Most people don't understand giving 100%

Have you ever worked yourself to physical exhaustion, enough so that you would fall if you tried to stand up, or drop something if you tried to lift it? Have you ever worked yourself to mental exhaustion, enough so that you can't figure out which way to turn a jar lid, can't recall your phone number, or forget to take your clothes off before getting in the shower? Many people with mental or physical disabilities can relate; these can be failure modes of their attempts at everyday tasks, let alone if they try to keep up with able bodied friends. But for those able bodied friends, this idea is entirely foreign. This post isn't about the able bodied people misunderstanding those with disabilities; that's a topic worthy of far more discussion. This post is about them misunderstanding the few able bodied people who ever push that far.

I encounter this situation with some regularity when people are telling me how I could have better handled some interpersonal interaction as part of a project or task. Maybe I was verbally short with someone. Maybe I ignored an offer of help. Maybe I took a tool away from someone to do their task myself. The admonitions I encounter later often sound like "You should have just taken a little extra time to explain it to them" or "You could have picked up some of the slack when they fell short". It took me a long time to realize that the people saying these things are always keeping a large reserve. When they are faced with the need to give 10% more effort to avoid upsetting someone else, they do it. When they have to work 20% harder on a task to pick up someone else's slack, they do it. They see me not doing these things and perceive some unwillingness on my part at an interpersonal and social level. Sometimes they think I simply don't know how to pursue these options. They seem oblivious to the nature of my efforts such that there is no 10% or 20% more that I am able to give. I may already be on track to come within 10% of exhaustion, such that trying to give an extra 10% or more would result in the project failing. The idea of planning to work close to exhaustion, or getting there despite a plan to not, seems alien to most people. When I try to bring it up they either don't understand or don't believe me.

The same conversation tends to go somewhat better when it comes to money. When someone tells me I could have maintained social harmony by spending 20% more money (a common response in discussions about coliving), I often respond that I didn't have that much to spend. This doesn't always get through, but that failure mode is far less common than when the expenditure is physical or mental energy. I think this is due to most people being personally familiar with the idea of running out of money, or just planning to get close. The results are even better when discussing spending all of someone's available time (regardless of effort). We all have the same 24 hours in a day, so most people understand that it's not always possible to spend more time, and most people plan to spend most of their time when necessary. If you've reasonably planned in advance to spend 80-100% of your available time then that extra 10-20% might be strictly impossible, and almost everyone understands that.

In short, "We have to use this approach even if it makes Pat upset, because we will run out of time otherwise" is far better received than "because we will run out of money otherwise", and that far better than "because Sam will reach physical exhaustion and we will lose their contributions and then fail at our goal". This goes doubly so when the statements are made in hindsight, explaining decisions that were already made.

Is there some way I can improve those earlier discussions, about physical or mental energy, or even about money, to achieve the higher success rate found in the discussions about time? I've tried analogies and drawing parallels. I've tried waiting until both types of thing happen so I can bring them up in the same conversation. I'm not sure what other approaches could be useful here.