Work Hard - Play Hard…Until It Doesn’t Work Anymore
Liz Schehl and David L. Zimmerman, MSc, CPC
Work hard, play hard.
This is one of those phrases that has been said often enough in this business that most people have stopped thinking about what it represents. It shows up in recruiting conversations and team cultures and in the stories told at industry dinners about how someone built what they built.
This attitude and way of operating carries genuine pride. It is a sense of identity, a kind of shorthand for the trade that was made and the life that came with it — which is precisely why it tends to escape the kind of examination that would be useful to give it.
What starts as a daily grind and grit between effort and recovery, a push followed by a release that feels proportional and earned, can over time become something that no longer works the way it was originally designed to. This results in requiring increasingly more on both ends just to produce the same effect. The challenge is that most people inside that pattern don’t recognize it has shifted because from where they’re standing it still looks exactly like what it always looked like — hard work, a well-earned reward, the cost of building something real.
The science, though, tells a more complicated story.
The Loop and What Drives It
Dr. Anna Lembke’s research on the pleasure-pain balance describes the brain as a system perpetually searching for equilibrium, and in the work-hard, play-hard cycle, it rarely finds it.[1]
The harder the push, the bigger the release needed to compensate. The bigger the release, the lower the baseline drops. And the lower the baseline drops, the harder the next push has to be just to feel like enough. What looks like a reward system from the outside is, neurologically, a cycle running on its own momentum — not toward fulfillment but away from discomfort.
Think about how this plays out across a typical week. A difficult deal that you have been working on for months finally closes on Thursday. Friday night is genuinely well-earned — a great dinner, a late night, the kind of release that feels proportional to the effort that preceded it. Saturday is recovery. By Sunday afternoon the dread has arrived, the inbox has started to loom, and Monday morning begins with a nervous system that is measurably behind where it was the previous Monday. Not because the person is undisciplined — because the brain’s homeostatic system did exactly what it was designed to do. The high required a low, and the low requires a new high just to get back to functional. Over time, and without any single moment that announces itself as a turning point, what was once a reward becomes a requirement. We have set ourselves up for new default behaviors and how we define risk vs. reward.
This isn’t about discipline or character or how much someone wants it. It’s about a pattern that made complete sense at one stage of a career and what happens when that pattern gets carried forward into stages it was never designed for.
When the Definition of Hard Work Has to Change
There is a particular moment in the lifecycle of this business that doesn’t get talked about enough — because it’s not a dramatic one. There’s no clear delineation or threshold to help you recognize when you are there.
It happens gradually, somewhere in the transition from building a practice to running one, and what makes it difficult to see is that effort has often actually increased at precisely the moment returns start to flatten.
In the early years, hard work has a very specific shape. It is measurable, fast-moving, and immediate in its feedback — dials made, appointments set, accounts opened, a scoreboard that updates constantly and rewards the activity that drives it. There is a particular kind of energy that comes with that pace, a frenetic forward motion that feels, and in many ways is, exactly like progress.
But a practice at year ten or year fifteen or year twenty needs something different from what built it. It needs depth where there was once volume, relationship management where there was once acquisition, strategic thinking where there was once activity.
And the transition into that kind of work can feel, to a brain wired on the dopamine of the early game, almost like not working at all — because it doesn’t carry the same urgency, the same visible scoreboard, the same immediate feedback loop that made the early hustle feel so alive.
So the pattern defaults. More hours, more activity, more of what worked before applied to a business that has outgrown it, and the result isn’t more growth, but more motion that doesn’t translate to the outcomes this stage of the business actually requires.
What the research on neurological change tells us is that this isn’t a failure of effort but a failure to update the operating system.[2] The brain is extraordinarily good at optimizing for what it has been consistently rewarded for, and if the reward has always come from a specific kind of hustle, it will keep reaching for that hustle long after the business has evolved past it.
Unlearning Is Not Weakness — It’s the Work
Here is where it gets uncomfortable for most high performers, because what’s being asked isn’t just to add new behaviors but to examine — and in some cases release — the ones that have defined an entire career.
That is genuinely hard, because the brain treats well-worn patterns as identity, and Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s research on fixed versus growth mindset documented exactly this dynamic: when success has been built on a particular method or approach, the brain begins to experience any challenge to that method not as information but as a threat to the self.[3]
Letting go of the version of hard work that built the practice doesn’t feel like evolution. It feels, at least at first, like loss. But the environment has made this conversation unavoidable, because the world the practice operates in has already changed regardless of whether the practice has.
Client expectations have shifted. The way people consume information, make decisions, and define value in an advisory relationship looks fundamentally different than it did even a decade ago. Technology has restructured what efficiency looks like and what it’s possible to accomplish without adding more hours to the day.
The pace of change in this industry is not slowing down, and the version of hard work that built the practice is not just less efficient than it once was — it is increasingly out of step with the environment it’s trying to operate in.
What the research on adaptability consistently shows is that the capacity to unlearn is one of the strongest predictors of sustained performance in environments that change faster than any fixed strategy can keep up with.[4]
The advisors and leaders who make these transitions well are not the ones who hold most tightly to what worked before but the ones who stay genuinely curious about what the business and clients actually require now, who have built enough self-awareness to know the difference between productive effort and familiar effort.
Taking time to leverage a new tool, to restructure how the team operates, to go deeper with fewer clients instead of wider with more — none of that looks like the hustle that built the practice, it doesn’t carry the same frenetic energy, and for a brain conditioned on that energy it will feel uncomfortable at first.
This is where the concept of hormesis, introduced in the first article in this series, becomes worth returning to: repeated, manageable exposure to discomfort doesn’t just tax the system but strengthens it over time, building a higher tolerance for what registers as threatening.[5] The work that once felt almost impossible to justify starts, with consistency, to feel like the work. That recalibration doesn’t happen all at once. It happens because you showed up for it before it felt natural.
This Is Bigger Than Any One of Us
That’s the thing that gets lost when we frame this as an individual performance conversation. The loop we’ve been describing — the work-hard, play-hard cycle, the dopamine baseline that keeps reaching for a familiar version of hustle, the resistance to evolving past what built the practice — is not unique to financial services.
It is playing out across every industry, every profession, every corner of a culture that has been collectively conditioned by the same forces. The same technology that has reshaped client expectations has reshaped attention spans. The same always-on culture that defines this business defines how people sleep, how they recover, how they relate to rest and effort and reward.
None of us opted into this environment. It built itself around us. Which means that reclaiming some agency over it is a genuine act of intentionality in a world that is constantly pulling toward the reactive, the reflexive, the familiar.
The advisors and leaders who will define the next era of this business are not necessarily the ones who work the most hours or carry the longest track record of the old version of hard work. They are the ones willing to get genuinely curious about what the work needs to look like now — who can hold their past success with real respect without letting it become a ceiling, and who understand that the capacity to evolve is not a departure from what made them good at this.
It is the fullest expression of it.
The environment has changed. The client has changed. The tools have changed. The definition of value has changed. And the most courageous thing a person in this business can do right now is to stop measuring effort by the metrics that made sense in a different moment — and start asking with intention where the next level of this business begins.
[1]Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Dutton.
[2]Baumeister, R.F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D.M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265.
[3]Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
[4]Mattson, M.P. (2008). Hormesis defined. Ageing Research Reviews, 7(1), 1–7. See also: Oshri, A., et al. (2022). Is perceived stress linked to enhanced cognitive functioning and reduced risk for psychopathology? Psychiatry Research, 314, 114644.
[5]De Meuse, K.P. (2019). A meta-analysis of the relationship between learning agility and leader performance. Journal of Organizational Psychology, 19(1). See also: Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
