In April of 2007, Arianna Huffington woke up on the floor of her office in a pool of blood.
Nobody had attacked her. She'd collapsed and hit her desk on the way down and broke her cheekbone. She came to on the carpet in a pool of her own blood. She was two years into building The Huffington Post and running 18-hour days to do it.
Her doctors ran her through everything to see what caused it. Echocardiograms, MRIs, tests to rule out a brain tumor and tests to rule out her heart. Much to everyone's surprise, the diagnosis came back as burnout. She's said since that if you'd asked her that morning how she was doing, she'd have told you she was fine. But the truth is, she had stopped knowing what the word "fine" meant.
What She Said She'd Have Done Differently
The story of her collapse is told often, but what's left out is what happened after she realized what caused it.
She's said she wishes she'd hadn't believed the lie that there had to be a trade between doing good work and living a balanced life. She wishes she could go back and tell herself that her performance would actually improve if she committed to unplugging and recovering, not just to working hard.
Think about the claim that she's making. She isn't saying she should have worked less and settled for a smaller company. She's saying she'd have built the same company better…without using 18-hour days and insane activity to justify the build
The Man Who Warned Everybody and Then Did It Again
In August of 2018, in the middle of Tesla's Model 3 production crisis, Elon Musk told the New York Times he'd been working up to 120 hours a week. He called it the most difficult and painful year of his career. He said it came at the expense of seeing his kids and seeing his friends. He admitted he was sometimes taking Ambien to sleep.
Okay, before I reveal what I really want to tell you, I want to point out the fact that the above paragraph is what everybody quotes. It's what all the gurus and all the entrepreneur bros on Instagram and TikTok say that entrepreneurship is like. They all point at Elon as the example of how hard work pays off.
But nobody, and I mean nobody, ever talks about what you're about to read next…
A few months later he told Axios that nobody should put that many hours into their work, and that it isn't recommended for anyone.
Then in February of 2025 he was doing it again with DOGE, saying publicly that his people worked 120-hour weeks while their opponents worked 40, and that this was why the other side was losing so fast.
He had the data. He lived it, he admitted it to reporters, and seven years later he was bragging about the same schedule. The belief is tougher than the evidence against it.
This lie is so difficult to debunk when you have people like Elon, who are a good example of bad activity, admit that it was a bad activity, and then go right back to doing it all over again.
Hard Work Isn't the Lie
I want to be careful here, because there's a version of this article that turns into permission to be lazy, and that isn't what I'm writing. I'm not saying hard work is wrong, and I'm certainly not saying that being lazy is the way to go.
King Solomon in the book of Proverbs is relentless about the person he calls a “sluggard”. The man who won't plow in season and begs at harvest time. The one who turns on his bed like a door on its hinges. Scripture doesn't go easy on that guy, and neither do I. Hard work is required. Nobody has ever built anything worth having without putting the time in, and if you're looking for someone to tell you otherwise, you've got the wrong article.
The lie is what got inserted into the truth somewhere along the way, the way most lies infiltrate our consciousness. We started believing that the hours themselves are the thing producing the result, and that being exhausted at the end of the week is evidence you're winning.
Where the Math Actually Breaks
John Pencavel, an economist at Stanford, went looking for hard numbers on this and found them in an unusual place. He looked at British munitions factories during World War I, where you could count exactly how many shells a worker turned out in a shift, and where a country at war would take every shell it could get. Nobody was working slowly because the orders had dried up. If output fell, the worker was the reason.
What he found is that output per hour falls sharply once the work week passes about 50 hours, and past roughly 55 hours it falls off a cliff. His data suggests a person working 70 hours a week produces about what a person working 55 hours produces. Those last 15 hours simply evaporate! That is a fact worth remembering.
Now I'll be honest about the limits of this conclusion. It was manual, measurable factory work more than a century ago, and the exact numbers don't transfer cleanly to running a company in 2026. You and I know that. But the shape of the curve keeps showing up in study after study across very different kinds of work, and this is what we have to acknowledge.
What Happened When Companies Actually Tested It
In 2022, the UK ran the largest coordinated trial of a four-day workweek that's ever been done. Sixty-one companies, roughly 2,900 workers, six months, June through December. Everybody kept 100% of their pay for about 80% of their previous hours, with a commitment to hold output steady.
