Marcus came to our first coaching session proud of himself. He had stayed up until two in the morning the night before a major presentation, adding a fourth data visualization to a slide deck that was, by his own admission, already thorough. He walked into that conference room exhausted, over-prepared, and certain he had done everything right.

The Senior Vice President reviewing the work got through five slides before redirecting the conversation. The additional charts Marcus had agonized over never came up. Not once.

I want to be careful here, because the instinct that kept Marcus up late is not the problem. Drive matters, rigor matters and so does caring about your work. The problem is whether Marcus’ instinct was serving him in that moment: whether the return on those extra hours was worth what it actually cost him.

In economics, the point of diminishing returns describes the moment when additional input starts yielding progressively smaller outputs. At some point, adding more effort doesn't improve the result, it just adds cost to the person producing it. I see this play out in workplaces constantly: the professional who delays a project three days perfecting the formatting no one will notice; the leader who volunteers for every initiative and delivers mediocre work across all of them; the team member who rewrites emails seven times, sometimes using AI, and removes more of their authentic voice with each pass.

The question worth considering isn't whether you're capable of doing more. You probably are. The question is what that "more" is actually for - and to what end?

You Know the Pattern.

I want to name something that most high-achievers won't say out loud: the extra work often isn't for the project. It's for their anxiety.

When you're operating past your point of diminishing returns, there's usually a belief underlying it. Sometimes it sounds like “My work needs to be perfect to be taken seriously” - a belief that is especially common among people who have had to be twice as good to get half the credit. The extra effort becomes armor. Protection. A way of preempting criticism before it comes.

Sometimes the belief is “If I do more, I'll finally be valued,” which is where the meritocracy myth does its most insidious work. It keeps you focused on input, on hours, volume, and evidence of effort, while advancement is often determined by pattern recognition, visibility, and proximity to power. You can outwork everyone in the room and still be overlooked, not because you didn't try hard enough, but because you were solving the wrong problem.

And sometimes the belief is “I can't trust anyone else to do this right,” which feels like competence and is actually a form of control and signals trust issues. When you become the bottleneck on your own team's growth, you are hoarding the work to manage your own discomfort.

The question worth reflecting on is what that 'more' is actually for.

None of this makes you a broken person. It does make you someone who learned a particular survival strategy and hasn't paused to question whether it's still serving you.

You Are Being Watched.

Here's what the high-achiever often doesn't realize: the way you work is a message. Your team is reading it whether you know you're sending it or not.

When you normalize fourteen-hour days, you are not just modeling dedication. You are modeling that this is the price of membership. That excellence requires martyrdom. That "above and beyond" is the baseline. The people watching you, especially the ones who want to grow, will either internalize that standard and burn themselves out trying to meet it, or they'll quietly decide that this organization is not a place where they can sustain a life. Neither outcome serves anyone.

There's also a less obvious cost. When you consistently push past your limits, you train the people around you to expect the unsustainable from you. You raise the baseline so high that your actual excellent work stops being recognized as excellent, it's just what you do. And the moment you deliver something that is genuinely good but not exhaustive, it reads as a decline in performance rather than a more sustainable pace.

You built that ceiling and you can dismantle it, but it takes intention and discipline.

You Get to Define "Done."

I'm not suggesting you lower your standards; I'm suggesting you calibrate them.

First, before a project begins, it's worth asking:

Ask “What does success actually look like here, and who defines it?” Not what would impress people the most, not what would leave no room for criticism, but “What is the actual outcome this work needs to achieve?” That question forces you out of performance mode and into purpose mode, and the two produce very different work.

Secondly, a practice I've seen change everything for people stuck in this pattern:

Seek feedback at 80% completion. Share the work with a colleague before you're certain it's done. This interrupts the loop. It gives you real information about where the quality bar actually is, which is almost always lower than the bar you've constructed in your head. And it builds the muscle of tolerating imperfection, which is not a character flaw but a professional skill that compounds over time.

Lastly, the third move is the hardest one:

Delegate at your point of discomfort. If handing something off makes you anxious, that is precisely when you should do it. Your team cannot develop competence if you never give them the chance to exercise it. Your discomfort is the signal, not the stop sign.

You Were Worthy Before the Extra Chart.

Marcus didn't need that fourth visualization. His work was already excellent. What he needed in that moment was the capacity to believe that - not after the SVP said so, not after the project got approved, but before he hit send.

That capacity comes from knowing what you bring, trusting it, and having enough self-knowledge to ask: “Am I adding value here, or am I just quieting my own fear?” One serves the work and the people around you. The other serves the anxiety, and the anxiety is self-inflicted. It’s fear…

This is not a time management problem. It's not a workflow problem. It's a self-awareness problem and that is both harder and more solvable than it sounds. Because once you know what's actually driving “the overwork,” you have a choice that you didn't have before.

This week, identify one place where you're operating past your point of diminishing returns - not to shame yourself for it, but to reflect on it. What would it take to stop at "Excellent" instead of pushing all the way to "Exhaustive?"

If this resonated with you, I am inviting you to continue the conversation in my upcoming live masterclass, Beyond Perfect: Reclaiming Excellence from the Fear of Not Being Enough.

Together, we'll explore why so many high achievers struggle with perfectionism and imposter syndrome - and how to break free from the patterns that keep us overworking, overthinking, and believing we're never quite enough.

Reserve your seat here.

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Sending love and light,

Ginny