CHAPTER 1

Hard Work, Plus

Sometimes success is disguised as hard work.

—S. Truett Cathy

In 2018, Mirai Nagasu became the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics. How did she do it? Hard work and perseverance, of course.

Before she ever set foot on an ice rink, Nagasu spent most of her childhood in a storage room at the sushi restaurant that her parents owned in suburban Los Angeles. They couldn’t afford a babysitter for her, so while they worked, Nagasu would do homework on her own and then sleep on a yoga mat until closing time. It is there, she maintains, that she picked up these important life skills of hard work and perseverance. “I have a great work ethic because I’ve watched my parents work super hard,” Nagasu once said. She often speaks about how her father, Kiyoto, refused to take vacations, rarely taking time off because closing the restaurant would mean his employees would go without pay. In fact, the very evening that she performed her historic triple axel, her parents were working the dinner rush at their restaurant.

With this type of work ethic and drive, it’s no wonder her Olympic teammates, such as Vincent Zhou, who made Olympics history by landing the first quadruple lutz, have described Nagasu as “the hardest worker I know.”

Nagasu’s story exemplifies a core belief: those who work hard and put in the effort will be rewarded. We teach our children this from day one, and even double down on this advice as they inevitably face challenges and disappointments, reemphasizing that hard work is the ticket to success.

Yes, you may experience hardship and failure, but with even more hard work, effort, and perseverance, you will overcome. We’ve all heard some version of this. It is a message that is universally ingrained in us, a phenomenon that transcends cultures. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour.” “A winner is a loser who tried one more time.”* “The most certain way to succeed is to just try one more time.”

In my family, growing up, it was always the story about how my mother immigrated to the United States from Taiwan with just twenty-two dollars in her pocket. Through sheer hard work and perseverance, she was able to provide everything that my brother and I ever needed, even after she lost my father and became a single mother.

Lots of us have some version of this family story. It’s also reiterated in the books we read and the movies we watch. Like Daniel-san in The Karate Kid,* a bullied teen who learned self-defense from Mr. Miyagi, an elderly gardener who also was a karate master. With hard work and perseverance, not only does Daniel defeat his nemesis in the final tournament, he also gets the girl. Or Braveheart,* anyone? The story of a man who sets out to avenge the deaths of his relatives and his secret bride, taking on the might of a ruling powerhouse to become a symbol of freedom for his country. There’s a reason it grossed $210.4 million in worldwide sales and won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography—it’s an extremely powerful story that gives us hope and the push to fight our battles.

It’s a deep-rooted sentiment that also transcends cultural boundaries. It’s stories like Gac Filipaj’s, an Albanian refugee who was a school janitor for almost two decades, mopping floors and emptying garbage cans. Despite the exhausting work and his low pay, he put aside both money and energy for one or two classes each semester. At the age of fifty-two, he received his degree, graduating with honors.

It’s stories like Sanghoon’s, who was raised on a small farm in a tiny village. He had to walk four miles to attend a one-room school, but through sheer hard work and determination ended up attending Sungkyunkwan University, one of the most prestigious universities in Seoul, South Korea, and becoming a nuclear physicist.

At a time when issues of social class are front and center, stories like these send a reminder that though class distinctions exist,* social mobility is possible. Your background does not limit how well you can expect to do in life—if you earn it.

But the reality rarely plays out that way. What if we think back to Mirai Nagasu and what actually happened? Well, before her triumphant triple axel at the 2018 Olympics, she was unceremoniously shut out of the 2014 Olympics figure skating team. She placed third at the national championships, which should have landed her one of the three spots on the Olympic team. Instead, the United States Figure Skating Association chose to give that spot to Ashley Wagner, who had placed fourth at the championship, by exercising their power of discretion and deeming Wagner a better bet than Nagasu.

This kind of substitution from the skating federation was unprecedented. One of the reasons they cited for making this decision? Nagasu was only twenty, and Wagner, at twenty-three, was more mature and experienced. Yet Polina Edmunds, who placed a surprise second in 2014, right in front of Nagasu, was only fifteen years old and had less experience than Nagasu.

Perhaps that is why US Figure Skating chose against Nagasu. Or, more dismally, perhaps it was because Nagasu wasn’t the picture-perfect image of an American ice skater—blond and fair skinned—as the three selected skaters were.* The federation denied any explicit racial bias, but decisions speak louder than denials.

