“I’ll give you two separate marks for your work,” said many schoolteachers to all of us at some stage. “The first one will be for effort and the second will be for attainment; the one for how hard you work is more important than the one for how good the work is.” At this we would all think: ‘Yeah whatever’, or whichever phrase conveyed the requisite cynicism when we were at school. I was nearly 50 before it dawned on me what truth those teachers spoke.
The revelation came exactly five years ago, on the day my eldest daughter’s GCSE results came out. On the way to get them I felt unusually relaxed. I wasn’t sure why this was as I’m rarely relaxed about anything. If there’s 1% jeopardy in any given situation, I’ll generally give it my fiercest focus. She had put a lot of work in and plainly cared about how well she had done, so why wasn’t I on tenterhooks for her? It certainly wasn’t because I thought great grades were in the bag, because I know life sometimes isn’t fair.
Parked outside the school, I overheard a mother talking about her son’s A-level results. “He’s a lucky bastard,” she said. “He did no work, spent most of the time smoking dope and getting into trouble. And somehow he got four As.” To be fair to her, while she couldn’t completely disguise her pride, neither was she especially delighted. And quite right, too, because in my experience these are the types who can go on to struggle in life. We’ve all come across them; you may even be one yourself. They’re the kids who breeze through school, apparently without expending any significant time or effort on their studies, and yet always come through with flying colours. For added irritation they may well also be captains of sports teams, leads in school productions, prolific lovers and, naturally, nailed-on choices for head boy or girl.
Without any great degree of schadenfreude (honestly), I’ve noticed the problems that can ensue for them. I think it’s because what they take from the effortless excellence they have enjoyed in their schooldays is, inevitably, a pretty hardwired assumption that they can breeze through life just as easily. When this turns out not to be the case, it’s a nasty surprise they’re often not equipped to deal with. Winging it works for a while, but sooner or later they find themselves flying at lower and lower levels and perhaps even crashing completely.
Through work, I’ve been lucky enough to meet many people who are highly successful in all sorts of fields. Be it in sport, media, entertainment, business or politics, they have one thing in common: they all had to work incredibly hard for long periods of time. They got up early and went to bed late, often exhausted and not infrequently demoralised. They took orders from people they didn’t rate or like but just had to nod and carry on. They ground it out. School can help teach you these skills, but not so much if you happen to be one of the gifted lucky ones who never had cause to work particularly hard. It’s a hard habit to pick up – a new mindset entirely – if you’ve not had use for it in your formative years.
If I was in charge of hiring young people I swear I would go for someone who worked their backsides off for three C grades, over someone who never lifted a finger for their three A stars. Sadly though, until someone decides to put grades for effort in brackets next to the actual results, it’s going to be hard to find out who the grafters are.
So that, I realised, was why I wasn’t as nervous for my daughter’s GCSE results as I might have been: she had already demonstrated the key thing she would need to get on – a capacity for hard work. As it happened, she did really well. I suppose if she hadn’t done well, then the challenge would have been to dissuade her from concluding that hard work doesn’t pay after all. I may or may not have won that argument, but I would still have been pretty sure that she would do well in the end.
• Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist
