Effort Does not Equate to Rewards?

This is a very enlightening argument that I found in an article by Nicolas Yee while reading up in preparation for writing a project. The article is A New Disorder is Born and the full article can be accessed at here:
http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001494.php

"After 6 years of fairy tales and then 16 years of school, we are then exposed to the real world. In the real world, goals are seldom well-defined, More importantly, the amount of effort you put into something isn’t guaranteed to get you any closer to your goal. Sometimes, you put in very little effort and hit the jackpot. Other times, you work week after week to get an incredibly small payoff. One of the disillusions of being an adult is that the framework of goals and rewards we learned the first 22 years of our lives suddenly stops working."

I think this is rather true. For example, some people can get to a certain positions by pulling strings, or just by their charismatic outer appearance, etc. What do you think? In a sense, this just comes to show that our world is an unequal place and the meaning of meritocracy is just an illusion to bind the unprevileged to their original positions.