Most of American management cannot tell the difference between motion and progress.
While I don't want to dismiss your extra effort as improving your results, I suspect that the value placed on your behavior by management may have been out of proportion with objective truth.
I'm also concerned with whether you were Defecting, in a Prisoner's Dilemma sense. Management always sets unreasonable deadlines as long as anybody agrees with them. Only when people are unanimous that this is crazy do they ever seem to back off.
Typical examples would be a client says "Oh no, our campaign that was supposed to start next Monday just fell through - we need a solution ASAP!"
or
"Our project is six months past deadline with no end in sight..."
For some, this is an unreasonable situation to find themself in. For me, I look at such situations as opportunities. The client's management is under a ton of pressure to fix things immediately and a lot of the internal friction that exists for the employees doesn't exist for me as an outsider. I'm allowed to stick my finger in the wound.
Still, you're absolutely right that management (and it's not in any way limited to the US - I've helped clients across North America, Europe, and Asia who all had the exact same problems) can be unreasonable. I wish I knew a good solution for that, but the truth is that there's a fairly small percentage of people that are actually good managers and there's an enormous amount of political nonsense where managers try to justify their own existence by carving out little kingdoms for themselves.
While I don't want to dismiss your extra effort as improving your results, I suspect that the value placed on your behavior by management may have been out of proportion with objective truth.
I'm also concerned with whether you were Defecting, in a Prisoner's Dilemma sense. Management always sets unreasonable deadlines as long as anybody agrees with them. Only when people are unanimous that this is crazy do they ever seem to back off.