The blue light of the monitor is physically vibrating against my retinas at 3:01 AM. It’s a sharp, clinical hum that seems to mock the silence of the rest of the house. Then comes the chime. It’s an all-staff email from the CEO, sent with that particular brand of manic energy that only thrives in the vacuum of sleep deprivation. ‘Hats off to the Logistics Team!’ the subject line screams. The body of the email is a breathless recount of how five people stayed in the office for 31 consecutive hours to manually patch a database error that threatened the launch of a new regional hub. There are emojis of rockets and fire. There is a promise of a pizza party.
We celebrate the firefighters while ignoring the fact that the fire chief was seen playing with matches in the basement just two days prior. This is the ‘whatever it takes’ culture, a phrase that sounds like a battle cry but functions more like a suicide pact for organizational health. It’s a systemic failure dressed in a cape.
When a company rewards the midnight oil, it is implicitly punishing the person who finished their work at 5:01 PM because they actually spent the last three months building a system that doesn’t break. The ‘hero’ is almost always the person who didn’t plan, or the person working for a leader who refused to listen to the warning signs. We are addicted to the adrenaline of the rescue, but we are rotting from the lack of the mundane.
Waiting for the Stench to Become Fatal
I spent three hours yesterday in a Wikipedia rabbit hole reading about the history of ‘The Great Stink’ of London in 1858. It was a crisis of epic proportions where the smell of human waste in the Thames became so unbearable that it literally shut down Parliament. For decades, engineers had warned that the city was outgrowing its sewers. Nobody cared. It wasn’t ‘urgent.’ They only acted when the stench was so thick they couldn’t breathe.
We do the same thing in our boardrooms. We wait for the stench to become fatal before we acknowledge the plumbing. And then, when we finally fix a pipe under duves of pressure and exhaustion, we call it a ‘triumph of the spirit’ instead of a ‘failure of foresight.’
The Philosophy of Vigilance
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If I am working at night,’ he said, wiping a bit of soil from his thumb, ‘it means I wasn’t watching the rain during the day. Why would I want to be a hero for my own neglect?’
Chen’s philosophy is a direct indictment of our modern workplace. He sees 11 steps ahead because he knows that in his line of work, there is no undo button. But in the corporate world, we have become convinced that everything is reversible if we just throw enough human misery at it. We trade the mental health of our best thinkers for a temporary patch. We burn out the methodical, long-term strategists-the people who move like Chen-because they don’t provide the ‘high’ that comes from a last-minute save. They are ‘too slow’ or ‘not agile enough,’ which is often code for ‘they won’t let us be reckless.’
[The hero is a symptom of a sick system.]
Scaling Processes, Not People
This culture creates a dangerous feedback loop. The reactive problem-solvers get promoted because their work is visible, loud, and dramatic. The proactive planners stay in the shadows because their work is invisible. You don’t get a standing ovation for a crisis that never happened. Consequently, the organization’s ability to scale is crippled. You cannot scale a ‘hero.’ You can only scale a process. When you rely on 21 people to sacrifice their weekends to hit an arbitrary deadline, you haven’t built a business; you’ve built a cult of crisis.
Reliance on Last-Minute Fixes
Reliance on System Integrity
The Legacy Database of Self
I’ve seen this manifest in the way we treat our own bodies, too. We ignore the creeping fatigue, the slight blur in our vision after 11 hours of staring at spreadsheets, the dull ache in our joints. We wait until the ‘system’ crashes-a burnout, a breakdown, a physical illness-and then we spend $151 on a luxury spa day or a ‘wellness’ retreat to ‘fix’ it. It’s the same firefighting. We treat our health like a legacy database that we only patch when it stops working.
This is why a shift toward preventative care is so radical. It’s the refusal to wait for the fire. For instance, visual field analysis champions this exact philosophy in eye health. Instead of waiting for the moment your sight fails and you’re forced into a reactive correction, the focus is on the long-term integrity of the vision. It’s about the meticulous, boring, and essential work of checking the foundations before the walls start to crack. It is the Chen C.-P. approach to the eyes.
The Anesthetic of Emergency
This ‘whatever it takes’ ethos also masks a deep insecurity within leadership. If you can keep your team in a constant state of emergency, they don’t have time to ask why the ship is steering toward an iceberg. Adrenaline is a powerful anesthetic. It numbs the realization that the strategy is flawed, that the product is mediocre, or that the market has moved on. We stay busy so we don’t have to be meaningful. I once worked in a department where we had 51 ‘top priority’ projects at the same time. It was a mathematical impossibility, yet we all nodded and drank our 4th cup of coffee, pretending that ‘hustle’ would somehow bend the laws of physics.
Hustle Dependency Index
98%
I’m guilty of it myself. I’ve worn my exhaustion like a badge of honor. I’ve looked at my 11 unused vacation days at the end of the year and felt a twisted sense of pride, as if I were a martyr for the cause of ‘the quarterly goal.’ But what was the cause, really? Most of the fires I fought were caused by people who are no longer at the company, or by decisions made by committees that have since been dissolved. I was sacrificing my sleep for the ghosts of bad decisions.
The Value of Stability
If we want to change this, we have to start celebrating the ‘boring’ people. We need to give bonuses to the engineers who write such clean code that they never get paged at night. We need to promote the managers whose teams never have to pull all-nighters because the deadlines were realistic and the resources were sufficient. We need to value the silence of a well-oiled machine over the roar of a jet engine that’s on fire. It requires a shift in our internal metrics of what ‘hard work’ actually looks like. Hard work isn’t just the intensity of the effort; it’s the quality of the thought that precedes it.
Roots
Foundation
Vigilance
Prevention
Process
Scale
Chen C.-P. told me that the hardest part of his job isn’t the digging or the weeding. It’s the waiting. It’s watching the seasons change and knowing exactly when to prune the trees so they don’t fall during the typhoons. It’s a quiet, constant vigilance. He isn’t looking for a ‘hero’ moment. He is looking for a legacy of stability.
Asking the Uncomfortable Question
We need fewer rockets and more roots. We need to realize that ‘whatever it takes’ usually takes more than we should be willing to give. It takes our health, our relationships, and our ability to think beyond the next 21 minutes. The next time you see an email praising a team for a ‘herculean effort’ to fix a preventable disaster, don’t hit ‘reply all’ with a celebratory gif. Instead, ask the uncomfortable question: ‘Why was the fire allowed to start?’
It won’t make you popular. It might even make you the villain in their narrative of heroism. But in the long run, being the person who ensures the lights stay on without a struggle is the only way to build something that actually lasts. We don’t need more heroes. We need more people who are brave enough to be boring, to be prepared, and to leave at 5:01 PM because the work was done right the first time.
The cost of the alternative is simply too high, and the ashes it leaves behind are all too real.