Both.
But in these lines I focus on the latter.
A lot more depends on us than we imagine. It is as if we were waiting for someone else to magically define for us, instead of us defining… or even better: us creating for that space we want to fill.
I recently visited Northwestern University in Chicago, house of Kellogg Business School, and the University of Chicago, home of the Booth School of Business. Such impressive places: the buildings, the infrastructure, one all along the lake, in Evanston — a beautiful town — , and the other one in the southern part of the city.
I couldn’t help but compare to our own ITBA in Argentina — Buenos Aires Institute of Techonology— another first-rate university, but less equipped and built.
Despite not knowing a lot of Chicagoan graduates but do knowing ITBA graduates of all kinds with graduate-studies experience in the USA, I tend to think there’s no real difference between capacities and skills of student from these two structurally very different places.
How can these unlike places graduate somehow equally good people?
Answer: because of the people, the students themselves. (And professors then).
In the end, the difference lies in the people, in oneself.
The catch being… we may be not so reliable.
One day, the sight is dark, no way out, the universe is decisively engaged against us.
But next day… the sun comes up, the sight is clearer, we realize we are more competent than we thought, and we put up the needed work.
What changed from one day to another? Nothing.
Or everything… because the way we frame facts, we connect dots, we see the story, either makes us engage or disengage. That makes the whole difference.
Where does that mentality come from?
Could one maintain it every day?
Could it be our default way of approaching things?
We simply cannot rely on something external to keep that thing turned on. One needs to train oneself to have the frame-setting capacity needed.
Maybe that can start by learning something from someone, but then one has to take it on from there.
Smart people understand that the key to success is the preparation for success, in which this capacity to rightfully address challenges has a big part.
Success won’t always come, but the more one prepares and the more one tries, the higher the chances.
A lot more depends on us than we imagine.