The myth? It’s that all it takes to succeed is hard work.

I have seen lives destroyed by that myth, more than once.

For example: I’ve had a few conversations with a smart scientist who works for a hard-driving, work-all-the-time boss at a major university. This hard-driving boss is in the lab all the time. Nights. Weekends. Days.

No social life. Health problems. Unhappy employees.

In the past few years, this hard-driving boss has had trouble getting grant funding to keep her lab running.

Her response? Everyone must work harder.

Has that solved the problem with funding? No.

It’s only tanked morale further. It’s gotten the boss more stressed than ever. The boss has made increasingly poor decisions. Her health has degenerated. She’s having family problems.

She continues to submit grant proposals that get rejected, and her answer is to work harder and submit even more of them. (There’s a hard and fast limit to how many really good proposals anyone can write per year, so more proposals means lower quality – it doesn’t help the odds to submit more half-baked grant proposals)

She’s running around “working hard” as a substitute for “working smart.”