Telling children 'hard work gets you to the top' is simply a lie
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
a. "more likely" doesn't mean it isn't possible to achieve if you aren't "born right"
and perhaps more to the point:
b. "success" is measured on a continuum; it's not a binary proposition. And there's a lot of room between "Becoming a Supreme Court justice" (just to pick an example) and winding up as a barista at Starbucks. Like, plenty of lawyers who make a nice living for their families, or all the thousands of local district and superior court judges out there, or the hundreds of federal circuit judges who don't quite make it to the very top.
This kind of article is boring and pointless because it's selling a dangerous idea: that nothing you do matters at all, and, ergo, you might as well do nothing. I mean, if hard work doesn't matter, why bother working hard to begin with, right?
As the old saying goes: "It is better to shoot for the stars and miss than aim at the gutter and hit it". Or another take on it: "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
So yeah, tell your kids to dream big and work hard. They'll probably go further than if you tell them "life sucks, you have no chance, so just go ahead and do nothing but play video games and smoke weed all day".
So if your kids turned out more successful than others, don't tell them it was just because they dreamt big and worked hard. While hard work is important, their success was also partially due to luck and the work of others, and they should never forget that.
Agreed. My problem is with this meme that seems to have become pervasive over the last year or two, which seems to posit that, effectively, everything comes down to luck. Clearly the actual truth is somewhere between the extremes of "it's all luck" and "it's all hard work". My response here is a reaction to what I perceive as a swinging of the pendulum towards the "it's all luck" mindset, to a degree that I think is damaging.
I completely agree with you, but it's curious that you frame this as a hypothetical outcome. At least in the US, this idea has been deeply ingrained in broad swaths of the population for decades - and not just among the rich.
These are fine. However, there is also the belief that all people who have reached the stars have worked hard or that people who haven't reached stars just haven't worked enough. These are wrong. Success is a combination of hard work and a good portion of luck. You most likely won't be successful if you don't work hard but if you don't succeed it's not necessarily because you haven't worked hard.
To me it's a call for successful people to be more compassionate with people who aren't successful.
I was unlucky and had medical problems in college. I deserve some relief. But I'm also a co-founder of a decent startup. Am I lucky or unlucky?
You definitely should work hard but by no means there is a guarantee you will succeed. You also need some luck.
Funnily enough the moon is much closer than the stars. ;)
I think success is a matter of preparation, opportunity/luck and 'hard work' in the form of dedication when the opportunity presents itself.
Sure but if you MISS the moon, you'll be stuck heading towards the stars until you run of of oxygen and die.
That's the point of this saying, right? ...
As the song goes[0]:
This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name!
>What I have learned in this short period of time is that the pervasive narrative of “if you work hard you will get on” is a complete myth. It’s not true and we need stop saying it. This is because “working hard, and doing the right thing” barely gets you to the starting line. Furthermore, it means something completely different depending on to which context you’re applying this particular notion. So much more is required.
If you note what he says at the end of that paragraph, it becomes obvious that what he's trying to get across is that you absolutely need hard work, but that will give you only the bare minimum to have a chance and it's definitely not a guarantee that you will do well.
I see no evidence of that.
> My mother gave birth to 12 children
Having 12 children is completely out of responsibility. Yet we saved this guy from poverty. Now what, not only the guy is barely thankful, but he claims that people should be able to reproduce this error and get the same incredibly good outcome – and it's a right? What about no?
He shows no understanding of what is normal; Growing from 12th-child of farmer parents to barrister in less than one generation is already a privilege; I'd be happy if my grand son had the same social status as I have already. Be humble. There's a lot of things to learn to rise in society, from not having TV to various attitudes about trading in business, from attitude about alcohol to relaxation things (or religion if that's your thing); No, if you don't educate your child, or if teach him that being a barrista is good enough, then he won't be able to become barrister despite his parents. But he's free to edicate his children better, that's how it works.
The XXI century is stuck in a wrong expectation that governments are supposed to compensate for your parents' life choices and make you a lawyer. To me, it explains why people are more and more polarized, on one side those who accuse the riches of stealing their right to equality (whatever that means), on the other people who grow a big expertise at getting deaf to such claims (and, unfortunately, they tilt towards not listening to any claims regarding rights, even older ones which were reasonable enough to survive the ages, like voting and democracy). Want to protect your democracy? Be reasonable with your claims, rights and expectations.
>The XXI century is stuck in a wrong expectation that governments are supposed to compensate for your parents' life choices.
No, it's really not. "Choices" are a luxury, not a given.
You need a good education and a personal or family tradition of researching and understanding outcomes to make useful choices. Those are not the default for most families.
