The recently released 2013 movie The Internship starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson may be late to pop culture references, but it does tell us one thing: Never give up.

Success depends on one thing. And it's not intelligence or hard work, but your attitude towards it.

Did you think it was a war for talent? Not at all. Marketing genius Seth Godin says it’s actually a war for attitude:
…it’s not really a search for talent. It’s a search for attitude. There are a few jobs where straight up skills are all we ask for. Perhaps in the first violinist in a string quartet. But in fact, even there, what actually separates winners from losers isn’t talent, it’s attitude.
What does Harvard tell its MBA students the number one thing when it comes to negotiating salary?
First, they need to like you. That’s the first component. The things you do that make them like you less make it less likely that you are going to get what you want…
Stanford MBA school professor Jeffrey Pfeffer explains that research shows performance is only loosely tied to who gets ahead. Which points the arrow back to 'attitude'.
The data shows that performance doesn’t matter that much for what happens to most people in most organizations. That includes the effect of your accomplishments on those ubiquitous performance evaluations and even on your job tenure and promotion prospects.
And having a good attitude will win you more than just success - You'll be liked too! Studies show that being liked affects performance reviews a lot more than actual performance.
In an experimental study of the performance appraisals people received, those who were able to create a favorable impression received higher ratings than did people who actually performed better but did not do as good a job in managing the impressions they made on others.
People with more friends at the office perform better at the office.
…when MIT researchers spent an entire year following 2,600 employees, observing their social ties, even using mathematical formulas to analyze the size and scope of their address books and buddy lists, they found that the more socially connected the IBM employees were, the better they performed. They could even quantify the difference: On average, every e-mail contact was worth an added $948 in revenue.
So it's time to buck up. Time to lose that no-can-do attitude. Time to lose that lets-leave-it-to-later style of working. It's all about your attitude.