“I’ve never really seen being pretty or beautiful as some kind of power… I’m extremely hardworking and driven, and I feel like that’s the reason why I got to where I am — through my hard work and my drive…”
Dua Lipa, in a 2021 interview with Rolling Stones magazine
Is beauty a magic potion for success?
The danceability and the catchy motifs of her songs, such as “Don’t Start Now” and “New Rules”, have made Dua Lipa is a superstar across Europe and North America, and therefore by default — around the world. Dua Lipa success is evident, and enviable — she is one of the most listened-to female artists on Spotify and was nominated for six Grammys.
However, lesser-known about Dua Lipa is her rather complicated family circumstances. She is the daughter of two Albanian refugees from the Yugoslav Wars. By moving to London, Dua’s parents forfeited their right to work as white-collars or the right to lead a comfortable life. They had to, according to Dua Lipa, “hold multiple jobs while attending schools at night” — a quintessential immigrant story. As a result of this, Dua Lipa moved around until she finally decided to pursue a career at a small age of 15 — all by herself in the competitive music industry of London. She worked hard and did anything to get her name out there such as writing songs and uploading the finished works to SoundCloud. While pursuing stardom, she was also juggling three jobs at a time: serving food at a Mexican restaurant, hosting a nightclub, modelling for the online shopping platform ASOS.
This is probably why Dua Lipa was rendered inarticulate when she was asked, in an interview with Alex Morris from the Rolling Stones Magazine, if her beauty had ever exerted a certain kind of magical power in the rise to fame. In fact, as Dua would later reveal, she was offended. Bothered by this question and its insinuation, she got hold of Alex Morris post-interview. While forbearing herself from sounding rude, Dua Lipa made her stance utterly clear: “Nothing except my hard work and drive helped me get where I am right now.” This is the quote you read at the beginning of this blog.
Dua Lipa is wrong — Beauty matters and this is why.
What makes someone successful?
There is no shortage of attempts to answer this question. If you google “how to become successful”, about 1 billion results would show up in less than 0,52 seconds. A profusion of efforts has been dedicated to decoding success by the likes of academics, journalists, entrepreneurs… The results of their effort are noticeable — the internet has become flush with articles looking as if they were made from the same mould — “7 steps to become a successful entrepreneur”, “10 tips to achieve anything in life”, “13 things to give up if you want to be successful” …
It is also an important question for society as a whole — depending on what you think is accountable for people’s accomplishment, your opinion on social welfare differs (Bowles and Gintis, 2002). People who find welfare societies disdainful tend to be those who contend that material prosperity arises out of hard work and grit. On the other hand, those who are proponents of establishing a comprehensive social safety net for the poor are generally more likely to discount the role of individual effort in material advancement. Rather, they stress the importance of circumstances, privilege and luck — which they think are the permanent elements of all success stories.
Your answer to this eternally perplexing question depends also on the cultural context. Growing up in China, a Confucian society that puts an emphasis on personal accountability, discipline and will power, I have always believed it as an axiomatic truth that as long as you put in the work, even mountains will move for you.
Yes, given perseverance and will power, mountains will be moved. This is not a hyperbolic metaphor, but an important moral lesson told to Chinese children through an all-time favourite fable from Chinese mythology — a story called “The Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains”. The tale tells the story of a ninety-year-old peasant who decided to dig a tunnel through an obstructive mountain outside his farm. The only tools at his disposal were hoes and baskets. Naturally, his neighbours began to question his sanity and pointed to the impracticality of the mission. In response to the doubters, the foolish old man simply replied with more confidence and determination:
“While I may not finish this task in my lifetime, I still have my children, my grandchildren, my grand-grandchildren, ad infinitum… Finally, one of my offsprings will remove this horrendous mountain”.
This story has received the stamps of approval from well-respected Chinese scholars and even Chairman Mao. The legend appeared in a Taoist text of the 4th century BC. Then it was retold by a Confucian scholar in the 1st century BC. Finally, it became embedded in the psyche of the modern Chinese when the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, retold this tale in a famous speech in 1945. Being a charismatic guerrilla military leader who always had a knack for crafting memorable speeches, Chairman Mao gave the old tale a new life form. The two big mountains that placed a weight on all Chinese people, Mao proclaimed, are imperialism from Japan and feudalism from the past. Through determination and will power, Chinese people will work unceasingly until these barriers are eradicated.
