I was born in Brazil to a family that had little but believed in one thing absolutely: education was the door, and I was the one who could open it. The belief was given to me before I had done anything to deserve it, a bet placed on a person who did not yet exist

This is the first thing I want to say, and I want to say it clearly, without the false modesty that usually accompanies such admissions: almost nothing that made my life possible was earned.

I did not earn the scholarship that made Harvard possible, or the brilliant best friends who taught me, without knowing they were teaching, that I could ask for things without apologizing. I did not earn the well-known professors who saw something in my fumbling attempts at introductory economics and chose to invest time they didn’t have to give.

I worked, most definitely. God, I worked. I worked in the way that children of workers with an insatiable desire to succeed learn to work: early, often, past the point of diminishing returns, because rest was never presented as a category of experience available. I learned to measure my worth in hours spent, in sleep sacrificed, in the dull and not-quite-painful ache that comes from treating your body as an instrument to be used rather than a home.

But what the mythology of meritocracy gets wrong is not that effort matters, because it does, enormously, more than almost anything, but that effort is sufficient, that the distance between where you begin and where you arrive is a pure function of will and discipline and how hard you’re willing to kick against the current. The distance is shaped by other things entirely: who happens to see you and decides, for reasons they may not fully understand themselves, to believe in you; by which doors happen to be open on the day you arrive, and which were sealed shut long before you were born.

Bets placed on nothing

My aunt was the first person who lived adjacent to a world I didn’t know existed. She didn’t live in it herself, at least not fully, but she was close enough to know it was there, and close enough to believe I could reach it.

She is the one who insisted on English classes when my parents could not quite grasp why such a thing would be necessary, who encouraged theatre when I showed the faintest flicker of interest even though I was far too shy to speak in front of anyone and the probability that the money would be wasted was, by any reasonable measure, quite high. She made a bet on insufficient evidence.

Most of the advice we receive about success assumes a certain order of operations: you prove yourself first, accumulate evidence of your competence, and then, only then, do people begin to believe in you.

But I’ve come to think this is incorrect. The people who truly matter in our lives, the ones who change the entire trajectory of what is possible, believe in us before we have proven anything at all, and it is precisely that belief (irrational, unjustified, given freely and without guarantee of return) that becomes the scaffolding on which everything else is built.

You cannot earn faith like this, cannot work your way toward it through diligence or merit or any of the other virtues we are taught to cultivate. You can only recognize it when it appears, receive it with grace, and understand that it places upon you a responsibility.

But not a responsibility in the transactional sense, not a debt to be repaid to the person who gave it, but a debt to be passed forward, an obligation to one day believe in someone else before they have given you any reason to—

to place your own irrational bet on a person who does not yet exist.

Hard work is not the whole story

I failed my TOEFL exam before moving to the United States, and so I studied every single day for an entire year, vocabulary lists and grammar exercises and practice tests until Portuguese became harder than English.

I could not touch my toes before trying out for my high school’s dance team, so I stretched every night until the muscles stopped resisting and agreed to bend.

I haaaated writing: the blankness of the page, the inadequacy of my sentences, the gap between what I felt and what I could make language do, but I wrote something anyway, every single day, until words stopped feeling like eating buffalo chicken (I don’t like buffalo chicken).

This is the part of the essay where you might expect me to speak about the triumph of the human will over circumstance & how anyone can achieve anything if they simply want it badly enough and are willing to work for it.

Yet the truth is less inspirational.

1. Hard work is table stakes. At a certain level of competition, everyone works hard and sacrifices. What separates outcomes is rarely the effort itself but (1) whether you had someone who showed you which direction to point that effort and (2) whether you had the time/mental bandwidth to keep going when everything around you was falling apart.

2. Luck compounds in ways we rarely acknowledge. One opportunity makes you visible for the next. I worked hard to get into Harvard (and will not pretend otherwise), but what got me here was the fact that I had time to build an application while not working to support my family, I had access to the internet and sample essays and YouTube videos and free online courses, aaand I happened to be standing in the right place at the exact moment when the right person happened to look in my direction.

3. The gap between effort and outcome is always filled by other people. Think about this applied to your own life. The teacher who pushed you past your limits because she saw potential? The friend who casually mentioned an opportunity she thought you might be good for? Maybe the stranger who posted a video that rearranged something fundamental in the architecture of your thinking?

You are never self-made, no matter what the mythology tells you; you are only the beneficiary of a thousand small generosities, most of which you will never be able to fully trace back to their source.