Here's what came back:
- Revenue held. Company revenue stayed broadly stable across the trial, rising about 1.4% on average.
- Sick days dropped 65%. People stopped getting sick as often, which by itself buys back hours.
- 71% of employees reported lower burnout.
- 92% of the companies kept the four-day week after the trial ended.
Those companies removed a full day. Not a meeting, not a report. A day. And the work still got done.
The Law of Addition by Subtraction
There's a principle in the material I study that says the way to get more is often to take something away, and it works for two reasons that have nothing to do with just trying to eliminate work.
The first is the quality of input. Every hour you work exhausted is an hour of bad judgment, slow decisions, and mistakes somebody else has to clean up next week. You're still producing. You're just producing work that costs more to fix than it was worth.
The second is that constraint forces you to choose. Fill a week with five days and you'll find five days of work. Cut it to four and you'll discover the standing meeting nobody needed, the report nobody reads, the customer you've been servicing at a loss for two years. The subtraction is what makes you look.
This is what Parkinson's law says. It says that the work assigned will fill the time allotted, and everybody knows this is true. Think back to your college days when you had an assignment due. You probably didn't start working on it until the week it was due, and somehow you pulled it off, even though you had four weeks to finish it.
If the professor had said it was due in three days, you would have gotten it done in three days. This is the same in our work life as well. Removing some of the extra time to do things over a longer period of time actually makes us work less but get more done. Sounds weird, but it's true.
So Why Doesn't Anybody Do This
The reason why most people don't do this is because taking something off the calendar feels like giving something up.
If the hours are who you are, then cutting the hours threatens the person. Delegating starts to feel like loss instead of relief. The guy who swears he can't wait to slow down never actually does it, even long after he can clearly afford to.
I work four days a week. Monday through Thursday in my core business, and Friday belongs to me.
Some Fridays I'm building something. A new company, a new concept, a joint venture I've been circling for a few months. Some Fridays I'm on the motorcycle from morning until dark. I used to feel weird about doing that, but not anymore.
It took me seven or eight months to get comfortable with it. Before I got used to it, I'd catch myself opening the laptop at 10:00 AM to check on something that did not need checking on.
But as I persisted in this and paid attention, what I realized was that everything was fine. Nothing broke, the revenue held, and the company kept doing what it was built to do. At this point you couldn't pay me to go back to grinding out five days.
The thing that changed was what Friday is for. Four days go to running the business and one day goes to building things that produce without me, which is the difference between working in a company and owning an asset.
I've written about the closest cousin of this in You're Not the Expert. You're the Bottleneck. and the busy-versus-productive version of it in You're Not Productive. You're Just Busy.
What It's Costing You While You Decide
Of the Five Freedoms I teach, Energy comes first, and it comes first on purpose. Without it, nothing else on the list functions.
A well person has a million wishes. An unwell person has one.
Arianna Huffington on that office floor had every bit of the ambition she'd had the day before. She had the company, the momentum, the network, the money. What she didn't have was a body that would cooperate, and everything else on the list went to zero the second she woke up in a pool of her own blood.
Subtract One Thing This Week
I encourage you to subtract one thing this week. And not just a small thing. Small things don't test anything.
Pick one real item off your calendar this week. A standing meeting you attend out of habit. A report you generate that nobody acts on. A Saturday. Something with actual weight to it.
Then measure the output, not the feeling. At the end of the week, look at what actually got produced and shipped compared to a normal week. My claim is that it holds or improves, and you'll know inside seven days whether I'm right.
If it drops, tell me. I'd rather hear that than have you nod at an article and change nothing.
Words of Wisdom
"In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat, for he grants sleep to those he loves."
– Psalm 127:2
That verse is not about laziness. It's a verse about vanity, in the old sense of the word, meaning “empty”. Rising early and staying up late is vain. It leads to doing the thing that looks like devotion and getting nothing back for it.
Solomon put that down 3000 years ago, and a Stanford economist found the same thing in a munitions factory ledger.
Before You Go...
What's Real? goes out every Wednesday. One lie dismantled, one truth delivered, with the research behind it. If you'd rather have it land in your inbox than check back here, subscribe at therealjasonduncan.com.
And if you run a company or belong to an association that puts on events, and you'd want this kind of talk on the stage, I'm booking keynotes for 2027. Details are at therealjasonduncan.com/speaking.
– The Real Jason Duncan
– The Real Jason Duncan