Throughout the history of Chinese civilisation, a recurrent theme is an assertion that perseverance could influence nature and even the Heaven (a collective term used by the Chinese to describe all supernatural forces, such as deities). However, almost on the opposite side of the globe from China, a different paradigm seems more popular on the land next to the Aegean Sea.
Ancient Greek mythology is a collection of reminders that human endeavours are futile. When Sisyphus was caught red-handed for being deceitful, he was punished by being forced to roll a heavy boulder up a hill. Whenever the boulder was near the top of the hill, it would roll back down, thus he had to repeat this action for eternity.
Gods are capricious and humans are impotent. Sisyphus was not alone — many others have suffered the same fatalism. Kronos, the father of Zeus, was imprisoned by his own son in the great abyss. He had to count the time itself — one second at a time until the end of the universe. Kronos, though hard-working, should never be considered successful. Similarly, mortal Arachne, who also happened to be a world-class master in making the most beautiful embroidery and clothing, suffered the same fate. In a weaving contest with Athena, the goddess of wisdom and crafts, she fared pretty well. Possessing no heavenly power, Arachne’s weaving contained no flaws. Is this not the very epitome of human perseverance and craftsmanship? But what good does that do? In the end, Athena simply became enraged and beat the crap out of the girl. Arachne hanged herself.
However, although underpinned by the Greek philosophy, western philosophy evolved beyond Greece to fit better with the evolving economic, historical and social contexts. This is why we have phrases such as “The Protestant work ethic”. For the protestants, to work diligently had becomes a spiritual affair. Indolence, whether it is a result of nihilism or simply due to one’s laziness, is frowned upon. But above all, it is a sign of being abandoned by God. Coincidentally, this belief system worked extremely well with capitalism. Founded on the principles of self-interest as well as efficiency gains, capitalism bridged the link between success and hard work. Because everyone worked for themselves, and those who have achieved the maximum efficiency will win — not by the decree of supernatural force but by the power of the invisible hand, i.e. the market forces — then it must be true that those who are prosperous have worked hard! It gave the rich the moral justification for their mounting wealth. It also gave the government and the aristocrats a political justification to leave the poor in their slums.
Is hard work a magic potion for success?
The western and eastern philosophies converged on the frontier of success theories. Hard work pays off — whenever and wherever.
If you read the biography of the oil magnate, John D. Rockefeller, who also happened to be the richest person in the history of America, you will find no shortage of words such as “Protestant work ethic”, “perseverance”, “hard work”, “drive”, “will power”… The ideation of going from rags to riches was coined a wonderful name — the American dream. In this fervent dream, people reap what they sow. In the 1970s and 1980s, at the peak of globalisation and neoliberal capitalism, both leaders from the western world — the U.S. president Ronald Reagan and the U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher — cut back spending on public education, social security, public health care and public pensions: all in the belief that those who are suffering the brunt of poverty are not hard-working enough.
But this is non-sense.
Sure, those who are successful worked hard. But that does not mean that those who worked hard will be successful. Hard work is a necessary condition for success, but it is not a sufficient condition. People who have flourished have also been blessed by circumstances outside their control, such as luck, environment, ethnicity, culture and family connections. Numerous books have been written on the matter to illustrate that hard toiling is merely one of the many factors it takes to be successful (for instance, see Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers). Therefore I will not go through the argument, and only wish to point out a few arbitrary things, amongst many, that separate the outliers from the ordinary Joes.
Your birth matters
Let us conduct a thought experiment. Take 75 richest people in human history and then calculate their net worth in today’s U.S. dollars. Find out only four arbitrary information for each person: where they were born, when they were born, their gender and ethnicity. Now enumerate them in a list and observe the patterns.
Suppose, for now, that success is something of one’s own making — in other words, to be economically prosperous depends on the inner qualities of someone — then logically we conclude that anything outside of one’s control should not contribute to one’s success. Right? If this proposition is correct, then statistically, we would observe no significant correlation between the number of times someone appears on our list and his/her gender, race, birth year and birthplace. Right?