Even if that weren't true, governments should not, in fact, compensate anyone for anything. What they should do is perform a cost/benefit analysis and work out which social mitigation strategies provide the best overall returns.
Does it cost less to house the homeless or to keep them on the streets, where they're a drain on all kinds of services?
Simple moralising can't answer that question. Objective, rational, research can. And when you do objective, rational, research, you often find that naive decisions based on simple-minded moralising tend to produces expensive, low-efficiency outcomes.
I'm often surprised how "objective, rational, research" can be biased by the author. For example, "objective, rational, research" lead to not demonstrating that women are paid less if they perform equal work (degree, interest in tech, but also number of extra hours at work), but "objective, rational, research"-people regularly and repeatedly refuse to discuss or even listen to such stats, because they're not "objective, rational, research" according to them. So if you leftist people agreed to question your own "objective, rational, research" that shows that leftist people are right, maybe we could hear each other.
Maybe that leads to a world where those who annoy their friends at school have no job when they're an adult. And that's how it should be, even if "objective, rational, research" show that "oh the poor boy he beats up his friends because [insert whatever family reason here]".
Note that I've given thousands to charities and helped minorities until my thirties. Until one of them raped my daughter-in-law. No matter how you try, even if you put them on a highway of priorities above normal people, those are their own top enemy. A bit of fairness towards former-normal people would be nice as well.
Try going back one or two more generations in your genealogy if you can't see it closer.
Sadly and I hate to break it up. Having 10 children a few generations ago used to go with a very high mortality rate, even in Western Europe.
I liked this article better, and it conveys more or less the same point as the topic link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/opinion/how-i-learned-to-...
The problem is that hard work makes a dent, but not a very big one if you don't understand the "game" that you need to play. It's easy to take this for granted if you grow up in an environment with many people who understand it because you learn it by osmosis.
Jumping into the article that I linked, the author was missing a critical chain of thought: that currently in the United States, the path to an "upward mobile" job generally follows these lines:
1. Get good grades in high school 2. Score high on the SAT (which has to be practiced), then get lots of help writing your college essay 3. Pick an area of study that corresponds with a well-paying occupation, and then get into a college that is solid in that department 4. Leverage the career and alumni network to find a well-paying job, or apply to business/law/medical school.
At each step, you have to prioritize how you spend your limited time and energy. I grew up with parents who understood this point and focused my energy into each step when it was time to do so, so I was very lucky in that sense. I also worked my ass off, but steps 1 through 3 were very much helped along by parental guidance.
I've been in too many situations and witnessed too many friends and family members that shoot for the moon but are never able to leave Earth as all their extra efforts are usurped by their managers and business owners.
Sure hard work "matters", it can help you get places, but how much does it matter is the question? Does it make 1% difference? 5% difference? 50% difference? I'd bet the difference is <10% compared to someone who does just enough to get by.
I think kids would go furthest of all if we told them "treat yourself as an autonomous being, work hard when you are in a position to realize the benefits of your hard work, otherwise do just enough and save your energy for better days."
Don't work harder if that will give you no returns. (like unpaid extra hours, going to your company funds or manager bonus for saving the project)
Which isn't what the author was saying, of course.
It's not just this article alone, that's the thing. It's the broader meme that this article aligns with, which denigrates the value of hard work and - IMO - over-emphasizes luck.
That said, if you want quote-mining, here ya go. One that I a wholeheartedly agree with. It just feels a bit tacked on near the end.
We need to do more to double down on improving environments both at home and at school which continuously constrain potential. If the adage that hard work truly matters rings true, then we must do more – at all levels of society – to make it a reality.
You must work hard and contribute only to a system that is fair.
Its important to starve that system of good contributors which doesn't reward merit.
One of the reason why people immigrate to other countries, or move companies is because of futility of doing anything in their current ecosystem.
Working hard will move you forward. How forward is hard to determine, and it varies. The reality is that some people in their lifetime won't achieve success but they lay the foundation for their children too...ex his mothers struggle to get from Africa to the UK laid the foundation for him to achieve his success. Their is little chance that he will become say the Prime Minister, but his children may...thanks to their dad being able to provide them with a privileged life.
Or rather it's correct, but irrelevantly so. Sure new markets will be created if your worker pool is made up highly motivated and college educated individuals. But it won't matter for that first generation - economies simply don't shift that quickly.
It's not a linear correlation, but it's a lot more linear than economic theorists would lead you to believe. In human working-age timescales, it may as well be linear.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/201...
It's the difference between "I made a new web framework" and Vannevar Bush or John von Neumann.
As for cost of debt - yes, it gets much harder to innovate when access to free capital is rationed. Rationing and hoarding capital is actually one of the dumbest things a capitalist culture can do. "Hard work" won't fix this.
