This was something that took me a fair amount of time to understand. Before I worked for myself, I was the guy who would be giving 150% at all times, pulling the weight of multiple employees because my pride demanded it.
I thought to myself that by showing how valuable an employee I was, I would get noticed and be promoted over those who half assed it every day. I was so wrong.
I learned this lesson when working in a manufacturing plant, we built containers used for waste disposal. When I first started, it was like any other job where you put in your 8 to 10 hours a day, and sometimes got bonuses when things were going well.
Over time as new management moved in, bonuses became less and less frequent, and the hours went from 8 hours a day, to 12 hour days six days a week for months on end. Old time employees were laid off, and the lesser paid employees had their workloads doubled, all while the company was pulling in record profits.
I found myself the sole employee in my department that previously took 5 people to staff, ontop of me being expected to assist the painter, the warehouseman, and do clean up duties as well.
I was able to do the work, and for a while I was the golden child who they called on when shit needed done, I had the reputation of being the hardest working person there, and was always being told how great of an employee I was.
Trouble is that I was too good, and gave too much. Whenever I would manage to get another person hired to my department, they would be all but useless, half assing it and mostly just getting in the way. I would always have to come in behind them and fix their work.
You can guess it, those people were always promoted to a better paying position with less work because if they promoted me, then my department would be in shambles. I was very bitter about it, and after some time I decided that now I would give them only what I was hired to give them, and that is one person's labor.
A couple of weeks of this now reduced output, and things were backed up. Other departments were overloaded with units that my department needed to prepare, the warehouse was jam packed with units that I was “unable” to get staged for pick up, deliveries were late, and units were regularly needing to be reworked since I no longer was giving them a customary quality control check for forgotten welds, or poor welds before sending them to be painted.
They were getting the work of ONE employee giving exactly what I was hired to give them. You see, when you give more than what you are paid to give, you end up setting yourself up to have that 120% effort be the new baseline. Looking back, the people who were doing shitty work and half assing it were the smart ones since they did not make themselves overly valuable to the point that they never advance from their original position.
After that shitshow of a job, I used what I learned at my next job and basically just carried a clipboard around looking at shit without actually ever doing anything other that looking like i was doing important things, and they thought I was a star employee.