was like, how can you want to end something that's doing $4.4 million a month? Like, you're crazy. There's something not connected here. Like, there's something distorted. And that was when I realized I really need to figure out what was going on with myself and why was I feeling this way. And so I'm sitting there and I'm really distressed. And it was probably the one time in my entire business career I had like a real mental breakdown where I was like, I don't know what to do. I want to quit. I want to end it. Let's sell it. Let's kill it. Like, I don't even know. I just don't want it anymore. And I felt like one of those people that I had for so long not wanted to be because I'd always been like, I will never be that person. I'm so together. I have my routines down to a tee. I've got everything controlled. And yet I still felt that way. And so I felt like this huge sham. And I thought to myself, okay, like, you have to coach yourself out of this because at that time I didn't have anyone that I felt like I could really talk to about it. And so I sat down and I audited my time. And so I looked at everything I was doing and I thought to myself, okay, I'm going to do this how we do with our teams. So with our teams, I'll have them audit their time if they feel like not good about what they're doing and I'll figure out why. And so I looked at my time more objectively when I was measuring it myself. And what I realized was that I was spending all of my time on shit that just didn't matter. And it's funny, I was like, if this were an employee that I were paying, if this was my CEO or COO, I'd be like, What are you doing all day? You know, like, none of this is even that important. And instead, what I was doing the entire day of most of my days is I was really productively procrastinating. Right. And I think that the reason that this is so interesting to me is that I was never like that in the beginning when we started the business. It's like you just go head on, like attack, attack, attack, thing after thing, and you're incredibly productive in your mistakes. Right. So I'm making productive mistakes the entire time in the beginning. And then what I feel happened when I took a step back and really thought about it, was that I really started to put more emphasis on other people's opinions. And it wasn't my family, my hometown, my friends anymore. It was clients and employees. And so what happened is over time, I really didn't want to make mistakes because I didn't want to look like a stupid boss. I didn't want to look like a stupid, you know, whatever, role model to our clients, whatever it was. And so I was just like, okay, well, I'll just not do anything then. Right. And what I realized is that it was partially me and it was partially the people on the team. And so I started to audit my team's time and I was like, holy crap, nobody's doing anything productive. Like, no wonder it feels so horrible right now. We've got like 3 people on the entire team that are actually moving the ball forward. And I think that this is something that's really hard for a lot of people to admit because I see a ton of business owners and CEOs that do this, but they don't want to say that they do it. Right? Because it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to admit that you are literally stalling your business or you're the reason that your business isn't feeling the way, operating the way that you want it to. And so what I want to share is the framework that I've been able to dissect that was in my brain and what I switched it to so that I could actually feel good about a business that does $4.4 million a month. Here's what I realized that it gets to, and this is what a lot of entrepreneurs get to, is you productively procrastinate, which many would say this is doing small tasks, I think it's just not doing the hard tasks and making the hard decisions. Right. And so what it means you do is you don't ever try. Okay. And so what I mean by never trying is you will do things that you have proven to yourself you can already do. Right. You stop attempting to do new things because you might have failed so many times because you were in attack mode. You kind of just back off and think like, maybe I just shouldn't be trying. Right. Which is never the right way to look at it because you never try. You never risk failure. Right? So you never have that keep you up all night feeling like crap, you know, I just messed this up in front of everybody feeling. Because you never risk that, you also never fail, right? Which is good. We're not failing. I feel safe. I feel secure. Like, I don't have to question my ego. Like, nothing's threatening me, right? And then because of that, you never let yourself down, right? Except the big obvious one of all of this is that if you do this you also never succeed. And that is what I realized I was doing to myself. And so what I was actually doing was that in the short term, I was keeping myself safe and not failing in the micro, right? But in the macro picture, I was never succeeding. So it's like you're successful in keeping yourself safe and you're also successful in keeping yourself miserable, right? And so that is when I realized I really need to trade my productive procrastination for what I want to call productive failure. So what does that look like? What's productive failure look like and how do you know if you're doing it or not doing it? Productive failure means you're going to try. So it's like you see something that needs to get done in the business, you see something that you would like to do, you see something that you aspire to, you try. Because you try, you do risk failure, right? And then I would say about 50% of the time you are going to fail, right? The other 50% of the time you just learn, right? And the thing is, is that you learn when you fail and you learn when you succeed. And so what that means is that once you try and you fail, You tweak and you try again. And so this is what I would consider most people aren't doing. If they're feeling like they're really burnt out, they're feeling like the wheels are spinning, but you're not getting anywhere, is you're probably avoiding trying the things that are most likely to threaten your ego because you're most likely to fail at them. So anytime you're starting something new, anytime you as a CEO and entrepreneur need to level up, you have to try doing something that you've never done before and you're probably going to look like an idiot. I look like an idiot when I try most things I've ever done. It's like, would it be reasonable that I would look like an expert when I've never done something before just because I'm a CEO or an entrepreneur? No. Like, you're just as new as somebody who's not a CEO or entrepreneur trying something, right? It doesn't mean anything. And so this is what I realized that I was doing. And because of this, I wanted to quit everything. And so what I've realized is that if you feel desperate for a change and you feel like you don't have time, What I realized for myself was that it wasn't time that was the issue. It wasn't I need more project management tools. It wasn't that I needed to delegate more. It wasn't any of that, right? It's that I needed to shift from productively procrastinating to productively failing. And so if you feel burnt out, I really would challenge you to audit your time. Audit how many big decisions have you made that move the ball forward in the last 60 days in your business? Because I will bet you that whether it be in your personal life or in your business, you are living out the decisions of the productive failures you made years ago. And so it takes more than that leap in the beginning when you start a business. You have to continue to make those leaps, which are productive mistakes, while you have the business. And that is something that once you reach a certain level of success is very hard to do because it threatens everything that you have built. But there's also no way to grow unless you do it. So I hope that was of use to you. This is what got me unstuck, realizing that, um, not like doing all the things I was doing to productively procrastinate. I actually don't need to do them. Other people can do them, or they just don't need to get done. Most of them, nothing would happen if they don't get done. Instead, I need to focus on productively failing through making the big decisions, making the big moves, or trying the big new things. And so I hope that was of use to you. If it was, hit the subscribe, and I'll see you on the next one.
