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White Coats Of The Round Table: Why You Shouldn't Give 100%

·47 min·3 clips

John says he studied only until 9 PM and was happy to get B’s instead of a 4.0.

The conversation starts with Mike Gazbek pointing to a June 2023 Harvard Business Review piece about asking for 85% effort. The basic idea is simple enough: if people are expected to give 100% all the time, performance can slide instead of improve because exhaustion and burnout start to pile up. That lands quickly. Healthcare is one of those settings where that expectation still feels normal. Mike and John McDonald talk through what that looks like in real life, not in theory. For Mike, the useful move is to leave a little reserve instead of turning every productive hour into a standing obligation. He likes early mornings. They give him a quiet stretch of time he can lean on when work is backing up or a deadline starts to wobble. He knows himself, though. If he made that routine permanent, he would fill it, then start chasing more of it. So the reserve stays reserved. John's version of 100% is more operational. He talks about the mode where he jumps on every grenade, takes the hard task onto himself, learns the new project better than anyone else, and pushes that knowledge back out to everyone else. It is the kind of effort that looks a lot like doing a manager's job before the promotion arrives. He says it can work. He also knows it has a cost. The more you cover for everyone else, the easier it is to end up carrying too much yourself. The episode keeps coming back to that tradeoff between being dependable and overextending. A later road-trip story, with a needed catnap before Vegas, gives the point a very human ending. Sometimes the practical move is to rest, recover, and keep moving.

As heard by us

A plainspoken case for leaving some capacity before burnout takes the rest.

White Coats of the Round Table takes a familiar healthcare pressure point and keeps it plain: what happens when effort starts getting treated like worth.

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Why you'd press play

For when 100% feels like the only acceptable setting.

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