Welcome to Work Tip Wednesday, where every Wednesday I get ready and talk about career, leadership and a piece of advice I've learned working for some of the world's biggest brands.
This week's question came from my community after I mentioned, in passing, that I was not a great student. Honestly, I was not strong in school. Math was hard. I could not follow economics. I had trouble paying attention in class and remembering information for the test.
But I never believed I was incapable. Deep down, I always felt I would be good at something. I just had not found the room where I could prove it yet. For me, that room turned out to be the workplace. Here are the three lessons that took me from struggling student to Chief Commercial Officer.
The Real Challenge
A lot of high performers come from backgrounds where the metrics of school did not flatter them. Slow on tests. Loud in class. Better at building things than memorizing them. The trap is letting that early label calcify into a belief about your ceiling at work.
Work runs on a completely different scoring system. The skills that get rewarded in a fluorescent-lit classroom are not the skills that move the needle in a boardroom. Once you internalize that, the door opens. The three shifts below are what made the biggest difference for me, and they are the same three I would tell my younger self if I could go back.
1. Hard work will take you very far
You do not have to be the smartest person in the room.
When I look at the people who have risen alongside me into senior leadership, almost none of them were the academic stars. What they had in common was something simpler. They were reliable. They showed up prepared. They consistently put in effort that compounded over time.
In school, effort is invisible until the test. At work, effort is visible every single day. The colleague who responds first, follows up cleanly, and walks into every meeting prepared is the colleague who gets the next opportunity. That is not a personality trait. That is a habit you can build starting Monday.
The compounding part is what surprises people. A small amount of extra effort, every week, for five years, looks nothing like the same effort applied for five months. Most careers are won by the people willing to be slightly more diligent than average for a long stretch.
2. Success leaves clues
Pay attention to the people in your organization who are doing well.
Watch how they communicate. Notice how they walk into a room. See how they build relationships, manage their managers, handle pushback, and solve problems other people walked around. You do not have to invent your own playbook from scratch. The playbook is already running in front of you, every day, in the senior people whose careers you would actually want.
When I was earlier in my career, I picked two people I admired and shadowed how they operated. Not their job. Their behavior. How they prepared for meetings. How they wrote their updates. How they responded when they got hard feedback. I borrowed what worked and adapted it to my voice.
Ask questions. Take notes. Borrow their energy. There is no prize for figuring it out alone, and there is a real cost to taking the long way when a shorter path is already visible.
3. Do not let one environment define your potential
This is the lesson I almost did not learn in time, and the one I am most grateful for.
School was not the room where I thrived. Work was. Sometimes your strengths show up later, or in a completely different setting. When I entered the workforce, I discovered that some of the qualities the classroom had not rewarded turned into real advantages. Curiosity. Soft skills. Relationship building. Communication. A willingness to take on the things no one else wanted to do.
If you are struggling in one environment right now, do not be too quick to label yourself. Try a different team. A different industry. A different scope. The label you are carrying might be one you put on yourself in a setting that was never the right test of who you are.
Bonus: anchor the lesson in a story
When I tell a younger team member about hard work compounding, I do not hand them a framework. I tell them about the year I volunteered to take the meeting notes nobody else wanted to take, and how that single habit put me in front of every senior leader at the company within twelve months. The notes were not the point. The visibility was.
This is the move I would teach anyone trying to mentor effectively. Stories travel through the layers of conversations you are not in. Slides do not. Whenever you want to pass a lesson to someone you are coaching, lead with the moment you actually lived.
The Bottom Line
Hard work compounds. Other people's success is your shortcut. The room you struggled in does not define the rooms you will walk into next. You are not where you started, and the point of a career is to keep proving that to yourself.
If you are feeling behind right now, the question is not whether you have what it takes. The question is which room is finally going to let you prove it.
