A quote I heard the other night from our college bar steward:

If you get 41%, you've wasted 1% of your time.

Now whilst I'm not directly of the view that you should only do the bare minimum to succeed, because mistakes and accidents happen, it does throw into the light the idea that sometimes doing things to the extreme is wasting our time. There is a question of what exactly a worthwhile way of spending your time is, and that's something we have to accept different people feel differently about. Where it comes in as far as academia goes is surely that you don't necessarily need to be focusing all your energy on getting marks in a course. As long as you can achieve what is necessary then you would be better off furthering a different area or pursuing another interest, increasing the scope of your activities.

To be honest when the guy made the quote it was probably just a reason why you could have the time to go to the bar every night - it's nice to see where following the same train of thought leads you. As long as it's not to a chubby maths lecturer with a beard brandishing a long wooden pole and claiming it's a dirty great vector.