From what I heard, working hard is like 10% of the effort to get into over-hyped shit schools like MiT. The rest is who you know, what you can pay, and what you're willing to do to get in.
What makes you say it's a shit school?
Mostly, I was educated in the Québec system, and had no idea before I was 16 that if I got good grades I could get into interesting universities -- even the American ones. Reading up voraciously on Richard Feynman, only to discover that if things had been different, I, too, could have gone to that school. By that time, it was too late, I simply didn't have the grades. My parents' perception that it would cost a fortune certainly didn't help.
Not that I'm complaining, I can't change the past. But the idea of never attending MIT is one of those very few, recurring what-ifs? that will sometime keep me up at night, half a lifetime after.
I like the idea of immortality (no matter what happens, I'll always wake up OK in some branch, and that is me), but I'm not sure it actually helps otherwise, day-to-day. In fact, I'd guess there's more potentially bad universes so it seems rather much of a downer in that sense.