By Rosie Lu
On the fateful eve before my first day of sophomore year, I sprinted the vain, never-ending uphill marathon of finishing my non-fiction summer read. In stark contrast to the boring ramblings of a well-informed professor I was expecting, Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell told me more about the world around me than I could have ever discovered for myself in my fifteen years—why my less-experienced friends received starting positions on the school team despite having only played the sport for a few months, how the reigning kings of the corporate world rose to power, and even how my own upbringing gave me an edge in academics.
The reasons for success I found most applicable to our society were cultural legacy, accumulative advantage, and timing. But if where and when we are born, how we are raised, the people around us—only a few among millions of unseen factors—can influence every aspect of our lives, what purpose does effort even serve? The answer to that question is different for every person—for the average person, a goal to work towards may keep the relentless existential crisis away, but for those who make it in life, effort is the basic requirement, under an endless stack of those factors of chance.
Society tries to correct these inequalities in opportunity by rewarding effort, which fair enough, is a practice proven by countless studies to encourage learning and cultivate a strong work ethic. Especially in school, the world favors the naturally capable over the hardworking strivers, and students without the resources often lose their spark for improvement. But over the past few decades, the effort to balance deficits in opportunity has become an overcorrection, celebrating uninterrupted diligence far too much. The problem is that incentivizing hard work regardless of outcome means we’re mindlessly equating busyness with success.
In the modern era, schools teach us that a person’s defining factor is primarily their work ethic. But if honored for grit only, we are automatically inclined to repeatedly utilize the same strategy—and if that approach is ineffective, determination becomes stubbornness. Pulling all-nighters taking notes again and again for AP World History when we really should have been practicing active recall, writing countless mock essays for English in the same structure, seeing the top students in our classes and automatically assuming they spend hours slaving away at practice problems—bad practice is a universal phenomenon in our generation.
What happens when industriousness isn’t rewarded? The default response is disappointment and perhaps resentment towards who or what failed to provide that reward. A student who earns a B- on their final exam after grinding review questions for weeks on end might, quite reasonably, complain that all their effort was wasted, or lament that they should have studied harder. But the unfortunate truth is that more of the same kind of effort rarely changes results—what we need is a change in strategy, and that begins with opening our mindsets, asking ourselves how we could get the best metaphorical bang for our buck.
Restrategizing could mean switching from practice problems to active recall with flashcards, asking a trusted teacher for advice, or even momentarily prioritizing a different task before returning to your original goal. Even if we can’t make immediate changes to the modern education system, we can begin by not allowing incentives to lure us into a fruitless cycle of endless effort. In a world of unequal opportunities, we can all achieve our best possible ending, but only if we can understand that practice makes permanent, not perfect.