Yep, it's bollocks. The world is not short of lazy millionaires and even shorter on people who work their arses off for a wage that doesn't provide an acceptable standard of living.
12-08-2023, 03:56 PM (This post was last modified: 12-08-2023, 03:57 PM by Danster.)
They are, but the older I get the more I realise that luck is a much more significant factor than effort and talent, despite what those who have "made it" will tell you. You could have a brilliant idea and work your backside off to accomplish something with it, but without that slice of luck you're going nowhere.
I've long been of the opinion that successful people are bad sources of advice. They don't actually understand their own success, but later try to reconstruct it after the fact. The biggest obstacle is people who benefited from luck, talent, timing and other advantages not really understanding that they began their process closer to the finish line that everybody else.
If you put it in the context of sports, winners like to talk about the hard word they did. But in my experience the benefits of hard work only account for a certain small percentage gained, and the returns diminish. Two people at the top will do a tremendous amount of work to beat the other by a small amount. But no amount of work will ever get most people anywhere near them. I think this can be applied to other facets of life as well.
100% agree for sports, you need to be born with the right natural talent for that sport as well as being extremely well co-ordinated. Without that, no amount of hard work can get you to the top.
I started running in high school. In Cross Country I was minutes behind guys doing the same training. As an adult I trained much, much harder, and only briefly found myself faster than I had previously been at the standard 5k distance. Of course my physical and mental strength grew and I was able to cover some big distances over tough terrain. But even then, if you look at where I finished, percentage wise, in the field.. it was pretty much the same place. I was closer to the front of the pack than the back, but the guys ahead of me were still on a different planet.
And I bet a lot of those guys would make out that they were only there because they worked hard. They'll struggle to accept they just bought a better ticket in life's lottery.
Finding out that you had advantages is, I suspect, a tough pill for people to swallow. That's why there are people who inherited millions who claim to be "self made."
