Tonight's discovery was this one.
Because I didn't find it until after I'd scanned a couple of other books I stayed in the shallow end. Moving beyond material mentioned in Gladwell's Outliers, author Tony Schwartz delves deeper into the study of thirty young musicians to show that excellence wasn't simply predicated on much, much more practice. Those who excelled also slept and napped more than the "normal" bunch.
Perhaps humans aren't so much like mechanical brains after all. Instead we're more like the created world. We have cycles. Productivity is enhanced by relaxation.
This is one of those insights we need to be applying to the church. The biblical worldview rests on such cycles. Our modern approach reflects too much dependence on mechanical or business models.
I'm not saying that Jesus wouldn't have used allusions from machinery or the business world. But I believe that his agricultural allusions were more than just the result of his agrarian culture.