OP's comment is a vast simplification of what's happening underneath, but nonetheless still tremendously valid as a useful heuristic. Valuable work, like many

OP's comment is a vast simplification of what's happening underneath, but nonetheless still tremendously valid as a useful heuristic. Valuable work, like many things in the real world, is not normally distributed, but skewed or following alternate distributions, such as power-law. This is likely what occurs within "torrents" of work: work that is has significantly more leverage than other work. Nonetheless, the implicit bedrock of the just-showing-up heuristic is that the valuable work cannot get done without the consistency of simply showing up; indeed, expert performance is often a function of deliberate practice plus persistence (time); one without the other rarely nets positive results.