Myth - “Doing more automatically leads to success”
Once as a new hire, in a multinational company, I began my journey there with guns blazing. I was a junior engineer and I thought I had to prove my value at all cost. The first thing I noticed was that the machines had a high downtime.
Unbeknownst to me, the company was trying to save money on mechanical parts and had decided to keep using old parts instead of purchasing new ones. This caused the machines to require higher maintenance time. But this didn’t matter. What mattered more for the technical director is to show management that the cost of machine repair was decreasing.
Oblivious to this priority, and after I did my homework and learned about the accumulated time the machines had to be stopped, I went ahead and ordered the missing parts without consulting my manager. And if you are wondering whether this was a part of my responsibilities, the answer is yes. But unofficially I wasn’t allowed to do that. It was my naive initiative. The “doing more” myth.
When he discovered what I did, he was furious and apparently not pleased at all. He stormed into my office, his face all red, and in a burst of anger he shouted: “Why do you care about the machines’ downtime?”. Someone had apparently told him that I knew about the repair times.
Doing more doesn’t result automatically in more recognition. And this is perhaps the most common myth in modern companies. You assume that: more work, more effort, and more sacrifice will naturally produce upward movement. Sometimes it does but many people spend years discovering a painful reality: execution alone rarely guarantees recognition. Simply because organizations are not pure meritocracies.
Learning this early in my career helped me navigate power dynamics more effectively. One year after this incident, I was summoned to the factory director’s office and I was offered a promotion to replace the technical director.
In many organizations, visibility matters more than volume and perception matters more than effort. Even more important is association which matters more than contribution. Two employees can produce the same amount of work while receiving completely different levels of influence and advancement.
Why?
Because organizations are human systems before they are merit systems.
People reward:
- familiarity,
- emotional comfort,
- political alignment,
- usefulness to their own interests.
Not merely output.
Hard work without positioning often turns people into invisible executors: highly useful, heavily loaded, and strategically ignored. Cogs in the machine.
This becomes even more true in the age of AI. As execution becomes cheaper and more abundant, your ability to shape perception and influence decisions becomes increasingly valuable.