On Friday, November 14, 2025, The Hill School welcomed Laura Huang, best-selling author and distinguished professor and director of the Women's Entrepreneurship Initiative at Northeastern University, as the first speaker in the 2025-26 Tom Ruth Speaker Series. In addition to her all-school address, Ms. Huang visited with students in Hill’s Economics and Engineering 4 classes and enjoyed lunch with a group of students and faculty.

Huang’s research, which has earned her recognition as one of the top young business School professors in the country and a spot on the Global Thinker50 List, revealed a surprising truth: hard work alone isn't enough. When interviewees were asked about the secret to success, Huang explains, “One hundred percent of them said hard work. And yet, when I dug under the surface a little bit, 100 percent of them also admitted that hard work alone was not enough."

Her breakthrough came from an unlikely encounter with Elon Musk, who initially, she says, kicked her out of his office within 30 seconds of meeting her. The Tesla and SpaceX founder assumed she was pitching him for money, and his "default answer has to be no," she realized. But through an awkward moment of nervous laughter and quick thinking, she turned the situation around, transforming a 25-minute meeting into a three-hour conversation where Musk offered resources she'd never even requested. This experience developed her research into what she calls "gaining an edge"—the ability to flip barriers, stereotypes, and constraints in your favor.

Central to Huang's research is the concept of self-constraint, illustrated by a classroom exercise where her students are given $10 and two weeks to generate revenue. While most teams made a few hundred dollars selling lemonade or baked goods, the most successful teams—some earning more than $100,000—never opened the envelope at all. "We self-constrain," Huang observed. "We look at ourselves, and we think, what skills do we have, what people do we know what resources do we have on hand," instead of thinking beyond those immediate limitations to imagine what's truly possible.

Huang's framework for gaining an edge is captured in the acronym EDGE itself: Enrich (understanding how you provide value and how others perceive it), Delight (finding authentic ways to open doors), Guide (actively shaping perceptions), and Effort (letting hard work come last, so it can work harder for you). Her research shows that by addressing negative perceptions head-on and flipping them to positive ones, whether dealing with accents, gender, or background, people can improve their outcomes by 70-80 percent. "When you know how you enrich and delight and guide, that's when your effort and hard work actually work harder for you," she concludes. "That's when you start to get those tailwinds."

Learn more about Laura Huang's work at https://www.proflaurahuang.com/.