[pritovido]

Ohh, the hard work theater... Humans love human sacrifices, all the ancient cultures did it.

Human's effort is not linear.

Try this: Go outside, measure some distance by counting steps, like 500 meters, or measure it with google earth.

Experiment A: Then take your clock and start running your distance multiple times, do for example 5 Kms, apply more and more effort until it is reasonable but not that exhausting and can sustain it. Run for 20 minutes. Write down your time and how do you feel.

Experiment B: Now do the same thing another day but applying all the effort you can. Then you will be forced to stop in order to rest and not die. Then try again, stop when you can't do more and so on until you make the distance. Write down your time and how do you feel.

Compare both times. Compare your feelings in both situations. You will be surprised at the results.

You can do bigger distances if you are trained, like 20 kms, because it represents better work load.

In places like Singapur, or China and now the US(it used to be different in the past because of religion) they are living their lives like in experiment B.

In places like Germany or Israel they live their lives like in experiment A. In Germany people is not less productive than in America, or Singapur. Quite the contrary.

In China people work all the time, they sleep on work, but the intensity of work is very low. Working all the time means you can't be excited for work. All work, no fun,your mind sabotages you.

Jews invented the system that forced everyone to stop working at least one day a week. Christians inherited that and dominated the world.

Now the US goes backwards, glorifying hard work until you die in your 30s because of cancer.

I have known several guys die very young of cancer in the startup scene and it is not a coincidence. The immune system and organs are depressed by constant stress. Stress is good if you can rest. Tissues are not repaired. They eat badly and don't sleep.

Do not do that. Do the above exercise with your work. Measure the real output of your work. Force yourself to rest and be with your family, go hiking or to the beach like in experiment A. Work as hard as you can,and do not take breaks, like in experiment B.

Do that for a week and compare your output results. You will be surprised.

[yowlingcat]

> Jews invented the system that forced everyone to stop working at least one day a week. Christians inherited that and dominated the world.

Ostensibly, Christians dominated the world by pioneering monotheistic proselytization. The day of rest didn't necessarily preclude Abrahamic religion from continuing the human sacrifice culture carried over from the polytheistic Canaanite roots of early Judeo-Christian religion. To the contrary, human sacrifice was elevated to the foundational myth vis-a-vis prophetic martyrship and symbolic rebirth.

On the whole, I agree with your broader point. Sacrifice cultures and result oriented cultures are intrinsically at odds with each other -- at some point, the culture must decide what is more important: appearances, or sustainable throughput? Cultures that decide to prioritize the latter almost all converge to your experiment A.

[bob33212]

This is true 99.99% of the time. Someone like Elon Musk is an outlier. He can actually be productive 18/hours a day for a while. Most of the "Hustle" and pour 100% into the business types I know are including a lot of Coffee meetings, Logo Design Meetings, VC meetings in their 12/hour days.

[ido]

This is absolutely not the case in Israel, which is as dog-eat-dog competitive as any. The German speaking countries are indeed better (Austria even more so than Germany).