What Jason Marchand Taught Me About Hitting Bottom at the Top
I want to tell you about a CEO named Jason Marchand.
Jason is fictional. But everything that happens to him is real.
That’s the tension at the heart of Crash and [Burn] LEARN — the business fable I wrote to capture something I couldn’t fully explain in frameworks or statistics alone. Because burnout, at the executive level, isn’t primarily a data story. It’s a human story. And human stories need characters you can follow into the dark, watch make the decisions you recognize, and sit with when the bottom finally arrives.
Jason is that character. And in building him, I found I understood my own crash more clearly than I ever had.
Why a Fable
People sometimes ask why I chose the fable format. The honest answer: because the truth lands differently in story form.
I could tell you that 56% of leaders report feeling burned out. I could tell you that 69% of C-level executives have seriously considered quitting their jobs for one that better supports their well-being. I could tell you that a record 2,221 CEOs left their positions in 2024 alone — the highest executive turnover in more than two decades.
Those numbers are real. They matter. But they don’t make you feel anything.
What makes you feel something is watching a leader you respect — a leader who looks, in most ways, like you — make the small daily choices that compound into a crisis. The decision to take the call instead of the walk. The meeting that replaces the vacation. The moment he explains away the warning sign his body sent and gets back to the real work.
That’s Jason. And that’s what the fable format allows: the slow, honest accumulation of choices that most burnout narratives skip over in favor of the dramatic collapse.
The Irony That Drives the Story
The irony that runs through Jason’s story — and that ran through mine — is that the crash doesn’t happen at a low point. It happens at a peak.
Jason is a CEO at the height of his professional power when the wheels come off. The company is performing. The board is satisfied. By every external measure, he has arrived. And it’s precisely that context — the gap between the outward success and the inward unraveling — that makes the story resonate with the executives I work with.
Because that’s how it actually happens. Not when things are visibly falling apart. When they look the most put-together from the outside.
The crash doesn’t announce itself with a bad quarter or a public failure. It arrives quietly, in the private moments. The Sunday dread. The inability to feel the wins. The 3am inventory of everything at risk. The exhaustion that doesn’t resolve after the weekend. And then, at some point, an event — a moment where the performance finally stops holding — that makes the invisible visible.
For Jason, that moment is specific and visceral. I won’t give it away here. But I’ll say this: when I wrote it, I was writing from memory.
The Five False Beliefs and Ten Blind Spots Behind the Crash
The book is structured around two frameworks that I built from my own experience and the hundreds of executive conversations that followed my crash.
The first is the five false beliefs — the foundational stories most high-performers carry into the C-suite without examining. Beliefs about what the title will deliver, what achievement will prove, what control and indispensability will feel like. These are the beliefs that drive the climb, and they’re the beliefs that quietly set the crash in motion.
The second is the ten blind spots that lead to burnout — the patterns of thought and behavior that operate below conscious awareness, shaping decisions and relationships in ways the executive can’t see until the damage is done. The Denial Tax. The Confidence Pendulum. The Focus Fallacy. Performance-Based Worth. The Judgment Trap. Perfectionism’s Prison. The Isolation Trap. Transactional Relationships. Boundary Collapse. The Competence Illusion.
Jason moves through all of them. Not all at once — the book isn’t a checklist. It’s a story. But each blind spot shows up in how he leads, how he relates to his team, how he talks to himself at the end of a hard day, and how he explains away what he should be paying attention to.
The reason the fable format works — the reason I chose it — is that it’s easier to see these patterns in someone else first. Before you can see them in yourself.
What Jason Got Back
The story doesn’t end at the bottom. That was important to me.
Not because I wanted a tidy resolution — anyone who’s been through a real crash knows there’s nothing tidy about rebuilding. But because the honest version of this story includes what becomes possible on the other side. And what becomes possible is genuinely different from what was there before.
Jason doesn’t get his old life back. He gets something better: a clearer understanding of what he actually values, a leadership style that doesn’t require self-destruction to sustain, and relationships — with his team, his family, himself — that aren’t purely transactional.
That’s not a fairy tale ending. That’s what recovery from burnout actually looks like when you do the work.
I wrote this book because I needed it to exist. Because when I was in the worst of my crash, I couldn’t find a story that told the truth about what it felt like to be a high-performing executive who had run out of road. Not a cautionary tale. Not a self-help manual. A story.
Jason is that story. And if any of this sounds familiar — if you recognize his choices or his blindspots or the particular quality of his exhaustion — then the book was written for you.
Crash and [Burn] LEARN is available now. The Ten Blind Spots assessment at TenBlindSpots.com is a direct way to see which of these patterns may be showing up in your own leadership.