The harder we work the better we are. The harder we work the higher we climb. The harder we work the more we control. The harder we work the closer we get to the gates of heaven.

For all the talk these days about balance – between work and play, home and office, personal and professional – the evidence is clear. Work trumps the rest hands down, any day, every day. This applies to leaders above all – to high-level leaders in both the public and private sectors, many apparently persuaded that the longer their hours the stronger their performance.

Work has become some sort of extreme sport. Seems it produces a rush, a high of a kind that results from the increased levels of mental and physical exertion. Sometimes the effort is akin to a marathon, a long distance run in which the leader who never lets up, not even for a day, is supposed to be superior. Other times the effort is more like a sprint, a brief burst of enormous energy expended, ostensible testimony to the superhuman human.

There’s just one problem – extreme work is not an extreme sport, not even close. There is a delusional aspect to extreme work, a dangerous loss of perspective. Leaders are misled into presuming that to be consumed by their labors is to cure what ails.

In a recent three part series in the Wall Street Journal that detailed the collapse of Bear Stearns, there is ample evidence that during the waning days of the once legendary firm, CEO Alan Schwartz drove himself to exhaustion. In fact Bear Stearns’s problems had been festering for months, which required Schwartz to expend considerable extra time and energy trying to mollify employees angry at the company’s handling of the credit crisis. So, during the closing crunch, a 72-hour period during which every one of his mental and physical reserves was taxed to the limit, Schwartz was already drained. He was drained, in other words, even before the denouement.

The evidence suggests that during her long-distance run for the White House, Hillary Clinton has been similarly determined to go full tilt full time. She’s called the “robo pol” – because she comes across as being tireless and indestructible and also bloodless and inhuman. Unlike Barack Obama, who a couple of months ago took a few days vacation with his family in the Virgin Islands, so far as we know Clinton has taken not a single break from her full-throttle thrust at the American presidency. Here’s an example. Obama and John McCain took Mother’s Day off. Not Clinton. She rose early on that Sunday, and then spent the next 16 hours slogging through a wet rain to campaign in West Virginia. Whether her recent mistakes, some of which were serious, can be attributed to extreme fatigue remains an open question. But driving yourself like a draught horse is no way to do good work.

It’s nearly summertime – and the living should be easy. Or, at least, it should be easier than leading lights would have us believe.