What to do with that information

Acknowledging that merit is insufficient doesn’t mean effort is meaningless. It means understanding what you control and what you don’t.

1. Track your luck. Write down the moments that weren’t earned: who believed in you before you deserved it, which door opened because of timing rather than qualification, what you have access to that others don’t. This sounds weird, I know, but you can’t make good decisions with bad data about how you got here.

   

2. Become someone else’s lucky break. The only rational response to unearned advantage is to make sure you’re not the last person who gets it. Introduce people, share information that was shared with you, believe in someone before they’ve proven anything. This is how closed systems begin to open.

3. Work anyway. Knowing that hard work isn’t sufficient doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary. I think you just stop confusing the two? You work because the work matters, because it’s the only part you control, because even if it’s not enough on its own, it’s still required, but you work without the delusion that effort alone will save you.

4. Build optionality instead of just skills. I didn’t just learn marketing, right? I learned it well enough that it became a door to other rooms. I didn’t just try design but tried it publicly enough that people could see me trying and offer next steps. Competence gets you in the room, visible competence gets you invited to other rooms.

Is there such a thing as manufactured luck?

I believe there is, though perhaps manufactured is not quite the right word. Engineered, maybe? Or cultivated, the way you might cultivate a garden whose fruits you cannot entirely predict?

I receive messages now from people I never imagined would know my name, industry leaders who respond to cold emails I send late at night half-expecting silence, and every single day (I mean this literally, not as exaggeration) at least two offers arrive in my inbox: jobs, collaborations, projects, opportunities I did not know existed until they appeared.

Sharing this makes me uncomfortable, but I’ll share it anyway because it strengthens my argument for how the outcomes of my work did not happen by accident, but they also did not happen because I deserved them in some straightforward meritocratic sense.

They happened because I finally allowed work and ideas that had been rotting in Google Docs to see the light. I stopped waiting to be ready, sent the messages that felt presumptuous, published the writing that felt unfinished (like this one), joined conversations I wasn’t invited to.

You cannot force people to see you. That part remains outside your control, subject to all the randomness and structural inequality that shapes who gets attention and who does not. But you can make yourself easier to find, even if privately! You can stand where the light is most likely to fall and then increase the surface area available for luck to land on.

The conclusion (it’s time. I’m tired of writing.)

I owe my life to a series of improbable yeses: my aunt’s yes, my high school English teacher’s yes, the stranger on an admissions committee who read my application and said yes when a different mood or a different day might have produced a different outcome entirely.

The myth I am trying to release is the one where hard work is always rewarded in direct proportion to its intensity.

The real story is messier and less suited to the narratives we prefer: you work as hard as you possibly can, you hope that someone happens to see you, take the luck when it comes without pretending that you earned it, and when you finally get through the door that so many others are still waiting outside of, you hold it open for the next person who has been working just as hard as you but has not yet caught their break.

Everything else is comfortable fiction we use to avoid sitting with the discomfort of how many people just as talented and hardworking as us will never get the chances we got for reasons that have nothing to do with their their worth.

I do not know how to live with that knowledge except to try, every day, to be worthy of the luck I did not earn; to hold the door open and keep holding it open for as long as I am standing anywhere near it.

This is not a humble brag disguised as naivety. I genuinely did not know. The word existed somewhere in my vocabulary the way “actuary” did: a job some people had, probably involving spreadsheets, certainly not something I needed to think about. Words for other people’s lives.

I thought college was for reading books you’d never otherwise read and arguing about them with people who had highlighter ink on their fingers. I thought it was for wandering into a lecture on the history of salt because the room looked cozy.

I thought you graduated and then figured out the rest. This was, I now understand, an almost comedically romantic idea. Nobody told me it was wrong. That’s how it works. They don’t tell you.

Freshman fall, I took Hum10. If you haven’t heard of it, think six professors, 2,500 years of essential works, one book per week from Homer to García Márquez. It was the course I’d imagined when I imagined Harvard. It’s the kind of class where Stephen Greenblatt, who knows more about Shakespeare than Shakespeare’s own mistress did, stands at the front of a room and makes you feel like the entire history of human thought is a conversation you’ve just been invited to join.

We read the Odyssey. We read Sappho’s fragments. We read Woolf.

Plato’s Symposium changed something in me. Aristophanes’ speech, to be more specific. He talks about how humans were once whole creatures, round and complete, until the gods split us in two, and now we spend our lives searching for our other half, desperate to press ourselves back together, to feel whole again.