The result might come as a surprise to some but not to others. In this 75-person list, the most frequent occurrence belongs to a very specific cohort of people: these are the men of European descent who were born in the U.S. or Europe around 19th century (Gladwell, 2008). Why?
Why men? The recorded human civilisation was dominated, arguably still dominated, by patriarchal systems. Women suffrage, which is the right for women to vote in a democratic election, did not arrive in most places until the 20th century — let alone having the opportunity to make a living in their own right.
Why European? Europe is the place of birth for a functional capitalist system. This spurred a series of technological innovations which provided the continent with superior military strengths. This ushered in an era of imperialism. Imperialism and colonialism ensured that European businessmen had unlimited access to cheap labour, abundant resources and above all, an unfair share of negotiating power over their trading partners who are consisted of the colonies. This lasted for approximately three centuries and did not cease until the 1950s. So clearly, being a European really helped with getting rich. Racial inequality in wealth and income persists to this day.
Why 19th century? This is quite intuitive if you think about it. In the 1860s and 1870s, the American and European economies went through the most transformations. Capitalism, as we know today, was solidified during this period — railways were built, stock trading became common, industrial complexes were built to replace the serene countryside… this is truly an era of money-grabbing madness — conditional on you being a male of European descent who live in the U.S. or Europe — so much madness that it was the time when Karl Marx predicted that the capitalist frenzy will undo capitalism itself in his revolutionary work Das Kapital. Compare to now, businesses from the 19th century were not constrained by labour laws, anti-trust regulations or social responsibilities. Sure, it was also the time when slums flourished, when children as young as eleven worked with heavy machines, and when labours were paid wages too low for sustaining a comfortable living — nevertheless, it was truly a golden age for businesses.
This is why we have:
- John D Rockefeller (Born in 1839 in the U.S., male, French descent)
- J.P. Morgan (Born in 1837 in the U.S., male, English descent)
- Henry Ford (Born in 1863 in the U.S., male, Irish descent)
- Thomas Edison (Born in 1847 in the U.S., male, Dutch descent)
- Cecil Rhodes (Born in 1853 in the U.K., male, British descent)
And the list goes on. You get the point.
But what if you are a Vietnamese female born the 1970s whose dream is to dominate the financial world? A black girl born in Transvaal province under the Apartheid South Africa whose dream is to become a scientist? A South Korean girl born in the 1950s whose dream is to become a musician?
Bad luck.
Your family matters
Many European men were born in the 19th century — yet some of them stood on the apex of the society while others toiled away under them. Surely, this means hard work still matters.
Or does it?
Academic research shows, however, that even for people who are similar in most observable traits, the level of success that someone achieves is still largely dependent and influenced by the achievement of his/her parents. Therefore, being born into a well-off family gives the offsprings a better chance of succeeding. This revelation came from a fascinating area of economics research — the study of intergenerational transmission of economic status. Researchers would use survey data to disentangle the effect that parents have on their children in certain socio-economic measures, such as educational attainment, income, wealth and occupation. According to numerous studies conducted in the last 30 years across a large number of countries, ranging from the U.S. to China, almost all have found a statistically significant correlation between parental achievement and the success of the younger generations.
This is not surprising. If we look at the last ten U.S. presidents, we would have found that over half of them come from a family that contains prominent figures in politics, law, or finance:
- Joe Biden (incumbent)
The family of Joe Biden is an American family, prominent in law, education, activism and politics.
- Donald Trump
Fred Trump, his father, was a prominent American real estate developer in New York City.
- George W. Bush
His father George H. W. Bush was the 41st U.S. president
- George H. W. Bush
His father Prescott Sheldon Bush was an American banker and politician. He was a Wall Street executive investment banker and represented Connecticut in the United States Senate from 1952 to 1963.
- Jimmy Carter
His father, James Earl Carter Sr, was an American politician, businessman, and farmer.
- Gerald Ford
Ford’s father was the son of a prominent banker — although Gerald Ford was separated from his father after he was born. Ford’s stepfather was an American businessman, the creator of Ford Industries, and a Republican politician.
