We Need to Kill Meritocracy
By: Bruno Gm
Tags: Startup, Corporate Culture, Business, Ideas, Psychology

We Need to Kill Meritocracy

Photo by yang miao on Unsplash

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.

Another commonplace way to define it is as ambition: the hunger for growth. Another self-serving devious metric, how can one judge the aspirations of the less fortunate? Can someone raised in sub-Saharan Africa be labeled as less ambitious? How do you measure it? In hindsight, it is easy to label Steve Jobs’ abuse to its employees as ambition, as someone who has hungry for success or passionate about his products. But how many ambitious people fall through the cracks? And more importantly, where do we stop when it comes to ambition? If I didn’t reach my dream due to a lack of merit, should I double-down my ambition? It seems that it is a concept that fuels our current number of white-collar jailed citizens. Ambition is essential, but moderate amounts should be the recommended medicine and do not define merit.

It must be intelligence then. We love to praise the intelligent people who “did it.” We see them in their shallow Ted Talks or Harvard commencement speeches and create the illusion of greatness. Intelligence is easy to use as a walking stick, as it seems like a God-given gift and unattainable to many. Yet, in our surroundings, we do not necessarily recognize intelligence. As another very devious concept, we fail to see the different layers of intelligence: ranging from emotional to logical. Failing to see the different shades of it around us, we fail to see the one in ourselves. The walking stick needs to go.

Intelligence is also not a gift and an immovable determining condition and can be crafted with time. I once had a co-worker who automated all pieces of his manual work. He used his knowledge of programming to transform his 8-hour day into a 1-hour one. He then went to spend the rest of his day networking and researching other topics. Instead of praise, his colleagues started to resent him slowly. Work needs to be suffering! Why does he get it easy? Their issues were at their grasp: all they needed to do was learn with intelligent automation. Yet, resentment took over. Work is not supposed to be comfortable and smart people who devise ingenious ways to be more effective and productive pay the price. Intelligence is a baseline condition to what we understand as merit. Fortunately, the majority of us have it or have the conditions to build it.