Working hard works better if you are lucky in the first place. You need to work much harder than the lucky ones to leverage opportunities if you were born in a third world country, or when you are physically disabled, or simply if your parents aren't wealthy.
There is hard work and smart work, if you simply work hard you may or may not advance the way you want, based on luck. If you work smart you will advance the way you want, but not as fast as someone who works smart and a tad harder ;)
Maybe some do. I'm lucky I don't know the meaning of the word 'work hard'. I'm sitting here on a sunday afternoon working, or rather waiting for things to go wrong. Sure it's a 12 hour day, but it's not hard working.
Those holding down two jobs and doing 80 hours/week of non-stop work on their feet filling amazon deliveries or cooking burgers or picking fruit for minimum wage know what working hard is. I doubt anyone ever became independently wealthy through hard work.
Is it right our society is set up to reward luck above all else?
I get the feeling that the idea of "If you work hard and work smart, you will succeed" is more true in America than in the rest of the world.
Living in Germany, I think this might explain why I get into arguments with people on HN when I comment about the unfairness of the system. There may be a mismatch between our experiences.
It seems that working hard does seem to lead to success for most people in America.
I think it could be that there are fewer cracks in the system and therefore fewer people tend to fall through them as they do in Europe...
That said, as few cracks as there may be in the US system, those that do exist seem to run deep; people who fall through them may have a much harder fall; it doesn't surprise me that the US has a homelessness and opioid problem - That's what happens to people who fall through the cracks; you don't see them on HN complaining about how unfair things are (as I tend to do - Complaining is an activity reserved for partial losers, not complete losers).
In America, the winners get to shoot rockets up into space. On the other hand, the only things that losers shoot up are schools and heroin...
Working hard is not inherently valuable. You have to do something with your labor that other people value, which may require hard work. It might also require working smarter, creativity, taking advantage of a rare opportunity, making the right connections, etc. Of course luck is involved. Do you think we should penalize people being lucky?
If you don't work hard, someone will. If you can offer something better in return, good. So it's either working smart, or working hard. And I suspect the people that have achieved the former also do the latter.
I think of hard work as being more of a necessary but not sufficient condition for most of these outcomes, so to some extent: "The harder I work, the luckier I get..."
You can't control your luck, but you can control how hard you work. Some will read that sentence and conclude that working hard is a fool's errand. Others will read it and conclude the opposite. Neither is entirely wrong.
Yes, working hard is not an absolute determiner of success. It may not even be a majority determiner, depending upon your personal experiences or philosophy as well as the domain in which you're trying to achieve success. Winning the lottery is an absurdly extreme example of one domain where luck is provably a majority determiner. It's funny as a comic, but that domain doesn't really map onto many other career domains where hard work is a lot more important.
One thing is pretty certain, though. Doing nothing at all leads nothing at all. If you don't get up out of bed, eat, do something - you die rather quickly.
If you barely get out of bed to eat, but don't take care of yourself, you limp along through life and probably die early from lack of proper nutrition, exercise, and mental stimulation.
Somewhere along the spectrum from doing absolutely nothing to killing yourself with work is a sweet spot for achieving success. My observation is that the people who succeed spend more time on the side of that spectrum toward working their tails off than on the side of doing nothing.
So yeah, it's a funny comic. It makes a point to remember, but it's definitely not the final word on the value of hard work.
Will they? Wouldn't you need to not only do them, but do them better than average? So it's not just that you need to work hard, it's that you need to be working harder than average. But also if someone was already ahead of you, they could work less than that and still wind up ahead of you.
So now, is it the hard work that determined the end result, or just the luck again?
There are tons of people right now trying really hard to do all sorts of things. Many of them will fail, for a myriad of reasons. That's the idea of "luck". You can't know which reasons will lead to your downfall, because reducing labor and life to "hard work" is so absurdly reductive it's meaningless.
Basically, your individual circumstances are your own and comparing yourself to others might be helpful but it also might not and nobody can definitively tell you one way or the other if luck is even real.
I've always found that having the right network or luck matters a lot more than the hard work.
The hard work is maybe necessary to capitalize on luck but ultimately some people land high paying jobs where they don't have to work hard and can take afternoons off to golf, purely out of being lucky about who their family is.
Other people have to work themselves to the bone to earn a fraction what those people earn.
Hard work isn't necessary or sufficient for success.
I find the luck vs. hard-work a weird dichotomy - both are true and both are false.
If you don't work hard, you probably won't be successful. But if hard-work were sufficient for success then the richest person in the world, or the President, or however we measure success would also the hardest working, which I don't think most people who agree with.
Similarly, although I think most sports-people would be acknowledged to be very hard-working, there is a matter of luck in their success - you need to find the right sport for you, you need to avoid injury, you need to perform at your best on the day of the big competition / when the talent-scout is visiting.
Perhaps it's just a problem of perspective - if you are relatively successful to begin with you can see that there are a lot of people less successful than you who worked harder by some metric and so would attribute success more to luck and connections than hard-work; if you are relatively unsuccessful, perhaps the correlation between success and hard-work is more immediate - you see that the people who work hard are more successful than you, and that those who slack-off are not.
As to working hard, that isn't what counts. It's making the right choices, i.e. working smart.
Sure, lots start out with many disadvantages and will have a tougher road. But if you're able-bodied, you do have choices.
reply