During my days as a student at the Julliard School of Music, I experienced two epiphanies that changed my life. The first epiphany occurred in the first week following enrollment, when it occurred to me that all the students at Julliard was smarter than I was, and this meant that I needed to work harder than they did in order to achieve their level of success. The second epiphany occurred when I attempted to work harder than my classmates, for it was then I realized that in addition to being extremely smart, my classmates were extremely hard working students, who spent virtually every waking hour engaged in knowledge and skills improvement . Although I didn’t know it at the time, I came to realize in the years following my days at Julliard that “smartness” and “hard work” in our society goes hand-in-hand: The smartest Americans are usually the hardest working Americans. And this is true at all levels of achievement in every endeavor.
Pick the brightest coaches and managers in any college or professional sport and more than likely you’re looking at the hardest working coach/manager in the business: Mike Krzyzewski (Duke Basketball), Bill Belichick (New England Patriots), Mike McCarthy (Green Bay Packers), and Tony La Russa (St. Louis Cardinals) are examples. Pick the best athletes in any sport and more than likely you’re looking at the hardest working athletes. For example, Tom Brady, Payton Manning, Drew Breeze, and Aaron Rodgers are the best quarterbacks in the NFL; they are also the hardest working quarterbacks.
This relationship between “smartness” and “hard work” isn’t limited to sports. Bill Gates (Microsoft), the late Steve Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Howard Schultz (Starbucks) are some of the best examples of the enormous amount of smart and hard work working women and men in our business world.
This brings me back to student achievement in public schools because it is here in our society that the relationship between “smartness” and “hard work” is most often overlooked. In other words, the single most ignored fact concerning student achievement is the highest achievers in public schools are the “hardest working students,” who happens to be smart! And the lowest achievers in public schools are usually not hard working students. Instead they are students that are held unaccountable for their success, kept uneducated about the value of hard work, and are taught (like their parents) to attribute the success of others to genetics. They believe that others are successful because they were lucky to be born smart; they (and their parents) never take the time to observe the countless hours of hard work the so-called “smart students” spend acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary for optimum achievement.
It is time for politicians, school districts, school administrators, and teachers to begin aggressively teaching “the value of hard work” as an integral part of the school curriculum, because, currently the students who need to apply it the most are applying it the least. And no amount of school reform is going to make an inch of difference without strong effort from the students (and the parents), who are the lowest achievers!
By
James A. Porter
