The executive who works consistently long hours, sleeps fewer than six hours a night, and takes satisfaction in the visible evidence of sustained effort is engaged in a pattern that is directly measurable in their performance data. The measurement takes time to surface — the degradation is gradual rather than sudden — and the subjective experience of performing at a degraded level is not reliable evidence of the degradation itself, because the capacity for accurate self-assessment is among the first cognitive functions that the degraded state impairs. The executive who is running on five hours of sleep and three weeks without a genuine day off does not feel as compromised as they are. This is one of the more consequential features of the problem.