Your look matters, too
Finally, we return to Dua Lipa. After being confronted with the question of whether her beauty assisted her rise to stardom, Dua Lipa disputed — “it was my hard work and my drive”.
It is without a doubt that Dua Lipa is extremely hard-working, as I have shown before. But hard work is only a necessary condition for success. Being diligent does not take away some of the advantages that Dua Lipa was born with.
Dua’s father was a lead singer and guitarist of the Kosovan rock band who even published an album. It was under his influence that she became interested in music and exhibited an early talent for music. Family matters.
A turning moment in her life was when she was given a role as a “singer” in a television advertisement for The X Factor in 2013. After this role, she was put into contact with a music producer who worked with One Direction and Ed Sheeran. Following that, she attracted the attention of a Warner Bros. manager, who then connected her with several prominent producers, and it was with those people that Dua Lipa released her first song.
For sure, this series of events must be imbued with hard work and drive — she worked really hard to make sure she stood out. But it is also true that she could never have gotten the 2013 X Factor role if she was not with a big modelling agency — Next Management Modelling agency, and she could not have been with this prominent modelling agency if she was an average looking girl.
In fact, economists have long been fascinated by the discrimination of homely-looking people for the past three decades. Even outside of the entertainment industry, looks matter. Hamermesh and Biddle (1994) found that workers of above-average beauty derive 10–15% more earning than workers of below-average beauty.
Attractive people are paid more because their appearances are usually part of the product that the company sells (e.g. if you are a model or a waiter), and employers tend to overestimate beautiful people’s productivity due to halo bias — the tendency for positive impressions of a person in one area to positively influence one’s opinion or feelings in other areas.
But sometimes, physical attractiveness stereotypes can become a self-fulfilling prophecy (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986). When people perceive attractive people to be more sociable, these attractive people will internalise the perception and ascribe their sociability to themselves. Gradually, they will develop a more sociable personality. This enhances their labour market outcome. For this reason, we find attractive people to be more confident, have better negotiation skills and are better connected (Mobius and Rosenblat, 2006).
Now imagine being an attractive person in the entertainment industry — it is a known fact that consumers, i.e., you and me, are more likely to accept people with above-average physical appearance. Furthermore, it is an industry where social capital, i.e. who you know, is your most important asset — therefore the extra confidence and sociability of the attractive artists must have helped them a lot. However much beauty premium we see in the outside world, it is magnified in the entertainment industry.
Should we stop trying?
For the majority of this article, I have argued that success is largely something outside of our control. Does that mean we should stop trying and let destiny take its course?
I don’t think that is the lesson of the story. I believe an optimistic lesson could be derived from all this.
Countless people have been working diligently but have not yet enjoyed the fruit of success. What they easily do is to blame themselves for not having worked hard enough. However, it is essential to realise that sometimes the problem is not how much effort you put in — but it is because of something outside of your control. So pause for a moment, and see the bigger picture. Think of life as a game. Currently, in the game that you are not winning, the rules of the game are rigged against you. So find another chapter of the same game, or pick a different game, where you enjoy an advantage. There is an unlimited number of games and you will find one where you will become an top winner.
For those who happened to have found the right “game” and are blossoming — realise that you are, above all, lucky. The winners should use his/her power to change the system so that in the future, the game is fairer for everyone else.
Lastly, for the fatalists who blame their failure on a lack of luck or privilege — know that even for people who are lucky, who possess the privileges, they still had to dedicate effort and hard work if they wanted to accomplish anything. As the saying goes — “You might not be successful even if you tried. But if you never tried, you will never be successful”.
Although this blog is premised on a Dua Lipa statement on beauty premium, it is not about beauty premium, nor is it about Dua Lipa. It is about recognising that everyone has the privilege and every success is the result of a complicated journey, fraught with surprises, tears, sweat and mishaps. Is that unfair? Absolutely. But in a way, it is also liberating to know this so that we don’t give up trying completely.
I will end off this article with a YouTube video which has provided me with tremendous inspiration on this topic. Thanks for reading.