I remember reading that passage in Lamont, back when I was a Lamonster (the name freshmen call people who spend the night at Lamont?), the library almost empty, and feeling like someone had described a longing I didn’t know I had. Not for a person, exactly. For something. The ache of incompleteness dressed up as ambition, as restlessness, as the sense that I was always almost-but-not-quite where I was supposed to be.

I walked around campus after feeling like Plato had handed me a diagnosis for a condition I hadn’t realized I was living with.

That same week (actually, I don’t really know when. maybe it was a month later? a couple of months later? it doesn’t matter), a friend asked what I was recruiting for.

Recruiting. The word sat strange in my mouth. I wasn’t recruiting for anything. I was reading Virginia Woolf while getting ready to revamp The Harvard Shop’s marketing with Alice.

She looked at me the way you look at someone who has shown up to a black-tie event in pajamas. The thing about Harvard is that no one tells you the rules. You just start losing at a game you didn’t know you were playing.

I wandered. I took psychology to understand people, political theory to understand power, philosophy to understand myself. I read Ulysses over winter break (all of it, even the parts that made no sense, especially the parts that made no sense). I spent hours on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and came out the other side feeling dumb. I still don’t fully get it.

Meanwhile, other people were doing things. They had coffee chats. They had case prep partners. They had entire vocabularies I didn’t speak like deal flow value-add second rounds blah blah blah hockey-stick growth moonshots exits blah blah.

They dressed up for reasons I didn’t understand (Superday) until someone explained it was when you found out if you were wanted.

I was not wanted on Superday.

I didn’t even know I was supposed to want to be wanted.

At Harvard, success is not something you choose. It’s something you absorb.

Nobody sat me down and said, “Julia, you should want to work at McKinsey.” Nobody had to. Harvard doesn’t convince you. It just stands next to you until you start leaning. Information travels through air like pollen. By sophomore spring, I knew the names of firms I had never researched, understood hierarchies I had never studied, wanted things I couldn’t remember deciding to want.

That’s the trick. The wanting feels like yours. I caught ambition the way you catch an accent – slowly, then all at once, until your own voice sounds foreign.

Subscribe now

I don’t remember the exact moment something cracked, but something cracked, and it was around the time I wanted an answer the way the dying want morphine. Not for the joy of it, just to make the question stop.

It was junior year and I was sitting in a cafe (as Julia does) working on an Econometrics problem set. That class still hurts me a bit. I don’t like to remember. I was scrolling on Linkedin (that was waaaay before my Linkedin arc) and looking at people’s offers. Goldman, McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Deloitte.

I was jealous.

I wasn’t jealous of their jobs. I was jealous of their periods. I was still a comma, waiting to be told where I belonged in the sentence. For the first time, I understood that wandering was not neutral. It was a position and it was losing. Wandering is, indeed, only beautiful in retrospect. In the moment, it is just another word for unprepared.

I wish I could tell you I had some great epiphany right there. I wish I could tell you I rejected the whole system, walked out of that cafe with clarity and purpose and a renewed commitment to Dickinson’s slanted truths.

Not quite yet.

The thing no one tells you about elite institutions is that they come with opportunities but also gift you with a new set of desires, and those desires don’t announce themselves, saying, “Hello, I am a socially constructed want that you have absorbed through ambient pressure.” You just wake up wanting things you can’t trace back to any memory of your own.

The machine doesn’t break you. It just builds a smaller room around you until you forget there were other rooms.

The “aha moment” came later, over the summer:

I want to build things.

I want work that earns its own calluses. I want to make mistakes so spectacular they become funny in retrospect, and then I want to get back up and make different mistakes. I want to fail in colors no one has names for yet and then I want to try again until someday, maybe, I’ve built something big enough that turning down the safe job becomes the smartest decision I ever made.

I don’t know if that will happen.

I can’t know.

And that’s what I want to live for.

I think about Hum10 a lot.

Not because it taught me anything practical (it did not). No one has ever asked me to close-read Mrs. Dalloway in a job interview and, to my despair, no recruiter has ever leaned in and whispered, “But what did you think about Woolf’s use of time?”

But I often think about what it felt like to sit in that room, eighteen years old, watching a professor talk about a book he loved with the kind of reverence most people reserve for their gods, their mothers, their dead. I think about the way he held the paperback like it owed him nothing and had given him everything. I think about constantly feeling like the whole world was made of questions worth asking, and that asking them was enough. That asking them was the point.

