Your rest ethic is just as important as your work ethic.

I am guilty of neglecting rest, of overworking, of making the false assumption that working harder always outdoes the competition. That is a short-term mindset, appropriate for sprints or short bouts where the rewards warrant the pressure. However, when we widen the scope to larger projects, to one's broader life over years, we see that a work ethic alone is insufficient for the job.

When you lift weights, your breaks between sets are just as important as the number of reps, the weight, and the sets. The body does not benefit from being broken by weight beyond your capacity or by doing more reps than you're capable of. Even before reaching such extremes, pushing yourself to exhaustion by skipping breaks is no badge of honor. The breaks give time for the muscles to recover and go for another round. Rest days allow the muscles to repair and come back stronger.

Work culture does not reward rest enough. At its worst, work culture punishes those who take breaks. It is often dangerous to rest, particularly in toxic corporate settings—colleagues may perceive vacations or days off as weakness, as a sign that someone is not taking their work seriously. If someone sees you going to the bathroom too often, taking more than one or two coffee breaks, they may raise questions about your work performance (often knowing little to nothing about what your performance actually is).

The workplace rewards those who work hard, who get more done. It does not reward those who take vacations, who ensure that they are well-rested. One may argue that a rest ethic should increase output; if rest does not make us more productive, then it’s not really serving us.

Damn this industrialist mindset. While I would argue that a rest ethic benefits our output over the course of years, most industrialist corporate minds are looking only through the scope of months or a year at most. They are not incentivized to look beyond a small timeframe—so few of us stay in a single configuration of team, bosses, and subordinates for longer than a year. So, of course, a rest ethic cannot be rewarded in such a setting when the timescale of its benefits never allows its yield to be seen.

But the game is not just for our work colleagues. It's for us. It's for our lifelong performance and our ability to profit not just from our output and its rewards but to give space to enjoy life beyond our work.

We may not be rewarded for our rest by gifts or by praise, but our bodies and our minds will thank us. We will know its benefits by the fruits of health, energy, and greater contentment.