Merit – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

When someone decides to pay the full price

As of today, you can drive on the new Xochi highway in Mazatenango, Guatemala. This road, just opened on my country’s South Coast, didn’t come about by decree or because some government decided it should. As it happens, this same week saw the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Taking public a company that has pushed the limits of what’s possible in space didn’t happen by decree either. Both are the visible result of years of accumulated decisions, capital put at risk, applied engineering and persistence in the face of the unknown.

Merit is no abstract concept, and it’s no consolation prize for showing up. It’s the distance between intention and a concrete result, real value delivered, when someone decides to bear the full cost of trying. Anyone who puts time, money and reputation into building something that didn’t exist before knows that every kilometer of asphalt and every failed prototype stands for hours of unseen calculation, negotiation and correction. No shortcut protects the quality of what gets built. I hope we never forget the five-hour traffic jams on a stretch of just a few kilometers, or that we once had nothing like today’s Starlink satellite internet, which reaches every corner of the planet.

At Zamorano, where I studied, the motto Labor Omnia Vincit was never just a decorative phrase at the entrance to the main building. It’s the daily heartbeat of every student and every graduate: "work conquers all." It promises nothing easy. What it says is that sustained effort turns land into harvest, problems into solutions and potential into a track record. That conviction doesn’t dismiss luck or starting conditions. It simply puts them where they belong: as variables, never as final excuses.

What strikes me is how quickly, in the face of achievements like these, a reaction appears that seems to ignore the road it took to get there. Few stop to examine what mix of vision, discipline and execution made it possible. The temptation is to reduce it all to something that has to be redistributed or reined in. That outlook, common to many people, misses the fact that the value created (better logistics for producers, technological progress that benefits whole industries, and so on) doesn’t appear out of thin air. It comes from the ability of a few to carry burdens most would prefer not to take on, as many politicians and many governments do.

At its core, merit asks us to recognize that results are a consequence, never an automatic right. Whoever achieves them has usually paid, alone, for the early mistakes, the nights of uncertainty and the final responsibility when everything could have failed. Attributing that result only to outside circumstances is, deep down, a subtle way of denying human agency. It’s more comfortable to believe someone else’s success came down to privilege than to accept that our own consistency could have closed part of that gap.

Of course, no amount of effort guarantees a proportional reward. Life includes chance, timing and circumstances beyond our control. Still, dismissing merit as the central explanation wears down the engine of real progress: the conviction that investing the present with rigor is worth it. When that conviction fades, individual motivation suffers, and what Vargas Llosa calls "the call of the tribe" takes its place.

In the end, real respect for merit goes beyond applauding spectacular results. It means cultivating, in small things and large ones, the discipline that makes them possible. It means asking ourselves every day whether we’re willing to pay the price of what we say we want.

In which area of your life are you still putting off the full cost of trying, waiting for conditions to improve?

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

Linkedin