What defines merit?

Is it hard work? How do we effectively measure who works more than the others? If you are breaking bricks in Kigali, you suffer more than someone sitting in an air-conditioned room in Amsterdam. Yet we all know that the latter is rewarded by society more than the former. Hard-work is a construct created by us to infuse the illusion of merit into our endeavors and not the other way around. If I got there, it indeed was because I worked hard. Even if we did not, we do unconsciously fool ourselves into belief.

Who did not work hard to achieve a goal? When the goal eludes us due to other reasons, we double-down and work harder, failing to acknowledge that the answer might be elsewhere. We blind ourselves to the fact there are also a significant number of hard-workers who don’t necessarily achieve their goals. As the hard-work metric is a devious one, it becomes easy to deceive ourselves into this idea. …

How much time did you waste by trying to figure out the processes left by a person who left your company abruptly? How many indecipherable spreadsheets did you have to work on daily? How many pages of useless and confusing process documentation did you have to go through in your career?

According to the Work Institute Retention Report, in 2018, 41.4 million U.S. workers voluntarily left their jobs. Employee voluntary turnover exceeded 27%. As people become less loyal to their companies and seek more significant opportunities elsewhere, employers are left with a big issue, managing the lost knowledge.

Companies spend countless money and time due to faulty knowledge management

Business gurus always sold documentation as the holy grail in terms of knowledge management. But how many companies do it with excellence? In my experience, most companies I worked for had a short handover period, if any, and the documentation consisted of Word documents spread out folders all-around their network drive. The majority of records were written years ago and with outdated or redundant processes. It is the equivalent of Hangar 51 at Raiders of the Lost Ark. A warehouse filled with boxes containing a mixture of garbage and precious items, without a map to help us find it. …

Rarely in our lives do we take the time to think about the path we have been on so far. For many people, COVID-19 was a time of mourning, financial, and personal distress. Understandably, for many people, 2020 is a year to forget. But while many struggled, some success stories have emerged. Stories of people driven by necessity or will, luck or skill — but still ended up using a time of affliction to build the foundation for their future success.

Recently I reached out to a friend who owns a pizzeria in a beach town in Brazil. I sheepishly asked him how his business was going. I was expecting the worse and preparing words of encouragement. Surprisingly, he shot back with an energetic message — “We just had the best week of our history!” …

It was the end of 2008. The traditional Brazilian football club Corinthians came from a painful relegation in 2007. After a one-year stint at the Brazilian league second division, it prepared to return to the country’s football elite. Meanwhile, the club organized a masterful deal. In secret, it was negotiating the return of football legend Ronaldo to Brazil. The goal was to make him a symbol of the club’s new times inside and outside the field. The news of the conversations eventually leaked to the press.

The Brazilian newspaper Placar dedicated a whole page to mock the fact. It seemed that the club was way over its head, trying to make an impossible deal. “Corinthians: phenomenal joke,” the central piece said, referring to the star’s nom de Guerre “Fenômeno,” or “Phenomenon.” …

It is hard to think about a positive effect on the Coronavirus crisis that astonished the world in 2020. The unexpected positive impact will be a lot of opportunities for talented and hard-working people. And an improvement in businesses and services like never seen before. Well, since 2009, at least.

Did you ever go to a restaurant and was astonished on how bad the quality of food and service was? Were you impressed on how this business might have stood with its doors open in sometimes very prime real estate? …

We had such a great run.

I still remember getting to know you. I came riding my bike in what was, so far, sunny weather. Suddenly, things turned for the worse. The weather went to crap, and it started to pour for thirty minutes — the exact thirty minutes I was riding my bike to meet you. It was not a good start. Even though I looked like crap and cursing queen Beatrix, Victoria, and Margrethe II, you still welcomed me with open arms. You were warm and comforting, had hot chocolate, offered me some toilet tissues so I could dry off my hair. Nice touch. …

In 1849, one of the biggest influx of people in the history of the United States started. More than 300,000 people migrated to the state of California in less than a year. These people came from all around the world, half arrived by sea and half came overland. Most of the newly arrived were Americans. Yet the gold rush attracted thousands from Latin America, Europe, Australia, and China. Their goal was simple. They wanted to capitalize on the biggest opportunity in the world at the time. Finding and mining gold in America.

The precious metal was first discovered in the state in 1848 by James W. Marshall in Coloma, California. In an astonishing information speed at the time, news flew by. By 1849, the state was already flooded by people looking to make riches beyond their dreams. The peak of the rush lasted until 1855. After that, gold could be retrieved from the goldfields only by large groups of workers, either in partnerships or as employees. Otherwise, it would not be profitable. By the mid-1850s, only the owners of these gold-mining companies were making money. Even though the Gold Rush was short-lived for the adventurous pioneers, its impacts are still around us nowadays. For starters, it spawned the statehood of California. It also inspired the name of professional sports teams like the San Francisco “Forty-Niners” and the “Golden State” Warriors. And created the “California dream”, an aura of richness and opportunity that developed the state and many industries within it. …

I come from a country known for its bureaucracy. Brazil is a country where opening a company takes on average 11 procedures and around 90 days of work. It ranks 124th in ease of doing business (sandwiched between Senegal and Paraguay). Companies willing to pay correctly their taxes employ 100-people tax departments just to be sure that it is filed correctly. It is a country that has a whole industry dedicated to paper-pushing (called “cartórios”). And another to speed up document issuing (called “despachantes”). It wasn’t long ago that the families running it were the richest ones in town. Nothing here is new — as many underdeveloped countries, the public sector creates difficulties to sell facilities. The gigantic amount of non-sense documents needed justifies the inflated number of employees. …