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I think some of this stems from our feeling the need to compete early on in high school to get acceptance into a "good" college. Later on in life this is merely repeated in different forms at work. E.g.,

"I want to get ahead and get that VP spot, I need to outsmart or outwork everyone else."

"Crap someone just stepped into our space and is eating our lunch, we need to move our roadmap up by 3 months."

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And also fear of getting blamed when something goes wrong.

If something goes wrong and you were working 80-hour weeks, you can say, "We did everything possible and still the ship sank."

If you were out having fun most of the time and the ship sank, most of the people standing around are going to blame you for laziness and inattention.

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