That feeling didn’t survive Harvard intact. The machine is very good at what it does. It doesn’t kill your wonder. That would be too obvious. It just makes wonder feel like a luxury you can’t afford. It puts a price tag on awe and watches you do the math.

But it survived enough. At least, enough to remember & enough to know what I lost and enough to want it back.

Dickinson wrote: “I dwell in Possibility— / A fairer House than Prose.”

Precious instructions of hers. The safe path is prose: legible, it scans, everyone knows what it means. You take the job, climb the ladder, collect the accomplishments that look good in an alumni magazine. The safe path is paved.

That’s the problem! Someone else decided where it goes! Possibility is harder because it doesn’t resolve into neat sentences but asks you to live inside the question, to build a house with no doors and call it freedom.

I don’t consider myself a particularly brave individual, but I’m choosing possibility because the alternative feels like slow death. The kind where you wake up at 45 and realize you’ve been holding your breath for 20+ years. “It’s too late now.” Ughhh, I don’t even like thinking about it. That certainty was the room you climbed into and forgot it had no windows.

It’s freeing to admit what you want. Terrifying, too. But mostly freeing.

For years, I told myself stability was the same as happiness, prestige was the same as purpose. The safe path was safe because it led somewhere good. I mistook the frame for the painting. I polished the frame for years to hang it in rooms I didn’t even like.

The safe path doesn’t lead somewhere good. It just leads somewhere legible, somewhere you can explain at dinner parties, somewhere your family can describe without pausing.

I want the unmarked trail now. The freedom to explore the full depth of whatever this creative spirit turns out to be, even if I can’t describe it yet, even if it doesn’t fit on a résumé, even if it takes years to build and might not work at all.

I don’t have a plan. I have a direction and a willingness to be wrong.

Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse in a room of her own. They ask what I’m building. I tell them: a room. They ask what’s inside. I tell them: ask me in ten years, when the door exists.

I found a copy of Letters to a Young Poet hidden in my files last week. I wasn’t looking for it. I was looking for a PDF on India’s economic landscape because I had a paper due, but then I found this file misshelved in the wrong place. If it was physical copy, I imagine it would have a forest green cover. So just imagine I found a hardcover book with a forest green cover. And that I opened said book.

“You ask whether your verses are any good.”

That’s how Rilke starts the first letter. He’s writing to some kid — Franz Xaver Kappus, 19 — who sent him poems and wanted to know if he should be a writer.

[NO. THIS IS NOT AI. LET ME USE MY EM DASHES.]

Rilke says: don’t ask me. Don’t ask anyone. Don’t send your work to magazines. Don’t wait for validation.

“Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write?”

I read that line a few times and then I closed the file and checked my phone and I had 47 (I’m making up a number, it was actually more) unread messages scattered across Gmail, Linkedin, and Slack, and someone was asking if I wanted to help them with a project for the spring semester and I said yes immediately even though I didn’t want to because that’s what you do, right? You say yes. You prove you’re useful.

(I still haven’t opened the file again to finish that first letter)

Somebody somewhere once told me that my Linkedin posts are “too personal.” Somebody said I should “create more distance” between myself and the subject matter.

I nodded and said thank you and rewrote this one post to be from the perspective of a hypothetical Brazilian girl at a hypothetical American university and it was worse, obviously, emptier, but maybe somebody, somewhere, liked it better. Why do we try to please other people so much?!

Anyway, Rilke writes: “Don’t write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary.” But then tells you to “describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind.”

Which is it? I want to ask him. Do I write what’s easy or what’s real? Do I perform distance or drown in closeness? He’s been dead for almost 100 years so he doesn’t answer.

The thing about reading Rilke at 22 is that he’s telling this kid to be patient, to live in the questions, to not rush toward answers, and I’m sitting here with 28 tabs open (it’s a good day). Patience feels like a luxury I can’t afford.

“Live the questions now,” he says. “Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

I’m drinking my Winter Latte (small, from Blue Bottle, $(1 arm + 1 kidney)) and thinking about how everyone around me seems to have answers already. They know they’re going into consulting or med school or finance. They network with the confidence of people who believe their lives will unfold in predictable, manageable ways.

I confess I still have many questions.

Must I write? Must I market? Must I perform certainty when I feel none?

Just kidding. It’s also not like that. I’m being dramatic. I do feel some certainty.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but one thing I know:

What Rilke’s been saying this whole time across a hundred years and an ocean and whatever the distance is between a famous German poet and a 22-year-old Brazilian creative who can’t figure out if she wants to be a marketer or a tech person or a struggling artist is that nobody really knows what they’re doing.