> Personally, it reminded me of how people say "it's not a sprint, it's a marathon". Yeah, but Haile Gebreselassie runs the marathon at an average of 20 km/h. Some people really do operate at a heck of a limit.
I wonder if that might be missing the broader point of the saying. Yes, it's true that some people do operate "at a heck of a limit" but it's much more true to say that human beings, compared to other animals, have distinct advantages and disadvantages. Bear in mind that few other species can actually /generally/ run marathons -- we evolved the ability to sweat and engage in endurance ran /in the pursuit/ of persistence hunting.
Maybe it's just a personal thing these days, but I'm even more curious about min-floors than max-ceilings. Not just because of patterns like this, but because the thought leadership trope of "let's look at a leader in the field and figure out what we can learn from them" is not very useful. Figuring out why it's so easy for me to get into decent aerobic shape pretty quickly as a human being (for millions of years, it was useful for hunting) is a lot more enlightening.
So to get back to your point, JC is probably even more of a "marathon runner" than he looks like. I've seen that with all great engineers (and founders) -- they have the patience and opportunism to pull solutions out of a different problem space from scratch for a six to seven year stretch of time.
It's not about working hard. It's not about working fast. It's about merely surviving -- and getting creative with how you go about doing that. And it is almost always about efficiency.