By Ray Langa
We tell young people that if they believe in themselves and work hard enough, they can do anything. We say it because we mean well.
I have said versions of it myself, but I no longer think it is true.
That does not mean I believe the game is fixed or that effort is pointless. I have spent a career watching hard work change lives, including my own. What I no longer believe is that hard work operates in a vacuum.
My first arena was sport. Long before business, boardrooms or advertising, I competed seriously enough to understand what it means to be measured, selected, overlooked and given another chance.
Sport taught me something I understood properly only later: talent can get you selected, but it does not always get you seen. Ability matters, but so does knowing who is watching, recognising which opportunities matter and being ready when your window of opportunity opens.
The same principle follows us into education, careers and business. Some people are born closer to opportunity than others. They grow up with good schools, financial security, useful networks and an understanding of how institutions work before they ever enter them.
Others have to discover those things for themselves, sometimes after the consequences of not knowing them have already begun to show.
None of this diminishes the hard work of someone who begins with those advantages. It does mean that effort can produce different returns depending on where you begin.
The field is not level. And, perhaps even more simply, the world is not fair.
In South Africa, the numbers make that difficult to ignore. We rightly celebrated the Class of 2025 achieving an 88% National Senior Certificate pass rate, the highest in our history. Yet about 1.2 million children entered Grade 1 in 2014, while the full-time Grade 12 class in 2025 contained around 778 000 learners.
Of those who reached matric, only 34% wrote Mathematics. The pass rate tells us how learners who reached matric and wrote the examination performed. It does not tell us how many of the children who began that journey made it to the finish line.
Go further back. The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study found that 81% of South African Grade 4 learners did not reach the lowest international reading benchmark. Then consider what waits on the other side of school. In the second quarter of 2026, South Africa’s official unemployment rate stood at 33.6%. Among young people aged 15 to 34, it was 47.4%.
Against that reality, telling a young South African that desire alone determines the life they can build becomes difficult to defend.
A young person can study, pass, apply, show up and work extraordinarily hard, and still find that effort is not enough to overcome the advantages somebody else began with.
If we tell somebody that hard work conquers every obstacle, the conclusion waiting for them is that perhaps they simply did not try hard enough.
My own life has taught me something different. Where you begin shapes what becomes possible, but it does not decide it. Even on an unequal field, there is still room to move.
You cannot believe your way out of a structure. But you can learn where its seams are.
Agency, to me, lies in understanding the field well enough to see the openings others walk past. It means learning which doors are only nominally closed, which rules go unwritten, and where the official path and the real one, part company. It means noticing the opportunity no one thought to point you towards and being ready to move the moment it appears.
When my life as a sportsman ended, the obvious route was to remain around sport. Instead, I walked into advertising. I had no obvious claim on the industry and no map for navigating it, but I brought discipline, curiosity and a willingness to contribute, in rooms where I was not necessarily expected.
What I discovered was that the door had never actually been locked. It had simply been communicated, implicitly and explicitly, as a door that was probably not meant for people like me.
Exclusion does not always require somebody at the entrance telling you that you cannot come in. Sometimes nobody tells you the entrance exists. The language, rituals, networks and confidence of those already inside can be enough to make you believe you do not belong.
Fifteen years later, I run the company. It would make a satisfyingly neat story if I attributed that outcome entirely to hard work, but I cannot.
Hard work mattered enormously. So did discipline and curiosity. But people opened doors for me. Timing mattered. Opportunity mattered. Luck played a part, and I had to be ready when those things arrived.
Eventually, you may become the person who knows how the room works. You can make the call, recommend somebody, hire somebody or give someone their first chance. Then you have to decide what happens to the person coming behind you.
You can explain rules that were never explained to you. You can point people towards opportunities they might never otherwise see.
And if you are in a position to influence institutions, you can start asking why success required quite so much luck in the first place.
Agency gets you through the door. Leadership changes who gets through after you.
If you escape an unfair structure and pull the ladder up behind you, you have not defeated it. You have joined it.
So, I am reluctant to tell a young person that they can become anything they want to be simply by believing hard enough. I cannot promise them that.
Where they start matters. Their education matters. Money matters. Networks matter. Timing and luck matter too. Recognising that does not diminish effort. It puts effort in its proper place.
You have more room than they told you and less than they promised.
The message I would rather give them is harder, but more useful: learn how the field works. Become excellent. Take opportunities when they appear and walk through doors you were never encouraged to see as yours.
And if one day you find yourself on the other side of one of those doors, remember how you got there. Hold it open, and if you gain enough influence, start making the door easier to find in the first place.
Because the measure of a successful life cannot only be how far you managed to travel from your own starting point. Some of it must surely lie in whether the person coming after you has a better place from which to begin.
Ray Langa is Group CEO, Leagas Delaney South Africa.
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