So what happens when hard work doesn’t work?

We are all trying to get ahead in our careers, goals, and ambitions. Sometimes it’s about making it to the Olympics. Sometimes it’s about making an impact or creating change; other times it’s about getting that promotion or getting funding for your new company. No matter the goal, the secret to success, we are told, is working hard. Hard work will speak for itself.

But something in the back of our minds tells us that this is not the entire story. That you can take two people who both work extremely hard—even put in the exact same amount of hard work—and one will be more successful and the other will fall short. Or, as Nagasu’s story shows, we can even perform better than our competitors and still get shut out.

We’ve all been burned before. We’ve all had experiences in which we worked hard, delivered the best product, and still ended up losing out. What we implicitly realize, when we admit it, is that success is actually rarely about meritocracy—the quality of your idea, the amount of effort you put in, the objective skills you have. Those who get access to the critical ingredients for success—vital resources and the money, time, and advice of others to help us achieve our goals—are not always the ones with the best credentials or ideas.

A few years ago, I was a volunteer mentor in a program that matched at-risk youth just starting high school with mentors who were fairly established in their careers. One of the things we got to do was spend their entire first week of school with them, with the goal of helping them adjust to a new environment and helping them get off to a great start. My “little sister,” Cerelina, was a bright, spunky thirteen-year-old, and I was quickly besotted by her. I accompanied her to her first class, a freshman history class, and quietly sat in the back, after giving her a fist pump of encouragement.

Because it was the first day of school, I watched as her history teacher went through the normal rules of the class and gave a brief overview of what they would be covering that year. And then, toward the end of the class, he gave each student an index card and asked them to write down a goal, something that they were striving to achieve by the end of high school. He gave the students a few minutes and then collected them. Then, he went through and read them out loud to the class, one by one. They had been instructed to put their names on their cards, but he didn’t read whose card was whose (thank goodness).

The cards listed ideas like “My goal is to make the football team,” “I want to beat my brother at Mario Kart,” and “My goal is to save up enough money for Steph Currys” (a type of shoe, apparently). And there was one from a wisecracking kid who was immediately popular and seemed to be instantaneously adored by everyone; he raised his hand and confidently acknowledged, “That one’s mine,” when the teacher read out, “My goal is to teach everyone in this class how to spell Zimbabwe.”

So the history teacher was going through these cards and reading them out loud, and commenting after each one. “Yup, you’ve got a great football arm—I think you’ll make it,” “Steph Currys? What happened to Air Jordans?” and even “Zimbabwe . . . I’ll make sure you all know how that country is spelled, and where it is!”

And then the teacher read a card that said, “My goal for high school is to study hard and be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University.” I immediately knew who it belonged to—earlier, Cerelina had told me about a book she had just finished reading about a girl who got a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, and asked me where Oxford was. My heart swelled with pride.

As the teacher read Cerelina’s card, I noticed he was smirking, and then I heard him chuckle and comment, “Ambitious,” and then under his breath, “Let’s not get our hopes up.” I remember glancing over at Cerelina, her face burning with embarrassment.

I pulled her aside after class and told her Oxford was a wonderful goal—that she could do it, and that with hard work and perseverance, nothing could stop her. But years later, despite her hard work (and my constant encouragement about the power of hard work), she fell far short, getting pregnant and dropping out of high school.

And the part that will always haunt me? On the day she dropped out, after apologizing for disappointing me—which she hadn’t—she brought up that index card from her first day of high school. She told me, “I should have just written that I wanted to make the cheerleading squad.* Hard work doesn’t get people like me into Oxford. Hard work doesn’t work that way for me.”

We don’t need to be reminded about hard work and effort. We already know. But what we don’t know as much about is how to navigate the nuanced nature of the disadvantages we all will face at some point in time—and how to build the capacity to cultivate the skills and tools that will allow us to take control and create a new starting position for ourselves. Create circumstances in which hard work does reap the benefits, rewards, and success. “Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well,” Robert Louis Stevenson once said. That’s what you get with an edge.

It’s Not Just About Bias

Cerelina and Mirai both faced adversity in terms of how others perceived them, to say the least. Cerelina’s teacher saw her dreams as too ambitious for someone like her, a girl from a low-income neighborhood. The US Figure Skating Association’s choice suggested ageist and racist decision making.

