You were never called upon to work as hard as possible till you breath your last. You were called upon to be patient. With it, you can work, recover, and work again. As the saying goes, "Rome wasn't built in a day".
Stop thinking that the only way to move forward in life it to take no days off.
Yeah #nodaysoff community, I'm coming after you guys.
While you should strive gallantly in everything you work for, hard work is only half the picture.
You must rest to truly reap what you sow.
Just like how muscles grow during the resting period after your workout, you yourself function like a muscle.
After you work hard in what you do, and you feel like you can't give it your all anymore, you're just like a muscle's muscle fibers that have been damaged after a hard and intense workout.
What's always the next step after a workout? Recovery.
Muscle growth and atrophy occurs when you're resting and replenishing your body with nutrients and protein. It's during the recovery phase where the benefits of the workout begin to manifest in your muscles.
If Arnold Schwarzenegger and other world-famous bodybuilders didn't take a rest day or a couple a week, they wouldn't have become who they became. Their muscles wouldn't be how they were without adequate recovery. Their bodies wouldn't have been able to take it. That recovery I'm talking about is their "break".
Any fit individual will even say the same thing. They reap what they sow in their workouts when they recover as adequately as they work out and train.
In other words, your recovery is equally as important as the hard work you put in.
This works for everything in life that's worth striving for, not just your muscles (duh).
You need to take a break. You need to let go of things. You need to trust the process.
And when I mean trust the process, I mean truly trust that literally sitting down with friends, or watching Netflix, or meditating, leisure reading, or taking a nap is just as important as staying for a couple extra hours at school studying for an exam, or rehearsing for an act or a speech, or working extra hard at your job so you can get a raise, or spending some extra time training for your sport at the gym after practice.
If you keep working hard 24/7 and take no breaks, you will burn out. You will run out of energy to do anything, and your mind and body will force you to rest for a very long time till you're able to work as hard again. (I say that because that used to be me).
Unfortunately, in our day and age, we see all too many people around us either working too hard or working too lightly. We live in a world of extremes, and no extreme is good or preferable. That's why the best and straight path is the middle path. Take the best of both worlds. Work as hard as you like, but be smart about it, and recover accordingly.
Give yourself a break so your mental, spiritual, and physical muscles get bigger, stronger, and more experienced.
Have patience, for "Rome wasn't built in a day."
Pursue Alchemy.