The Meritocracy of Success

I must warn you that you are about to enter into an over-confidence zone (slightly bordering on narcissism). I was reading a blog posting on GOOD magazine’s site and it had me thinking that I wonder how limitless my life would be if I had gone to an ivy league school, like Yale and not a state school, like the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. I must admit, I am already awesomely smart and successfully running my own independent consulting practice, but the thought has crossed my mind whether I could have been the next Mark Zuckerburg right now, versus potentially three years from now (there goes that ego!)? Then my stream of consciousness moved towards fantasizing about missed opportunities if I worked for Oprah, or the uber progressive Google, or even better Groupon. Would I have limitless relationships and networks that could catapult me into business rock star status?

My short attention span got me to Bing the holy grail of business degrees, the HBS MBA, and I came across a New York Times article, entitled “Was the Harvard MBA worth it?”. The author discusses Dr. Minztberg, a.k.a the “ Harvard hater”, a management professor at McGill University in Montreal who discovered thru his research that not all Harvard MBAs are successful, in fact five out of 19 HBS MBA grads, that participated in the study were quantified as successful and the other remaining, and I quote Dr. Minztberg were “utter failures”. Five out of 19 – that sounds like the stats of those who actually return to U of I after Freshman year – I blame Thursday night shark bowl specials.

Thru my mini-research analysis, I learned that not all ivy leaguers will be Mark Zuckerburg and there is enough socio-economic strata to write 1,000 dissertations on the difficulty of gaining admittance into ivy league institutions. At the end of the day, when it all comes down to it the success you make as an entrepreneur, innovator, game changer or insert any title that would define your “Quan”, is the direct result of the work you put in. My barriers and challenges have been my greatest teachers and the school of the hard knocks is real an institution and for some of us, with our Nordstrom Rack equivalent degrees, have to do it the old fashion way, i.e. with white hot poker fierce determination.

Barriers have caused me to exhaust all options, which often forces me to be resourceful and innovative. The hard knocks is an education that can’t be replaced by any higher education institution, because even the Jack Dorseys have to climb insurmountable mountains to attain an impact that changes the way our society functions. There’s no short cut to success and Oprah is the ultimate testament, she also went to a state school: Tennessee State University. Although, this is a random post, it is no more random than the self-deprecating thoughts that creep into our heads, especially those of us that have the guts to strive to change the world. I just hope that this post caught you at mid-“self-doubting”-thought and it dissipates those nasty insecurities and directs you towards much success.