No work is "most important." Or, put differently, all work is important but work done poorly becomes most important.

To create worry humans elongate fear with anticipation and memory, expand it in imagination and fuel it with emotion. The uniquely human mental process called worrying depends upon having a brain that can reason, remember, reflect, feel, and imagine. Only humans have a brain big enough to do this simultaneously and do it well.

People associate hard work and overload with stress. But, like suffering, stress is complicated. Bad stress is stress that a system can't endure without suffering damage. It is unplanned, uncontrolled, allows no time for rest and recovery, and exceeds the capacity of the system to adjust to it. As the popular phrase suggests, it burns people out and, over time, it can decimate an entire workforce.

Fear shuts people down. When you feel safe, your brain is free to soar. When you feel in danger, your brain goes into survival mode, not peak performance mode. Too many people feel unsafe at work, under toxic pressures, and stretched too thin. They are literally about to snap. Within an atmosphere of trust and what I call connection, a supervisor can create conditions under which people's brains can set aside fear and fly high.

You brain does its best when it is doing a task it can do well. That's basic brain science.

Modern loneliness is an extraverted loneliness, in which the person is surrounded by many people and partakes of much communication but feels unrecognized and more alone and, although connected technically, isolated and even estranged emotionally.

I would suggest that excellence occurs in direct proportion to necessary suffering, but in inverse proportion to unnecessary suffering or toxic stress. Connection is the best antidote to unnecessary suffering.