Success, on the whole, is associated with hard work, and those who succeed in becoming leaders will have to work harder than others in order to produce better results. Nevertheless, recent studies in psychology suggest that effort is not the only determinant of performance. Effort may not determine the level of performance achieved; what counts is the amount of energy left for decision-making.
Depriving oneself of sleep, interrupting oneself constantly, using technology, stressing oneself out, and failing to recover are just a few ways in which energy is depleted from the very pool of energy required for good decisions and control.
Success depends on more than effort
The first reason it is essential to manage one's energy is that it affects cognitive abilities without a recovery period. For example, according to recent experimental research on the impact of sleep deprivation on decision-making, complete absence of sleep was observed to be associated with changes in the quality of such decisions.
However, at least a short recovery sleep mitigated the effect, suggesting that while humans might live without enough sleep, the quality of their decisions deteriorates much faster than expected.
Similarly, the analysis conducted by the team of researchers working on the 2025 scoping review of scientific studies on the impact of sleep deprivation on decision-making, published on PubMed, revealed several aspects of this experience. First, insufficient sleep leads to impaired risk assessment, reasoning ability, patience, cognitive flexibility, and effort evaluation.
The importance of the issue under consideration is that in addition to making people tired, sleep deprivation makes individuals less flexible. While success can be attributed to many decisions rather than just a few, the issue becomes clear: hard work alone is not enough for success. Effort is worthless if there is no strategic thinking behind it.
