In order to be successful, ambitious people need to differentiate their actual abilities from external perceptions of those abilities. The hard work you put in

In order to be successful, ambitious people need to differentiate their actual abilities from external perceptions of those abilities. The hard work you put in maximizes your individual potential, but it doesn't guarantee that your abilities reach any particular bar. That bar is determined externally, and often very subjectively because outcomes often depend on a confluence of factors well beyond one individuals performance. In large scale group environments, like the corporate world, it's even worse because your promotability may depend primarily on the storytelling ability of your boss with tenuous connection to your actual contributions. Many come to this conclusion and focus primarily on optics. This can work to a point, but it can also lead one to lose the plot on ground reality. At this point you are vulnerable to any higher up with a clue coming in, and the higher you go the bigger risk this is because senior management make their bones sniffing out bullshit even when they might not personally have all the details. For that reason I think it's very important to develop hard skills from the ground up, and not focusing primarily on optics from a young age when you don't yet have a deep understanding of how things work. It's much easier to sell quality work than to try paper over a gap in fundamentals.