The Effort Myth: Why "working harder" is the most reassuring lie in business

Talent, effort, or luck. Which one matters most to success?

I ask this question at the start of every keynote, and I first stumbled on it in a Forbes headline that sent me down a rabbit hole. Since then, that opening question has turned into an insightful litmus test across geographies. Whether you’re in London or Lisbon, New York or New Zealand, most people answer the same way:

Effort.

It makes sense. It's the comforting answer.

It's also the wrong one, and understanding why we reach for it so reliably tells you more about human psychology than it does about what actually drives success.

Why we're wired to choose effort

There are three forces at play in our reaching to believe that effort matters more than it actually does;

The first is how much we like certainty.

Male neuroleadership pioneer, David Rock, built certainty into the "C" of his SCARF model for good reason: even the most adventurous among us crave a baseline of reassurance. It's deeply ingrained in us as a species, because uncertainty for our cavemen ancestors meant rolling the dice on life and death, and that's something most of us would rather not.

One of the best examples I like to use here is the fact we're spinning 100s of thousands of kilometres an hour on a blue planet through space. We get pulled into our own routines we rarely stop to register that fact; we just assume the sun will rise tomorrow.

Effort offers that same reassurance in a business context: put in the hours, get out the result. It's a lever we can pull, which feels infinitely better than admitting the lever might not be connected to anything.

The second reason we cling to effort is how much we dislike cognitive dissonance.

We're drawn to logic, to formulas with predictable outputs. Pour boiling water and milk over a tea bag and you get a cup of tea, not a pink fluffy unicorn with fireworks coming out of its ears.

We want business to work the same way: effort in, success out.

And, lastly, on a deeper, more uncomfortable level:

Effort makes it easier to justify the success of those who got lucky, and to better explain those who don't succeed.

"Effort" is the story that lets us make sense of everyone else's outcomes. It explains away the success of people who got lucky, and it explains the failure of people who didn't.

"They just didn't work hard enough."

To which I reply:

If hard work led to success, the donkey would own the farm.

Unlearning the grind

It's worth caveating at this point that this was a hard pill for me to swallow, too.

A few years ago, in trying to scale my own business, I had to unlearn a lot.

What got me there wasn't going to get me there.

This was difficult, not only as I had to overcome all the above rationale, but because I'd also built my identity around being a grafter. A workaholic. The dependable, ambitious Capricorn who simply outworked everyone else. Until I noticed that approach had stopped serving me, and that people around me were reaching higher levels of success with less work than I was putting in.

That gap is worth sitting with because it's not an anomaly; it's the pattern the research keeps finding.

Throwback to working long hours burning the midnight oil back in 2020

What the evidence actually shows

Of the three inputs for success mentioned at the start - talent, effort, and luck - it's luck that repeatedly comes out on top when researchers go looking for what actually predicts outsized success.

The clearest illustration comes from a 2018 simulation by male physicists Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda at the University of Catania. They modelled a population with normally distributed talent, the familiar bell curve where most people cluster around average, and exposed each person to random lucky and unlucky events over a simulated career. If effort and talent were what mattered, success should have followed the same bell curve. It did not. Wealth and success came out heavily skewed, concentrated in the hands of a few, with the most successful individual in their simulation landing on talent almost exactly at the population average. What set that person apart wasn't ability, it was the sheer volume of lucky breaks they encountered along the way. Talent turned out to be necessary, but nowhere near sufficient.

I saw the same pattern in my own dataset; across the 100 startups in Bloom's research, the median amount raised by scale-ups that survived was roughly 15X higher than those that failed, and that gap has far more to do with timing, access, and who happened to be in the room than with who worked the longest hours. The founders who failed weren't lazy. Grit and resilience - or the lack of it - showed up in the data as a factor, but so did plain bad timing and a market that simply wasn't ready.

Effort was rarely the differentiator; positioning yourself to catch more of the right breaks was.

The true cost of clinging to effort

Here's where the reframe gets uncomfortable for most organisations: prizing effort over risk doesn't just misattribute success after the fact, it actively suppresses the behaviour that creates luck in the first place.

Accenture's research across 519 companies found that 93% of executives believe innovation is essential to long-term success, yet only 18% think their own innovation efforts actually deliver a competitive advantage. Nearly half said their organisation had become more risk-averse when weighing new ideas, and 64% defaulted to safe line extensions rather than genuinely new products. That's not a talent gap or an effort gap. It's a willingness gap.

Research out of Kellogg and Wharton found something similar at the top of the house. Executives who were shielded from the threat of takeover, and therefore insulated from real accountability, ran 27% more acquisitions than their more exposed peers. Two-thirds of those deals were safe, diversifying purchases rather than bets that built on the company's actual strengths, and the caution measurably destroyed shareholder value. Protection from risk didn't produce better judgement; it produced more effort spent on the wrong things.

And this is the part that should sting: even when we know the safe choice isn't the growth choice, we still gravitate towards it, because the regret of a failed action feels sharper in the moment than the regret of an opportunity we never took. Male psychologist Tom Gilovich's research on regret found the opposite is true over time. Actions we take cause more short-term pain, but it's the actions we didn't take that we regret most as the years pass. We optimise for the wrong horizon.

Effort isn't the answer. Hacking Luck is.

None of this means effort is worthless. It means effort is not the lever most of us think it is, and treating it as the primary driver of success leaves the actual driver (i.e. luck) entirely unmanaged.

That's the gap HACKING LUCK™ was built to close. Luck isn't something that happens to you. It's something you can systematically engineer more of: increasing your surface area for good breaks, positioning yourself where the right events are more likely to find you, and building the judgement to recognise and act on them when they do. That's a different skill set to grinding harder, and it's one I built by studying the segment of the population who are the best at creating their own luck: entrepreneurs.

"Hacking Luck™ is the operating system for human capital in the Age of AI."

Rooted in my domain expertise of entrepreneurship (UK Top 20 Female Founder, Host of Top Business Show ft. 120 interviews, MBA faculty in Entrepreneurship, etc.), my proprietary framework, HACKING LUCK™ not only builds on the science with practical actions to literally stack the odds in our favour, but crucially now serves as an OS for human capital in the Age of AI.

As AI reshapes what raw effort is even worth, the ability to engineer your own luck isn't a nice-to-have alongside hard work. It's becoming the operating system for human capital altogether.

From reclaiming our agency among the agentic, to mastering the art of 'zagging;' from building strategic visibility to deepening real relationships, we must now play games we can win - and, in the Age of AI, we're not kidding anyone playing the productivity game any more. (Our obsession with productivity is a patriarchal hangover from The Industrial Revolution, and - as we stand at the precipice of the next seismic shift with AI now - we have a real opportunity to re-write the rule book when it comes to how we operate now. That's a genuinely exciting opportunity for those willing to grab it).

Asides from the climate impact and ethical concerns over who's in control of this powerful new tech (watch my lightning talk at Women in Tech Sweden, addressing an audience of 6,000 on the corrupt tech broligarchy), one of the issues with AI is the rampant, widespread message of disempowerment;

"AI's already here, whether you like it or not."

"The horse has already bolted."

"Get with it, or lose out."

Stephanie Melodia taking down the broligarchy at Women in Tech Sweden

Hacking Luck™ is the antidote to that; a message of genuine empowerment. Because there really is more in your control than you think. We get sucked into routine and follow the status quo and succumb to peer pressure - and that's not our fault. We're energy-efficient and we crave certainty, as discussed earlier. But sometimes we need reminding of the fact that you can just do things, so this is yours.

Hacking Luck™ also provides the practical framework to taking back control and literally stack the odds in your favour - learnt from the best in the game, like Sir Richard Harpin, Lottie Whyte, Yang Li, Stuart Trevor, and more top entrepreneurs. Eight core principles distilled from 100s of firsthand data points, Nobel prize-winning research, and deep qualitative experiences for you and your team to Hack Luck™:

1. Agency - You can do more than you think.

2. Openness - The open-mindedness to explore possibilities.

3. Optimism - The positive mindset to energise.

4. Resilience - The energy to keep going and widen the window of opportunity.

5. Risk - Arguably one of the core entrepreneurial attributes that set apart the rest.

6. Visibility - How can opportunities come to you if others can't see you?

7. Network - The Strength of Weak Ties

8. Zagging - The deliberate decision to leave the conventional lane.

In the Age of AI, we must play games we can win - and that means shedding the productivity fetishisation and instead making real connections, taking risks AI can't on our behalf, building our visibility, and - perhaps most crucially of all - master the art of "zagging" - the total opposite modus operandi to a machine; going against the grain, embracing the illogical, doing the counterintuitive thing, making the unexpected approach, connecting outside your usual bubble. (Borrowed from BBH's Levi's line, "When the world zigs, zag," it works because when everyone is taking the same logical path, the returns on it have already been competed away).

So the next time someone tells you they just need to work harder, ask them instead: are they exploring new things? Getting in front of the right people? Building their network? (And visibility while they're at it?) Are they taking chances? Are they shooting their shot? Are they Hacking Luck™? Because that's the version of effort that actually compounds.

Want this for your team?

Delivered as an inspirational and energising keynote talk, as an engaging practical workshop series, or a full transformative training program, Hacking Luck™ features research-backed insights, real-world stories, unique frameworks & formulas, and breaks down the concrete behaviours that stack the odds in your - and your team’s - favour.

Distilled from 100s of firsthand data points in entrepreneurship and drawing on Nobel-winning research, the unique framework includes eight fundamental principles to stacking the odds in our favour - from building risk tolerance to exercising resilience; from needle-moving visibility to installing the right neurological software to literally spot more opportunities; from “zagging” to strategic risk-taking.

