Having moved away from such a belief I can intuit why this is: Believing in merit makes you inclined to seek extrinsic motivations to act, which are known to be less powerful than intrinsic ones.
If you instead separate the two things and see "doing work" and "getting credit" as nearly unrelated, you can operate more successfully when you run the rat race, and also study more effectively when you learn a new skill.
Ideally we could devise a society where they're closely related through technical means, but as of now that's usually only achieved in a limited sense by running a formal evaluation like a contest, and even then, the quality of the result is dependent on it being run honestly and fairly. A tournament where everyone cheats says nothing about who is more skilled.
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Having moved away from such a belief I can intuit why this is: Believing in merit makes you inclined to seek extrinsic motivations to act, which are known to be less powerful than intrinsic ones.
If you instead separate the two things and see "doing work" and "getting credit" as nearly unrelated, you can operate more successfully when you run the rat race, and also study more effectively when you learn a new skill.
Ideally we could devise a society where they're closely related through technical means, but as of now that's usually only achieved in a limited sense by running a formal evaluation like a contest, and even then, the quality of the result is dependent on it being run honestly and fairly. A tournament where everyone cheats says nothing about who is more skilled.