But harmful perceptions such as these can actually be a key to overcoming adversity. If creating an edge is the antidote, perceptions are the poison—but also part of the cure. We are cognitively limited creatures who must rely on our perceptions to help us organize and make sense of those we encounter in the world. We haven’t evolved past the fight-or-flight responses that helped our ancient ancestors grapple with dangers in their environment, and this has resulted in biases and disadvantages. Sometimes, our perceptions lead to explicit partiality and bias, like when a hiring manager openly decides not to hire older candidates because of the perception that they don’t understand technology.

Other times, we aren’t even consciously aware of bias—for instance, when we hire the taller candidate. Research demonstrates that many of us implicitly believe that taller people are smarter, better leaders, and ultimately more successful in life. In fact, while only 15 percent of the total population is over six feet tall, 58 percent of CEOs in the United States are; only 4 percent of the general population is taller than six feet two, but nearly 33 percent of CEOs are six feet two or taller. My colleagues and I have even found that something as basic as someone’s attractiveness can give people—especially males—an extra boost in positive perceptions.

In my own research, I have found that patient-provider interactions and treatment decisions are impacted by which patients are deemed to have the highest pain threshold (spoiler alert: women are assumed to be able to handle more pain). In fact, my inimitable, brilliant coauthors, Brad Greenwood and Seth Carnahan, and I found that implicit perceptions of patients are so considerable and matter so much that women were less likely to survive emergency heart attacks when treated by a male physician. Perceptions can literally impact life-or-death outcomes.*

But perceptions are not just about gender—or race or ethnicity or any of the standard characters that come to mind when we think about bias. Put simply, no one is immune. It is not a competitive hierarchy of who has it worse. Disadvantage is situational. I’ve seen males, for example, face egregious bias. Not too long ago, a school district in Philadelphia was found to be hiring female teachers at much higher pay levels than their male counterparts, and further, was giving them more credit for their prior teaching experience. But what was perhaps even worse was that these male teachers, during their interviews, were getting asked questions like “Why do you even want to work with kids? I always wonder why any healthy male would want to work with kids,” and “I just want to make sure that you’re not a pervert.”

It is important to note that bias is not just about the disadvantaged minority. It is pervasive and takes on many different forms. It’s easy to label someone as a “privileged rich kid.” It’s harder to remember that everyone has something.

And it’s not one particular type of person who is doing the biasing either. I’ve found, for example, that men and women are equally likely to be biased in favor of male entrepreneurs.

What we call bias or disadvantage is really the result of perceptions that have gone awry—when we link our perceptions about people to their attributes to describe what is “good” and “bad” in society. When, for example, blackness is linked to masculinity—but also criminality. When older age is connected to trustworthiness, but also less motivation and ability to learn. When women are perceived to be compassionate, but also incompetent.

It doesn’t take much for people to form perceptions. And it takes even less for us to make attributions based on these perceptions. Psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal found that even “thin-slice” encounters that last less than fifteen seconds result in strong perceptions about character—how kind, honest, and trustworthy we believe other people are.

Perceptions and attributions are made quickly. But more important, they tend to endure, even when people learn of evidence to the contrary. Once these attributions are made, they influence how others interact with you, how they assess the value you bring, and what rewards they think you deserve.

Take a look at the following chart. We can’t escape the perceptions that other people have about us, and the attributions that result. Success at work depends on social skills more today than it did in the past. There’s a premium on those who are skilled in coordination, negotiation, persuasion, and social perceptiveness. These types of skills have the most potential to expose us to bias. But they also give us the most opportunities to turn inherent disadvantages into an edge. They give us the chance to guide the process of how people perceive the value we bring.

THE GROWING IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL SKILLS AT WORK

Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game

Why must we take on this burden ourselves? Shouldn’t the structures we have in place, and the organizations at large, be responsible for creating more equitable environments where inequality doesn’t exist?

Absolutely. We should all be doing our part to change the system to get to a place where meritocracy does exist, particularly if we’re in positions of power. But it’s just as important to recognize that inequality isn’t going to disappear anytime soon.

