110% Doesn't Exist
- Sharkey HR Consulting
- May 7
- 1 min read
🔥 Why "Giving 110%" Is a Scam – From Someone Who Did the Math
“Give me 110%, Coach!”“We’re building a future! I need 110% from all of you!”— Leo the CEO
Cue Archimedes:
“That’s not possible.”
Let’s be honest—you can’t give 110%. You can give 100%, and even that rarely comes with proper pay.
So what does it really mean?
💡 It means Person A wants more than Person B can sustainably give.It’s a motivational cliché used to bypass reality: finite time, finite energy, fixed budgets.
As Algorithms to Live By puts it:
“Every prediction requires what you know and what you don’t.”Adding more effort doesn’t always make a better outcome—it just fits past expectations, not future success.
💼 Quick HR Story:
I once managed health benefits for 300 employees. Tight budget. Tough area. We worked hard to keep the single-parent premium affordable—the math mattered.
A new HR hire came in—married, no kids—and wanted the Employee + Spouse rate reduced. Fair ask.
I gave her the model to play with (teaching moment!). She returned proud, with lowered rates! Small issue: she added $50,000 to the budget.
“The owners can cover that,” she said.No. They can’t. The business objective was clear: this budget, these constraints.
She gave 110%. And completely broke the math.
Sound familiar?
🎯 The point:
Stop glamorizing a hustle that defies reality. Reward well-calculated, 100% human effort.And please, retire the 110% speech. It’s exhausting and impossible.
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👉 Have you ever been asked to go "above and beyond"—with no real boundary? Drop your best story below.
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