Most of us have done it. Stayed up too late to finish something and told ourselves it was worth it. The problem is, it rarely is – and when that habit scales across a team or organization, it begins to quietly reshape how people think, lead and perform.
Not long ago, I overheard a conversation in a coffee shop that depicted this perfectly.
“I finished the presentation for today at 4am, so I thought I may as well stay awake and get ready for this morning.”
The response came immediately: “Wow. You’re a beast.”
We still reward exhaustion as though it’s evidence of commitment.
Exhaustion does not create better thinking, instead it creates reactive cultures, slower decisions and diminished creativity.
Last year, a senior executive proudly told me he’d worked until midnight every night that week. By Friday, he’d snapped at his team twice, forgotten a critical client detail and spent most of the day revisiting decisions he was too tired to make properly the first time.
Meanwhile, one of his team members left work at 5.30pm each evening, went for a walk, had dinner with her family, slept properly and returned the next morning clear-headed. By Thursday, she’d solved a problem the leadership team had been circling for weeks.
Exhaustion does not create better thinking, instead it creates reactive cultures, slower decisions and diminished creativity as well as teams quietly burning themselves out trying to keep pace with unsustainable expectations.
I know this because I lived it.
Wake up call
In 25 years of executive experience across ten countries, I worked with startups, scaleups and global enterprises, and from the outside it looked like success. But my ‘high performance’ was just prolonged exhaustion wearing a professional disguise powered by 12, 14 and 16-hour days stretched across decades. For a long time, I believed endurance was the price of ambition.
Feeling tired of being tired, I set out to solve the problem of how to ‘win the night to win the day’ by combining personal insight, modern research and real-world experience.
That process led me to redesign my life around what I now call the 6:3:3 model – six months earning, three months creating, three months living. More importantly, it led me to build a daily operating system that shifted me from permanently ‘always on’ to intentionally on.
Performance is built from the quality of thinking, decision-making and creativity that only becomes available when people are no longer merely surviving their work.
This notion creates an important opportunity for HR leaders and organizations at a time when globally between 30 and 45 percent of people report experiencing disrupted sleep.
Poor sleep alone contributes to the equivalent of roughly eleven lost productive days per employee each year, alongside an estimated US$44 billion in lost economic output. I believe the key to sustainable high performance is not reduced ambition, but better-designed systems that support how people perform over time.
The future of performance culture will not belong to the companies demanding the most hours. It will belong to the organizations capable of building environments where people can think clearly, recover properly, contribute meaningfully and sustain excellence over the long term.
Because performance is not built from exhaustion. Performance is built from the quality of thinking, decision-making and creativity that only becomes available when people are no longer merely surviving their work.
