Everyone is celebrating higher output right now.
Very few people are talking about the rising cost of recovery.
Most founder and leadership stories I’m hearing as the year starts carry the same undertone:
More leverage.
More tools.
More speed.
And quietly, the human system doing the work is carrying more.
What matters isn’t the tech or the strategy.
It’s what’s getting normalized underneath:
• Shorter gaps between pressure events
• Less time to metabolize mistakes
• Fewer real pauses between decisions
That can work for a while.
And then it stops.
The breakdowns I see most often don’t come from failure.
They come from success that never downshifts.
The system keeps performing.
The person inside it keeps compensating.
From the outside, that compensation looks like discipline, grit, leadership.
From the inside, it starts to feel like fatigue, irritability, narrowing judgment, or a low-grade sense that something is off even though nothing is “wrong.”
Early January is a good time to ask this—not later, when the cost is higher:
What is your body compensating for that you’re no longer paying attention to?
What’s the cost?
That answer sets the real ceiling on how long this pace lasts.
