TL;DR: Work smarter, not harder.

I have noticed that all systems have some natural capability for productivity, value delivery and quality. As the people in the system gain experience in the system, their performance will start reaching that systemic speed. Just like with a ship, this happens quite easily, but when the “hull speed”* is reached, the amount of effort / power to go faster dramatically increases, up to the point that a certain speed seems unsurmountable regardless of power expended. In systems, we can perceive this e.g. in overtime, which does not yield real benefit since the extra effort translates to more mistakes and other negative factors that detract from real progress.

I continually observe that also in the ball point game, where people psyche themselves to try harder, but they still get the same result.