by Don Kurz, author of “Do the Hustle – Life Lessons from Studio 54, the Championship Lacrosse Field, and the Boardroom“
There’s an old saying about how life changes once you finish school: the B students hire the A students, and the C students donate libraries.
Obviously that’s a bit simplistic, but there’s a nugget of truth at the core of it: intelligence is somewhat overrated as a predictor of success because hard work trumps it every time. People think that being smart is a ticket to instant wealth. It’s not.
At the risk of boasting, I’m willing to say that I’m a reasonably smart guy — but I am definitely not smarter than everyone else around me. However, I don’t have to be smarter than everyone else because there’s a more reliable way to make up for smarts, and that’s honest, hard work.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that natural gifts like intelligence and athleticism don’t matter or that they don’t provide a strong advantage. In the athletic field, for example, when you get to the top, you can’t just rely on outworking everyone. If it takes you five seconds or longer to run the 40-yard dash and you want to be a wide receiver, you’re not going to play pro football no matter how hard you work. And there’s an equivalent barrier in business: If your IQ is under 100, then no matter how hard you work, you’re probably never going to be CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
Therefore, it’s not just about who works hardest. It’s about who works the hardest and gets results. You could work hard and not get results, either because you’re not smart enough or you don’t listen to the marketplace and keep pursuing dead ends. Working hard is no ticket to anything — it’s necessary, but not sufficient.
So yes, natural advantages do matter. But an advantage can be squandered if you don’t have the grit to do the hard work of maximizing it.
A correlation with athletes’ physical disadvantage
I played lacrosse in high school. I’m not a big guy, and being on the smaller side and trying to compete in contact sports was, well, let’s just say it was sometimes humbling. If you’re a big man they take one look at you and say, “Oh, this guy is six-feet-two, 220 pounds, and reasonably fast, so we’re going to find every way to get him on the field.”
I think that was a driver for me. When you don’t have an advantage like that you have to show that you’re tougher and don’t make mistakes. You do whatever you must do, because five-foot-eight guys don’t have to be put on the field. So I did what I seemed to have to do.
I loved the game, but loving the game isn’t enough, especially if you don’t have the physical gifts of height and weight that would give you an advantage. So I had to work harder to compensate. I didn’t love having to relentlessly train with weights, wind sprints, stick drills, et cetera, but I loved the end result.
Luck plays a role in success, but only marginally
Many people believe that most or all of their problems stem from something beyond their control — who your parents were, whether you had money growing up, what school you went to, et cetera. They think “it doesn’t matter how hard I work or what I do, I won’t be able to make it because the other guy has had every advantage and isn’t fair.”
That classic victim-type mentality is the antithesis of “I’m going to outwork everyone.” Underlying it is the idea that the other guy doesn’t deserve his success and so his happiness constitutes some sort of injustice. He didn’t earn it; he’s just lucky.
To be sure, luck does play a role in success. Some people are born into wealth and, although many such people work hard to retroactively “earn” their good luck, many others don’t. For the majority of us who weren’t born into wealth and have had to work hard for our success, we too depend on at least getting a small lucky break now and then. There are also poor people who are fortunate enough to have a fantastic teacher who mentors them and shepherds them through their youth. That’s lucky for them, even if the circumstances of their birth were not.
But you can’t just be a resentful, willful victim. It’s unhealthy and unhelpful. The truth is that life isn’t fair. There may well be reasons to say, “I didn’t have as good a shot as somebody else.” But so what? I’m not six-foot-three, so I could never play pro football. That’s not fair, I guess.
Some people take the resentment train even further and develop a feeling that anyone who is more successful than they are must have come by their success dishonestly — or at least unfairly in some way. Many subscribe to the notion that “behind every great fortune is a crime.” If you’re doing well and I’m not, then you must have cheated.
Are certain people more ruthless and cutthroat? Absolutely. Are some of them underhanded? Absolutely. But I don’t see that cheating is a way to get ahead. The world is largely a meritocracy, and although some people are born smarter and some people have better connections or otherwise have a leg up, I really believe that if you work hard enough and get a little luck, you can achieve virtually anything within the range of your abilities.
You have no say in what kinds of advantages you’re born with. You can’t control how wealthy your parents are or how tall or well-coordinated you are. You can’t control certain inherited predispositions toward weight gain or depression.
Your destiny lies in your own hands
But you can control how hard you work, and that counts for a lot. Do other people have natural advantages like smarts or money or nepotistic connections? Sure. Again, life isn’t fair. You have to accept that and move on, because the one thing you can control is your effort.
As famed author and marketing guru Seth Godin said, “While luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.”
You can control whether you exercise. You can control what you eat. You can control your work ethic through discipline and passion and by focusing on your end goal.
If your end goal is to be a starter on the team, if your end goal is to be reasonably successful, if your end goal is to graduate in the top 10 percent of your class, you can control a fair amount of what causes that to happen or not happen. Irrespective of the barriers you may face, you control your effort, your work ethic, how you treat other people.
My message to you is this: never forget that you control your own destiny.
Don Kurz is an entrepreneur, former championship lacrosse player, and dance instructor who learned to dance the Hustle at Studio 54. He has been a senior partner in a major international consulting firm, successfully taken a company public on Nasdaq, started a hedge fund, and currently is the executive board chair and principal shareholder of leading creative agency Omelet LLC. His new book, “Do the Hustle – Life Lessons from Studio 54, the Championship Lacrosse Field, and the Boardroom“, is a both an amusing and serious collection of lessons learned, taught to readers through his dynamic life story. Learn more at don.kurz.author.com.
