Hard Work Always Pays Off...

Welcome to Issue 009 of Decoded. This one wasn't planned - it wrote itself on Sunday afternoon at a street circuit in Markham. Grateful I get to tell you about it properly.

⚡ The main idea

I was at the Ontario Honda Dealers Indy at Markham this past weekend - the inaugural IndyCar race on the streets of my home province - and my good mate Marcus Ericsson won it.

Two days before the race, I sat down with him for a catch up. He signed the Decoding Wisdom guest book - we ask everyone the same question, what’s your message to the world. He wrote: “Hard work always pays off.” I didn’t think much of it at the time. Guests write plenty of good lines in that book. Then Sunday happened.

Marcus hadn’t won a race in 63 starts. Last year he’s called a disaster himself - no hedging, his words. When he sat across from me on the podcast back in February - Episode 54 - I noticed something different about him. Not louder, not more confident in the performative sense. Just calmer. He talked about his off-season like it had been a proper rebuild - working on his mind as much as his driving, deliberate about it in a way he hadn’t been before.

You don’t get to see that work from the outside. All anyone sees is the drought - 63 races without a win, a driver whose best days people had quietly assumed were behind him. Nobody sees the winter he put in to get back here. Then he wins, close enough to my hometown that I could drive up for a Thursday coffee and be back for the race Sunday, and the line he wrote in my guest book two days earlier stops being a nice quote and starts being exactly what happened in front of me.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. The work and the payoff are never on the same timeline. You only get shown one of them.

👁 On my radar

Three things catching my attention that connect to the same idea.

1. Rory McIlroy went eleven years between his fourth major and his fifth. Every near-miss at Augusta got picked apart publicly - the 2011 collapse, the ones that followed - while the actual work of staying good enough to keep contending happened away from any of that. When he finally completed the career Grand Slam at the 2025 Masters, his message afterward was almost word for word Marcus’s: keep working hard. Eleven years is a long time to keep believing a plan is still working.

2. Sara Blakely sold fax machines door to door for years before Spanx existed, then spent another year getting turned down by every hosiery manufacturer she approached before one finally said yes. The rejection wasn’t a chapter before the real story started - it was years of it, unglamorous and mostly invisible, which is exactly why people assume success like hers arrived quickly.

3. Katalin Karikó spent over three decades on mRNA research most of her field considered a dead end, demoted four times at the University of Pennsylvania and repeatedly turned down for funding along the way. In 2023 she won the Nobel Prize for that same research. Nobody was watching those thirty-five years. Everyone was watching the two after.

↗ The takeaway

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss when you only see the win. Every one of these stories looks, from a distance, like a straight line from talent to result. It never is. It’s years of a specific, unglamorous kind of work that nobody’s clapping for while it’s happening.

I won’t pretend hard work is a guarantee. Marcus could have put in the exact same winter and still not won on Sunday - timing, luck, ninety other variables were in play too. Plenty of people do the work and never get the moment. That’s real, and worth saying honestly rather than wrapping it in a neater bow than it deserves.

But doing the work is still the only version of the bet that has a chance of paying off. So pick the one thing you’ve been quietly building that nobody’s noticed yet, and put in one more honest session on it this week - not for the applause, because there won’t be any yet. Just because that’s the only part of this you actually control.

🎙 From the pod

This week’s pick is an easy one - Episode 54 with Marcus Ericsson, recorded back in February, months before any of this happened on track.

We talked about his 2022 Indy 500 win, what winning it actually changed and didn’t change, and what a properly bad season does to a driver’s head once the results stop backing up the belief. He was honest about how flat the year before had left him, and specific about what he’d changed going into this one - not vague “working harder,” but the actual mechanics of it. Watching that episode back now, knowing what happened in Markham, it plays completely differently. You can hear the rebuild before you see the result.

🎧 Watch the full episode here on YouTube

That’s Issue 009 of Decoded. Glad you’re here for it.

If this landed, forward it to one person who needs to hear it. That’s how this grows - one reader at a time.

See you next Tuesday.

Cheers, Sachin.