First, there are (and will always be) those who actively do not want to change the system. Unfortunately, these people tend to also be the most powerful in any given group. Research has shown that individuals—especially those who have benefited from a particular system—are prone to support and rationalize the status quo, even if there are clear problems. These people justify systemic inequity with familiar phrases like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” A branch of psychology called system justification theory describes how people tend to see social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate if they have succeeded as a result of those systems. According to Erin Godfrey, a professor of applied psychology at New York University, “The people who are at the top want to believe in meritocracy because it means that they deserve their successes.” Those who are in an advantaged position in society are more likely to believe the system is fair and see no reason to change it.

Second, we overestimate the extent to which people actually notice what needs to change and know how to do so, even among those who logically support change. Research shows that most successful people have a blind spot, a sort of advantage blindness, which can be an unintended result of system justification, but doesn’t have to be. Special treatment just seems normal because it has always been their norm, and they can’t imagine what the alternative would look like.

Third, even if people do fix some elements, others will remain. For example, scholars have found that increased contact between individuals can change the extent to which racial bias exists. Harvard sociologist Letian Zhang discovered that NBA players receive more playing time under coaches of the same race, even when there is no difference in their performance. As a coach spent more time with a specific player of another race, that player’s playing time did increase, but the coach regressed to the original levels of bias as soon as the player was replaced by another player of the same race.

Or consider initiatives that seek to explicitly combat bias and harassment. While these initiatives may be well intentioned, researchers such as Freada Kapor Klein and Allison Scott from the Level Playing Field Institute found that the results are mixed. There is growing evidence that companies who declare that they will “just start with gender initiatives” actually set back efforts to achieve diversity along other dimensions besides gender. Creating gender parity (which often differentially benefits white and Asian women) may actually be creating increased gender-based bias, harassment, and general incivility for black and Hispanic women.

As The New Yorker staff writer Katy Waldman observes, “Prejudice doesn’t disappear when people decide that they will no longer tolerate it. It just looks for ways to avoid detection.” Let’s say, for example, you switch away from standardized tests for admission because rich kids can afford prep classes. You need to realize that rich kids can also afford more sports, clubs, tutoring, and volunteer experiences.

You have to assume that the system is not going to change. But even if it does, why should you wait around for it? You can’t be paralyzed by this inequity. You can’t be afraid to confront the system as it is.

When you are in the system, you need to take charge of your own outcomes. Yes, do what you can to change systems—advocate for better hiring practices, speak up for injustice, and educate others about the reality of bias. But we can’t just wait for people to make fair decisions on our behalf, make the right decisions about our future, or do things the ideal way. Creating an edge enables you to succeed within an imperfect system.

Make Your Own Privilege

Guide the perceptions that others have of you. Make your own privilege. That is ultimately how you get more out of your hard work. Just like people giving investment advice say, “Let your money make money for you,” we should let our hard work work for us. Psychologists Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich describe it as headwinds and tailwinds. You need to put in the hard work. That’s a must. When you create an edge, you create tailwinds that help you capitalize on your hard work more effectively. Headwinds are the biases and disadvantages that have the opposite effect, things that make it difficult for us or others to get ahead. You might still get to your destination, but it might take you much longer, it might be more painful, and you might be exhausted and frustrated by the end. Give yourself tailwinds. Allow your hard work to work for you. Turn your headwinds into tailwinds. Empower yourself by taking action—don’t just sit back and let others determine that your hard work isn’t enough.

It may seem inauthentic, even dishonest to do so, especially when you’ve been conditioned to believe that hard work is the only thing that matters. But in fact, it’s the alternative that you should be wary of: allowing other people to decide your fate. Why should you allow others to make lazy assumptions about you based on their uninformed perceptions? Why don’t you get to be the one who tells them about who you are? If you leave it up to them to “get it right,” you leave a lot up to chance and are expecting a lot out of them. You leave your success up to their perceptions and attributions. Your work matters. But it is your job to help the world see how it matters.

You are dealt the hand that you are dealt, but you get to be the one to play it. There is nothing inauthentic in being dealt a hand and then deciding that you’re not going to let others tell you it’s a weak hand. Replace these beliefs with new ones that every successful person—regardless of their starting position or the disadvantages they face—begins with: the future can be better than the present and I have the power to make it so.

