No harm, the lady is broadcasting mine and your latent emotion! But are we really? Kindly peruse and decide!
What is merit?
Merit, at its simplest, is the quality of deserving recognition, reward, or advancement because of one’s ability, effort, or achievement. It rests on the idea that outcomes should track contribution — that the person who runs fastest wins the race, the student who understands the material best earns the top grade, the officer who leads best is promoted. Merit is meant to be a measurable, demonstrable quality, not an inherited or assigned one.
How is merit achieved?
Merit is rarely one thing. It’s an alloy of:
• Innate ability — intellect, physical aptitude, temperament — much of which is simply given by genetics and early environment
• Effort and discipline — the deliberate practice, study, and repetition that turns raw ability into skill
• Opportunity and access — training, mentorship, resources, and exposure that let ability and effort translate into results
• Character — judgment, resilience, and integrity, especially in fields where the “test” isn’t a single exam but sustained performance under pressure.
A brilliant mind without effort stagnates; enormous effort without any underlying aptitude has a ceiling. Genuine merit is usually the product of both, refined by opportunity.
Can a person be meritorious in every field, including the Defence Forces?
No single person is likely to be meritorious across all fields — merit is domain-specific. A gifted surgeon isn’t automatically a gifted general, and a brilliant mathematician isn’t automatically a capable diplomat. Each field has its own composite of required traits: a scientist needs patience and rigor; a soldier needs courage, quick judgment, and the ability to inspire others under extreme stress; an artist needs sensitivity and originality. What can transfer across fields is a certain meta-ability — discipline, learning agility, self-awareness — which is why some people do reinvent themselves successfully in a second career. But total, universal meritoriousness is rare to the point of being almost theoretical.
The Defence Forces are actually one of the clearest cases of merit being tested rigorously, because the cost of poor judgment is measured in lives. Physical fitness, tactical intelligence, decisiveness, and the ability to command loyalty under fire are all merit criteria that are hard to fake for long — the battlefield or the exercise ground exposes pretence quickly.
Does luck and favoritism play a role?
Yes — undeniably, and this is where the “unbiased” part of this essay matters most. Pure meritocracy is an ideal, not a description of reality. Luck plays a part in:
• Being born into circumstances with access to good education, nutrition, and mentorship
• Being in the right place when an opportunity opens
• Timing — an economic boom, a war, a technological shift that favors one’s particular skills
Favoritism and personal liking also intrude, in every field, including ones that claim to be purely merit-based. A commanding officer, a professor, a hiring manager — all are human, and human judgment of “merit” is filtered through bias, familiarity, and sometimes nepotism. This doesn’t mean merit is a fiction; it means real-world systems are an imperfect approximation of the ideal, and honest institutions constantly have to build checks (transparent testing, peer review, objective metrics) to reduce the influence of luck and favor.
Does meritoriousness last after death?
In a meaningful sense, yes — but it transforms. A person’s living merit (their capacity to perform) ends with them, but their legacy of merit — the work, the institutions they built, the ideas they left behind, the precedent they set — can outlast them by centuries. Isaac Newton’s mathematical merit didn’t stop mattering when he died; it became the foundation others built on. In this sense, merit converts from a personal, present-tense quality into a historical, referential one: we no longer say Newton is meritorious, but that he was, and that his work remains valuable.
Examples: success and failure
Succeeded despite obstacles:
• Abraham Lincoln — largely self-taught, failed in business and lost several elections before becoming one of history’s most consequential leaders. Merit built slowly through failure and persistence.
• A.P.J. Abdul Kalam — from a modest background in Rameswaram, India, rose through sheer scientific merit and discipline to lead India’s missile and space programs and later became President.
• Serena Williams — extraordinary natural athleticism combined with relentless, well-documented training discipline, sustained at the top of a brutally competitive field for two decades.
Merit that failed to convert into recognition, or was undone:
• Many scientists and inventors — Nikola Tesla is the most cited example — possessed enormous technical merit but were outmaneuvered commercially and politically by rivals with more capital, connections, or ruthlessness (notably Edison). Merit alone didn’t guarantee reward.
• Military history offers cases of highly capable officers passed over for promotion in favor of better-connected but less competent peers — a recurring complaint in armies throughout history, illustrating how favoritism can suppress even demonstrated merit.
• Conversely, some leaders and executives have risen on charisma, timing, or family connection, and their limitations were later exposed when circumstances demanded genuine competence — a caution against mistaking position for merit.
Is it all hard work?
No. Hard work is necessary but not sufficient. It’s the multiplier applied to whatever raw ability, opportunity, and timing a person has — but it cannot manufacture opportunity out of nothing, nor can it substitute entirely for aptitude in fields with a strong ability component (elite sport, certain sciences). What hard work reliably can do is maximize whatever ceiling a person’s ability and circumstances allow, and it’s the one variable most fully within an individual’s control — which is precisely why it’s worth emphasizing, even though it isn’t the whole story.
Final recommendation
Merit should be understood as real but conditional — a genuine quality of ability and effort that exists, but one whose recognition and reward depend heavily on the fairness of the surrounding system. The honest approach is twofold:
1. For individuals — cultivate merit deliberately (skill, discipline, character) while recognizing that outcomes aren’t fully in your control; resilience in the face of unfair setbacks is itself a form of merit.
2. For institutions (armed forces, corporations, academia, government) — actively design processes that minimize the influence of luck and favoritism: transparent, criteria-based evaluation, blind assessments where feasible, and accountability for those who make selection decisions.
Merit is worth striving for and worth building systems around — but a wise society and a wise individual both hold it with humility, aware that talent unrecognized is not talent absent, and reward received is not always reward earned.
He died a pauper! Today others owning his paintings are millionaires!
