Early on in my career, one of my mentors told me that “Success in your job is 10% education, 20% hard work, and 70% luck. But without the education, your hard work will be useless, and without the education and the hard work you will not get lucky.”
This advice has stayed with me ever since and in my experience, it is largely correct. First of all, it emphasises the dominant influence of luck on your career. Whether you are an investor or a corporate leader, it is largely a matter of luck that we have achieved the positions we are in. And if you think you are not as far up the corporate ladder as you deserve to be, that too is a matter of (bad) luck. In most cases, it is not that people have discriminated against you or that your talents aren’t appreciated (emphasis on the word “most”, because there are instances of true discrimination). Instead, it is just a random decision here and another random decision there that accumulate over time and put you on your career trajectory. So, if you think you have been treated unfairly, take a deep breath and remember that life is unfair simply because it is so random. But it is equally random and unfair to everyone.
Unless that is if you are good-looking.
There is plenty of research that shows that attractive people are treated better in life and that they tend to get promoted more quickly in their jobs, earn higher wages, etc. I have written about that here, but you can also read a more comprehensive study on the US labour market here or international results here. Being born good-looking is obviously a matter of luck, but what bugs me about these results is that good-looking people seem to get ahead without the necessity of hard work and a good education.
But a new study has calmed me down at least a little bit. They didn’t look at the general relationship between looks and career success as the other studies I have mentioned. Instead, they looked at the extreme end of career success: Billionaire entrepreneurs and executives. Using the 2008 Forbes list of billionaires they asked a panel of 16 students (split appropriately across ethnicities and gender) to rate the attractiveness of these billionaires and then compared the rating to the educational attainment and wealth of the individuals. The study showed that at these extreme levels of wealth, there is no more link between looks and professional success or wealth. Billionaires are on average more attractive and better educated than the general population, but the study showed that once you compare them to successful people that are not billionaires, they are no better looking nor better educated than the rest.
So, looks might give you a bit of an advantage, but that advantage wears off after a while. And when it comes to being extremely successful, education, hard work, and looks don’t make much of a difference anymore. All that matters is luck. And that means that my mentor’s advice still holds true, in my view. Education and hard work are the foundation of success. But once you have taken care of that, luck will decide your career path.
Good looks = luck. It is genetic lotto. Probably with less than 0.2% deviation or some infinitesimal factor. I agree the advantage will surely wear off after a while, but the time it can save you in terms of access to opportunity is non-trivial. This is not even counting skin color or age.
I used to color my hair grey. Because I was once blatantly told in a meeting "you sound too wise for your age" (when I was Director of Strategy in some Fortune 500 co, I pushed for conversion of our traditional network to VoIP and before cloud computing was known, I pushed the agenda of closing our data centers and migrating us to AWS, whilst providing my AWS sales rep 18 feature points I wanted to get implemented in the cloud to allow total migration to work). My CTO pulled me aside and struck a deal with me - I can get my ideas implemented and get some bonus, but I have to give it to him privately so he can present it as his idea (cause he is a CxO and had lost most of his hair). So that was it until when he suddenly passed away and I left (you can call it anything you want, but sometimes you need to know "when to fold").
So yes, people with a lot of money do not necessarily look better, but they can mitigate perception or reduce "objectionable features", especially when steps to be done require money. What is funny is that advancements in plastic surgery + cosmetics actually scare people that are reliant on their good looks. Could you imagine? In the real modern world, a good personality (high EQ) is quite important!
It is up to you if high EQ falls into education and hard work, but it is definitely not luck. And I bet it is part of the formula. Just have no clue who has done research on it.
It is a mistaken assumption that good looking people look good by luck, rather than through diligence, hard work, and intelligence. Like everything it requires luck, but it also requires the discipline to eat well and exercise properly, the wisdom to refrain from insalubrious pursuits, grooming habits in accordance with good taste, a refined sartorial judgment, and indeed much sacrifice in of time and opportunity cost.