Loners Can Win at School. They Can’t in the Real World.

Imagine if your high school diploma listed not just your name in big italic font but also the names of the specific classmates you allied with to achieve academic success.

Unfortunately, it’s a far-out scenario, because we have an education system that rewards individualistic achievement and teacher-pleasing, not teambuilding and broad collaboration—essential skills in almost every professional field.

In school, there’s only one relationship that matters: the one between you and the all-mighty teacher.

Accordingly, it pays to be a teacher’s pet. Raise your hand constantly in class. Ask for extra work. Tell the other students to quiet down when the teacher enters the classroom. These things might cause classmates to sneer behind your back, but they don’t decide whether you get an A+. You might have no one to sit with at lunch, but you’ll be laughing all the way to the Valedictorian seat at graduation.

In the real world, however, if your officemates sneer at you behind your back, you’ll be falling all the way to the bottom of the company org chart. At work, you only get ahead by completing projects that require more than one person; the most important projects are always group efforts. Teamwork rules. You produce impressive accomplishments by collaborating with others, by forming alliances, by mastering the politics of the office.

In Ender’s Game (one of my favorite books growing up), there’s a bracing example of the military commanders testing Ender’s ability to be a leader. When Ender arrives at Battle School, the head commander praises him relentlessly in front of his peers. By exalting Ender as a true genius out in the open, the commander intentionally makes Ender’s ultra-competitive peers resent the special attention, thereby making it more difficult for Ender to form alliances. The commanders test Ender in a way that school never does: Can he negotiate rivalries and partner with his peers to build a team and accomplish something great?

Now, while it’s true that at work you usually have a single manager who determines your bonus or promotion, that manager’s perception of you is shaped by many sources.

This is not the case at school; there’s little opportunity for a fellow student to sabotage your reputation with your teacher. Did you ever sit around with your teacher in high school and BS about how your classmates are doing academically?

At work, though, this happens all the time. Those you work with whisper quietly to your boss.

Boss: “By the way, how’s it going on that project for the big client?”

Your colleague: “Oh it’s going fine. Yeah, you know, [Your Name]’s working hard, though I’m not sure he’s really a natural at this kind of work. The client has told me it can be hard to work with him at times. But it’s not a big deal, and overall, things are going well, thanks for asking.”

When I meet with really successful professionals, they frequently reflect on this disconnect: in school they thought it was an individual game, in life they realize it’s a team game, and team games require skills they never developed in school.

For example, I had dinner the other week with an accomplished doctor in his 60’s. He told me that in the first half of his career he thought what mattered for standing out in his field was possessing superior knowledge. If he memorized more than the next guy, he thought, he’d get ahead. Today, he realizes what matters is his ability to persuade others—to convince other researchers to partner with him projects, to convince hospitals to adopt his ideas, to convince students in residency to follow his leadership, etc.

And it turns out, memorizing organic chemistry formulas was a whole lot easier than learning to read a room, interpreting human motivations, and building teams who will follow you.

When reflecting on how the education system does or does not prepare students, we should pay special attention not just to areas where school under-prepares students for the real world (more statistics! more engineering!), but where school actively misprepares. Where an entire framework of "how to be successful" has to be unlearned and replaced by something else. These are the most consequential breakage points in formal schooling.