“This Company Will Take Everything You Give It”

The fear is real but some of the pressure we live under is assumed, not tested.

I was at a leadership discussion this week and one question stopped the room.

“What are we pretending is normal in corporate life that is not actually healthy?”

We could have stayed on that one question all night.

What kept coming up was familiar: back-to-back meetings, being always on, juggling work, family and guilt and saying yes to everything because somewhere along the way people had started to believe that was what commitment looked like.

I was pleased when one leader shared his story. He realised he had become so used to saying yes at work that he was no longer present with himself or his family, so he put boundaries in place.

I asked him a loaded question “what were the consequences of that?”

His answer was simple and what I expected: “there were none”.

Because the fear is real. Very real. But sometimes the consequence we fear is assumed, not tested.

What surprised me was how common that still was. What saddened me was how normal it felt to almost everyone in the room.

I do not say that from a place of judgement. I have learned to work differently now and don’t always get it right, but for most people in the room, this was still just normal working life.

That was the reminder for me.

Your normal is your normal when you are inside it.

Earlier in my career, I worked in one of the most inspiring high-performing teams I have ever been part of. We were driven, competitive, fast and the energy was huge. It was absolutely a hard-working culture. One of the phrases floating around at the time was that “sleep was for the competition”.

Not exactly a wellbeing campaign.

But I remember our Managing Director saying something in an all hands that stayed with me for years. He said, “this company will take everything you are willing to give it, that is on you.”

The pace was real, but it was not a directive. No one was pretending the company would protect our boundaries for us. That responsibility sat with us.

Now, did I slow down after that? No. Did work spill into my personal life? Yes. Was that my choice? Also yes.

But what made that team high performing was not just the effort.

It was the discipline.

We did real work. We followed up straight after meetings. We were clear on outcomes. We owned the baton until the next person had it. We did what we said we would do. We did not waste time blaming other teams or hiding behind ambiguity.

The culture was demanding but it was also clear, accountable and built around impact.

That is very different from performative hustle.

Later, when I moved into larger and more mature businesses, I felt the difference immediately. I found myself running from meeting to meeting, wondering when anyone actually had time to do the work those meetings were supposedly about.

I still remember asking a leader how people ever found time to follow up, check email or think properly. He said, get comfortable with not having enough time to do that.

I never did.

What really threw me was the number of meetings with no agenda, no clear purpose and no decision to make. Just a block in the diary so people could gather, then book another meeting to work out what the first meeting should have been for.

That was not hustle.

That was drift.

One of my earliest mentors gave me a rule I still use now: if you can get value or give value, go. If you can’t, don’t.

Simple.

But if there is no agenda, no outcome and no reason for the meeting, how is anyone meant to make that call?

So when I got the chance later on, I changed it. I rejected any meeting that did not have an agenda. I told my team not to send one nor accept one without clear outcomes. And if we were in the meeting, we had to leave with actions, owners, time frames and clarity on what happened next.

It sounds basic because it is.

But basic discipline changes culture.

A lot of what we call hustle is not high performance. It is poor design, unclear expectations and fear dressed up as commitment.

I found myself back in this lesson again years later when I was introduced to Essentialism.

That book gave language to something I had already started to feel. When everything is important, nothing is. Every yes is a no to something else. Time, focus, health, family, deep work, recovery, clarity.

Something always pays.

So I built in a discipline I still use now. I look ahead in my calendar and block meaningful work time before the diary fills up. Thinking time. Prep time. Follow-up time. Space between meetings so I can actually process, move things forward and do the work all the meetings are supposedly there to support.

And yes, I often make those blocks private.

Because I noticed if I labelled them “thinking time” or “block”, people would schedule straight over them. Marking them private was a simple way of saying this time matters too.

That does not mean I nail it every time. Things come up. Some meetings are genuinely urgent. But it is a lot easier to make good decisions when you have left yourself some space to make them.

It also does not mean every culture problem is in our heads. Some environments are genuinely unsustainable. Some leaders do reward presence over impact. Some businesses are badly designed and burn people out as a feature, not a bug.

But I do think many of us have internalised a version of hustle that we stop questioning.

We assume we have to say yes. We assume the late meeting cannot move. We assume being unavailable for an hour will damage our reputation. We assume the diary owns us.

Sometimes those assumptions are true.

Often, they are not.

And if we never test them, they start to feel like facts.

The company will take everything you are willing to give it. If that is a conscious choice for a period of time, fine.

But if you are constantly busy, always available, drowning in meetings and still not feeling like you are winning, that is not something to wear as a badge of honour.

That is a signal.

Maybe the hustle is real.

Or maybe what is real is an undisciplined environment, unclear expectations and a set of fears you have never been given the space to test.

I am changing my environment completely. I know I will still work hard.

But this time, I want it on my terms.

Not driven by fear. Not driven by noise. Not driven by a calendar full of activity that looks impressive and leaves nothing meaningful behind.

Driven by impact. Driven by choice. Driven by building a culture I actually believe in.

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Nugget in Action

Look at your calendar two weeks out and ask yourself: where will actual work happen?

Question one meeting that has no agenda, no outcome or no real reason for you to be there.

Protect one block of thinking time and treat it like it matters as much as any meeting with someone else.

If you lead people, stop rewarding availability and start rewarding clarity, ownership and outcomes.

And ask yourself honestly: am I hustling for something that matters or am I just responding to noise?

What I’d love to know: what is one thing your workplace has normalised that is clearly not healthy?