One of my favourite quotes comes from Nassim Taleb in his book "Fooled by Randomness". He writes, 

"Whenever I hear work ethics, I interpret inefficient mediocrity." 

The first time I read this quote, I felt a pang in my stomach. 

Inefficient? Mediocre?! 

It felt like an immediate attack on everything I held to be true. For as long as I can remember, people have praised me for my work ethic.

A vivid memory takes me back to age 16, on a school trip to Ghana. In the evenings, I worked on coursework that was only due weeks later, while my peers were enjoying their well-deserved holiday. 

One evening, our supervising teacher interrupted dinner: "Listen carefully…" 

He interrogated the entire table asking, "Have you noticed how hard Louise works?" Then continued, "This kind of hard work is the only way to become truly successful." 

Of course, at the time, I felt both a mix of embarrassment and extreme pride. 

But today, exactly 10 years later — to the month— I have learned a lot about the role of work ethic and success. Despite what I had hoped, having strong work ethic is not a guarantee for wild success.

To find out how I got to this conclusion, let's take a step back and look at the origin of work ethic.

The ethics of hard work

During my undergraduate dissertation, I explored the role of religious beliefs in shaping our belief in the afterlife. The discussion of afterlife beliefs in the West would have been incomplete without looking at the 'Protestant work ethic' (Weber, 1905).

The Protestant work ethic is a belief system that emphasizes hard work, self-reliance, and personal responsibility. 

Protestants, unlike Catholics, believe that our place in Heaven needs to be earned. It is not granted at birth. Instead, Protestants are driven by a psychological necessity to prove their worth to God.

By now, the underlying ideology of strong work ethic is deeply embedded in capitalist societies. It has become culturally expected to behave according to central values like hard work, independence from others, and self-discipline.

Helpful ideology or foolish delusion?

Weber wasn't the first person to establish this link between religious doctrine and our collective drive to perform and work hard. In his novel, "Candide (ou l'Optimiste)," Voltaire describes a young, ever-optimistic man trying to navigate the world. 

In one famous passage, Candide declares that "it is the view of Providence that every person should stick to their own trade, profession or station in life”.  

Reminding us that strong work ethic will help us "prevent the three great evils that afflict all of us - boredom, vice, and need."

Voltaire is believed to have been mocking the idea that work is a panacea for all of life's problems.

Now, before we continue, we should distinguish between work ethics and hard work.  Voltaire rejected the misguided belief of hard work as an ultimate virtue. He doesn't necessarily criticize hard work itself.

He criticises blind adherence to work ethics as the only key to success.

Real risky randomness

To understand why this is such a problematic belief, Nassim Taleb tells us to consider the role of randomness and luck in success. Wild success, according to Taleb, is attributable to luck (i.e., randomness).

Randomness is a force that drives wildly different outcomes. He explains, 

"Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance." 

One famous example of the role of luck in success is that of Bill Gates founding Microsoft. As a young boy, Gates was lucky enough to attend a school with access to a computer terminal, a rarity back in the '60s and '70s. This access gave Gates the opportunity to learn how to code at a young age, probably gaining a massive advantage in starting Microsoft. 

Hard work alone would not have gotten him there.

According to behavioural scientists, more subtle personal qualities like charisma, for example, often get people promoted to leadership positions. 

Not charismatic? Tough luck. 

The idea that people who have certain traits or characteristics become more successful is confirmed by Cialdini in his book "Influence." He describes that people make decisions based on familiarity, similarity to a person, and positive affect. 

No matter how hard one works, without a serving of luck, it’s hard to win big. 

Just like Voltaire, Taleb's problem then isn’t with hard work. In fact, he encourages us to work hard and have luck on our side. In the words of pro golf player Arnold Palmer, “it’s a funny thing, the more I practice, the luckier I get.” 

The problem is with work ethics for the sake of having work ethics. Taleb says, 

“Those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy.” 

It is exactly that intellectual focus that is important in navigating a world full of randomness, where random, unexpected events could result in losing everything — our house, money, or relationships.

So, when is randomness dangerous? When we become overconfident. 

When are we being overconfident? When we think we can predict or bet on the future, specifically when we think hard work is enough to bypass the role of luck in success.

How can we navigate this world full of randomness?

1 — First, by agreeing that we should take the possibility of random events seriously. 

2 — Then, by looking out for the biases and heuristics that make us extra fragile to the consequences of random events. We think we can predict the future. This makes us over- or underestimate the likelihood of good and bad things happening. 

Some of the heuristics and biases Taleb tells us to check for:

• Availability bias: the human tendency to think that examples of things that come readily to mind are more representative than is actually the case.
  

• Simulation heuristic: easily mentally undoing an event or playing an alternative scenario. Thinking we won’t get fired because our manager likes us and ignoring the potentially disastrous consequences.
  

• Affect heuristic: making decisions based on our emotional reactions to an event or situation. Events that scare us (e.g., terrorist attacks) sound more likely.

3 — To build resilience in the face of randomness. In one of his other books, Taleb introduces us to "antifragility." He suggests learning to embrace our chaotic and unpredictable world is one thing, but it is another to thrive in it, preparing for randomness and uncertainty.

To him, entrepreneurs are more antifragile than people in a corporate job. The former are prepared to deal with unexpected events such as bankruptcy or losing a client. The latter, not so much. 

Cultivate your own garden

Repeat after me: having good work ethic alone will not guarantee a wildly successful future. Hard work is, however, an essential step in increasing our odds or having luck on our side. 

The missing piece in the equation is to learn and appreciate random events. 

We do this by focusing on what we can control—our emotions, beliefs, and biases.

Voltaire gives us similar advice. His character, Candide, endures countless hardships despite his hard work and diligence. This confirms that factors beyond our control, such as luck and circumstance, play a significant role in determining success or failure.

At the end of the story, Candide famously concludes, "Il faut cultiver notre jardin," translating to "We must cultivate our own garden." 

A call to take responsibility for our own lives and master what lies within our control. Rather than hope the world will somehow magically reward us for our good work ethic.

Illustration from Candide by Voltaire, published by Gibert Jeune, 1952