Shortly after being unceremoniously booted off the 2014 Olympic team, here’s what Nagasu wrote to herself:

My Fears

The articles that twist my own words into weapons and explode into me. The list of criteria I don’t understand. The judgment the fans are entitled to. The people I used to look up to criticizing me. What I wear. What I eat. My body. The competing. For what?

I ask myself everyday [sic].

“Nagasu’s efforts to recapture some of her old magic can be agonizing to see and hear.”

Those words really push an arrow through my heart.

Everyone tells me not to listen, but, how can I not, when they jump around in my own head. To read them through someone else’s words only verif[ies] my greatest fears.

My time is up.

There is no room for improvement . . .

We know about her triple axel in the 2018 Winter Olympics. What draws us to her is that she worked hard and overcame adversity. But these words are how she felt during the adversity. She was left off the 2014 US Olympic team in a controversial snub that still stings today.

Yes, she put in the hard work.

But hard work alone wasn’t enough, or else she would have gotten into the Olympics in 2014. So what else was it? Being a fighter, yes. Perseverance, most certainly. But what she realized over the next four years is that making the Olympics was not solely about her hard work and skill. It was also about the perceptions and the attributions that the Olympic committee created around hard work and skill. A perception about maturity, perhaps. A perception about a unique skating program that would bring attention and interest to Team USA as one that was elite rather than passé, and what that meant when it was embodied by an Asian-American versus a blond American female skater.

Nagasu decided that she would guide all future perceptions about her herself. Her story wasn’t about what had happened to her at the 2014 nationals, but about an athlete pushing the boundaries of her sport. Nagasu’s story was about her raw athleticism, about the triple axel that she would perfect and bring into her repertoire so that she could pave her own path and give prominence to Team USA. She could create her own attributions and influence the media attention in a way that she could control, in a way that would place pressure on the USFSA to not leave her off the team again. Nagasu’s monologue about her fears clearly exhibits her creative and thoughtful nature. We attribute these words to an artistic, considerate, and mature Nagasu, rather than a youthful, naive Nagasu. We attribute her hard work and effort in landing a triple axel to a solemn, persevering, potential Olympic medal–winning Nagasu. The jump became a key part of her plan to make it to the Olympics this time around. Once she became the captain of her own perceptions and attributions, and the perceptions and attributions that she would force, using the media in her favor—that was when she created her own edge.

Though some might argue that it was just about personal branding, the edge that she created for herself extended far beyond mere marketing. What did Nagasu do specifically? She knew the value she brought. She knew the value of a triple axel and how it would enrich the team. But she also knew that before people would let her in, before they would ever believe in her value, they needed to first be delighted by her story and her personality. So she let that show. She acknowledged the controversies in her career, saying, “Everybody makes mistakes and obviously I’ve had ups and downs.” But Nagasu also declared that she had nothing to be ashamed of, owning her winding path and saying, “I’m not afraid to show everyone who I am.”

And then she continued to guide that perception of her as an honest, authentic, thoughtful athlete with tweets like “You don’t have to be perfect all the time. You just have to get up and keep going.” So she kept going, turning headwinds into tailwinds.

Your hard work and effort work harder for you when you understand that perceptions drive the attributions that people make, which in turn drive decisions. For most of you, it will be about positioning yourselves as an antidote to stereotypes, which will allow you to guide the perceptions of others, delight others, and ultimately will result in others seeing the unique value you can provide. As we’ll discover over the course of this book, figuring out your own positioning and your own contexts is what will give you your unique edge.

When you have an edge, effort and hard work fuel the engine more efficiently. Edge is about knowing how, when, and where to put in the effort and hard work.

The past decade of my career has been spent studying the myth of meritocracy—but even more important, studying what can be done when you acknowledge and own the fact that risk and failure work differently for different people in a world that will never be entirely fair.

I’ve studied what happens when you know that perception is a double-edged sword, and how you can cultivate an advantage for yourself through this awareness. And I’ve found that there are ways for you to actually have an unfair advantage—an edge—over others who seemingly already have an advantage, as well as those who don’t yet know how to create their own edge.

Embrace it. Own it. Make it yours and turn it into an advantage. Craft it. Hone it. Make them take notice. Be that counterintuitive presence.

And as my father used to say to me as a little girl whenever I would whine about how I was so much worse than all the other kids at sports, “If you’re going to play, lace up. Lace up and get ready to play.” So let’s get ready to play.