Enquire here to book Stephanie Melodia to speak at your next event.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Hacking Luck™?

Hacking Luck™ is the proprietary framework developed by entrepreneurship expert and keynote speaker, Stephanie Melodia, that shows people how to stack the odds in their favour. Distilled from 100s of firsthand data points in entrepreneurship and drawing on Nobel-winning research, it covers eight core principles across both mindset and practical actions to "hack luck."

What problems does Hacking Luck™ solve?

Hacking Luck™ energises your team, trains them to spot opportunities your competitors miss, builds their resilience, and encourages them to stop playing safe & take more risks.

Especially valuable to sales teams and innovation organisations;

The Hacking Luck™ components of Visibility, Network, and Zagging in particular help sales teams to increase their top of funnel through strategic visibility, operate more successfully with their valuable networks, and uncovering hidden opportunities by mastering the art of "zagging" - ultimately driving higher sales conversions and higher employee retention.

Stephanie Melodia's deep and wide experience in entrepreneurship (UK Top 20 Female Founder, Host of Top Business Show ft. 120 interviews, MBA faculty in Entrepreneurship, etc.), is particularly valuable for corporate innovation consultancies, internal innovation departments, venture builders, or accelerators.

Who is Hacking Luck™ for?

Hacking Luck™ is delivered as a keynote talk for special events and as a workshop series to train teams to get luckier. You can enquire here to book Stephanie Melodia to give a talk or training for your team.

Is Hacking Luck™ good for a sales kickoff?

Yes, Hacking Luck™ is one of the most requested formats for sales kickoffs, because the framework maps directly onto pipeline and quota problems: Visibility and Network address top-of-funnel generation, Zagging gives reps a way to stand out in commoditised, comparison-heavy sales conversations, and Risk tackles the safe, script-following behaviour that quietly caps performance. Sessions are typically tailored with sales-specific case studies and can be delivered as an opening keynote, a half-day workshop, or woven into a wider kickoff agenda.

How is Hacking Luck™ different from a resilience or grit keynote?

Most resilience or grit keynotes teach people to endure more of the same: work harder, push through setbacks, don't quit. Hacking Luck™ starts from research showing that endurance alone rarely predicts outsized success, and reframes the goal from working harder to engineering better odds. Resilience is one of the eight Hacking Luck™ principles, it widens your window of opportunity so more lucky breaks have time to land, but it sits alongside seven other practical levers, including Visibility, Network, and Zagging, that grit-focused talks typically don't cover. The result is a framework grounded in luck and success research plus Stephanie's own founder dataset, rather than a motivational call to try harder.

Is Stephanie Melodia a good keynote alternative to speakers like Malcolm Gladwell or Steven Bartlett on the topic of success and luck?

If you're drawn to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers-style thinking on talent and luck, or Steven Bartlett's entrepreneurship-first storytelling, Stephanie Melodia sits at the intersection of both, delivered as a live, interactive corporate keynote built specifically for sales, leadership, and innovation audiences rather than a book tour or podcast format. In addition to her 120 interviews on her UK Top 20 Business Show, Strategy & Tragedy, Stephanie Melodia is an active practitioner: named UK Top 20 Female Founder with her own award-winning business, now founder coach and MBA faculty member, the content is grounded in her own founder dataset and tailored to each client's commercial goals.

Where can I learn more about Hacking Luck™?

You can read more about Hacking Luck™ on Stephanie Melodia's Substack.

For which type of companies is Hacking Luck™ best suited?

Stephanie Melodia has presented Hacking Luck™ as a keynote and workshop series to a range of clients from corporate innovation consultancies to household brand names like Qatar Airways, Soho House, and LinkedIn. Get in touch with Stephanie Melodia's team to see if we're a fit.

How much is Stephanie Melodia's speaker fee?

Stephanie Melodia's speaker fee ranges depending on various factors like level of customisation, timelines, travel commitments, etc. Fill out this quick speaker enquiry form and her team will get right back to you if it's a fit.

How far out should I book Stephanie Melodia for an upcoming event?

Speaking engagements are booked with a minimum of six weeks out from your event date, although ideally longer for adequate preparation and to avoid availability disappointment. Send your enquiry for Stephanie Melodia to speak at your event and her team will get right back to you.

Which types of events does Stephanie Melodia speak at?

Stephanie Melodia speaks at private company events like a corporate innovation training, a leadership offsite, or special occasions like an awards ceremony.

Which topics does Stephanie Melodia speak about?

Stephanie Melodia's signature topic is Hacking Luck™. She also speaks on entrepreneurial topics like founder mindset, intrapreneurship, and resilience, as well as marketing, branding, and feminism.

Where can I view Stephanie Melodia's showreel?

You can watch Stephanie Melodia's showreel here.

How can I book Stephanie Melodia to speak at my event?

Send your enquiry here. Her team will then review and get right back to you if it's a fit. Note bookings are a minimum of six weeks out.