Why hard work alone isn't enough to get ahead

• Despite adages and advice that tell people from a young age hard work will get you everywhere, it really won’t. Hard work is a good start and early in your career, it can certainly help you establish yourself in a job. But it’s not enough to take you all the way to the top.
• At a certain point you look around and realize, wow, everyone works hard at this level. Expertise and hard work just become the expectation, and will not help you up the ladder.
• More often than not, those who rise are the ones willing to politick their way to the top, while you were too busy just working hard to notice you should be working the room.

Hard work is still very important, but simply waiting for someone to pick up on it is detrimental. 

The tiara effect is the tendency people that work hard have to hope that the right people notice and come along and place a tiara on their heads. But that usually doesn’t happen.

One of the things that can happen to people who do good work and nothing else is that they’re under the radar. If you don’t draw attention to yourself in other ways, it’s easy to fade into the background.