There. I said it.

And before you dismiss this as motivational fluff — let me be clear. This isn't about being lazy. This is about performance. Your long-term performance. And the science on this is unambiguous.

The illusion of the always-on leader

After more than twenty years in tech — Microsoft, Salesforce, Databricks — I've watched exceptionally talented people run themselves into the ground. Not because they were weak. Because the culture rewarded it.

Long hours became a badge of honor. Checking email on vacation became proof of commitment. Being unreachable became almost unprofessional.

But here's what I've learned — and what research has been telling us for years: the culture lied to us.

As Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writes in Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (2016):

That line stopped me cold the first time I read it. Because I recognized myself in it.

Your brain isn't designed for linear performance

The fundamental problem is that most of us think about performance the wrong way.

We think of our working capacity as a straight line — put in more hours, get more output. But the human brain doesn't work like a machine. It works in rhythms.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz spent over thirty years studying elite performance — first with world-class athletes, then with executives and leaders. Their conclusion, laid out in The Power of Full Engagement (2003), reframes everything:

Oscillation. That's the key word. The best performers — in sport, in business, in creative work — aren't the ones who push hardest the longest. They're the ones who know when to stop.

Loehr discovered this watching the world's top tennis players. The difference between elite and average wasn't what they did during points. It was what they did between them. The best players recovered more completely. Their heart rates dropped faster. When the next point came, they had more to give.

The parallel to leadership is exact.

Sleep isn't a soft topic. It's a performance variable.

Matthew Walker is a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley and the author of Why We Sleep (2017). His research should alarm every high-performing leader who treats sleep as optional.

After just ten days of sleeping seven hours per night — which most people would consider adequate — the brain becomes as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours.

But here's the part that makes this particularly dangerous: the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.

You are degrading — and you don't know it.

Walker also addresses a belief common in leadership culture directly:

This isn't a wellbeing argument. This is a performance argument.

Rest is not the absence of work. It's the engine of it.

Here's the reframe that changed how I think about this:

Work and rest are not opposites. They're partners. As Pang puts it:

This is also what neuroscience tells us. When your brain is not actively solving a problem — when you're walking, sleeping, staring at a lake — a network called the Default Mode Network activates. This is where your brain makes unexpected connections, consolidates learning, generates insight. The "aha moment in the shower" isn't a cliché. It's literally your brain doing its best work in the absence of forced focus.

You cannot access this on a laptop with Slack notifications on.

The incentive structure is broken

Here's where I can't resist applying a Munger lens to this.

Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome.

The incentive structure in most tech organizations rewards visibility, availability, and apparent effort. Vacation becomes a liability. Being offline feels like falling behind. The system isn't malicious — it's just deeply misaligned with how human performance actually works.

As Pang writes: "If your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist."

That's not just a philosophical observation. For many leaders I've worked with — and for me at points in my career — it's a literal description of the trap we've built for ourselves.

The leaders who sustain excellent performance over decades are the ones who figured out, often the hard way, that rest is a professional discipline — not a reward for finishing.

What this means practically

So if doing nothing is the point — here's how to do it well.

Protect the first week. The research is clear that the first days of a vacation are largely recovery from accumulated fatigue. You're not ready to benefit from rest until that debt is cleared. Don't cut it short.

Disconnect with intention. As vacation researcher Jessica de Bloom, quoted in Pang's Rest, puts it: "Vacations are like sleep: you need to take them regularly to benefit." Partial disconnection doesn't count. Check in once a day if you must — but design your absence, don't drift into it.

Do something genuinely absorbing. Passive rest is good. Active rest is better. Pang calls it "deep play" — activities that fully engage you but carry no performance stakes. Tennis. Hiking. Reading for pleasure. A child's football match. The brain recovers faster when it has somewhere else to go.

Trust the science, not the culture. As Pang writes: "If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it."

The honest confession

I didn't always believe this. I've worked during my vacations. I've been proud of my response time, and still am thus struggling with this one. And I've confused availability with contribution.

What shifted wasn't a book — it was watching the cumulative cost. The slow erosion of patience. The reduced quality of thinking. The decisions made from depletion rather than clarity.

The best leaders I've observed weren't the ones who worked the most. They were the ones who showed up, year after year, with energy in reserve.

That's not a coincidence. That's a system.

Enjoy your summer. Fully.

Thanks for reading!

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/Jonas