No. Just no. That is utterly wrong.
The job market goes by itself. It has little correlation with education prospects (that takes 5 years for any change to make new student anyway).
Just because something's not 100% true doesn't mean it's 0% true. In this case, a more appropriate level of granularity would be: "if you work hard, you are more likely to be successful than if you don't work hard." That kind of nuance doesn't really resonate with children though, which is why we don't tell them that.
Complaining that it's all a big lie is akin to someone growing up, realizing that there is no Santa living in the North Pole, and concluding that the North Pole must also be a lie.
This argument is not, as some have claimed, an excuse for apathy. Rather, it argues that accepting the prevailing socioeconomic norms is foolish for anyone who is not close to the apex of society. The level playing field and other such political tropes are false, there is abundant evidence of this, and anyone who tells you otherwise either lying to you or to themselves.
I grew up in a very poor part of the country, certainly bottom 5%. And eventually paid my own way through an Ivy League school... I would say that the lessons my dad taught me were solid.
1) It's important to work hard. You don't work hard to get ahead... you work hard so you are satisfied that you gave it your all. Take pride in your accomplishments -- however small. Work until you're happy with what you have done.
2) Be careful what you wish for -- what you choose to dedicate your life to doing is important, but know that luck plays a huge role. You can't count on luck, but you can be immensely thankful for it and humble accepting it.
3) The world is yours to make what you will out of it. You're the only one who can determine what is right for you. Nobody is better than you are, but you're no better than anyone else -- stand up for yourself, and be kind to those you run into along the way.
The author misses the point. It's true that only saying “if you work hard you will get on” is not enough. But it's only half the picture - working hard will only get you somewhere - the starting line. Then you need to continue and improve and adapt. Whether it's worth that time and effort is another question.
But simply accepting a half truth as a whole and ignoring the whole picture is harmful "It’s not true and we need stop saying it." is the completely wrong thing to say. Better: "it's not the only thing that counts, and we need to give tell our children what they really need to do"
> So much more is required.
While he does not explicitly state what is required, he is obviously saying that we need to stop using that statement alone.
> I don’t see this mindset shifting, so my advice to youngsters has remained: you need to adapt yourself. You need to find the right way to speak to different people, at different times in different contexts. This is not compromising who you are, but rather adapting to the relevant surroundings.
I remember one politician here a couple of years ago defending miners in his electorate as 'battlers' (aussie slang for poor who are trying to make ends meet)... and at a time when the national median wage was $57k and median household income was $77k, the 'battler' he was defending made $110k...
Luck favors the prepared mind - Louis Pasteur
Alas, teaching children (and adults) they're but one of a larger group of victims is, and will always be, a political juggernaut.
Individually preferences, choices, dumb luck, etc. of course would lead to unequal outcomes -- as it should be. But when taken as a whole, those differences should disappear.
It is an ideal, but I like it because it is a measurable ideal.
Apparently Americans are far more likely than Europeans to believe that hard work gets you to the top.
However, these expectations are apparently quite divorced from reality. Apparently hard work is far more likely to get you to the top in Europe (especially continental Europe) than in the US.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_t...
Europe and USA are large continents, comprised of many environments and sub cultures.
Luck matters, intelligence matters, natural skill matters, social circumstances matter, but hard work matters more.
You can be blessed with all of those behaviors and still fail, but hard work moves the odds in your favor more than the others.
Arbeit macht frei.
As far as I am aware, every human culture has always demanded more work than strictly necessary from the working class in order to support a relatively small proportion of non-workers or light workers. At the band/tribe level, that is generally very young children and very old elders. Larger organization units tended to reserve some of the light work and non-work for administrators and enforcers. For a while, we have had concepts such as "education" and "retirement" that take the place of child labor and dying at your workstation, made possible by improvements in productivity in the working class.
So for those whose hands never acquired a callus, it has long been necessary that other people do harder work. Indeed, we even had more odious lies, such as "you must work hard, because you are my property," or "work hard, or you will be removed, and your family will starve."
Sometimes, the promise of promotion was not a lie. The very best of the hard workers were elevated to encourage the others, but never quite far enough that they might question what is really done with all that hard work.
We have robots and power generators now. None of us can work harder, faster, or more cheaply than a fully automated factory running on raw materials and electricity. The former economic necessities are no longer required. But no one is prepared to come out and say "no one really needs to work hard any more, and you will only be able to reach the top by owning the most productive capital" because there are so many people out there who have been toeing that line their whole lives, working hard without reaching even a local maximum. The economy isn't entirely automated--not yet--and we still collectively need some people to work. No one wants to be the one chump in ten that has to bust their ass every day while everyone else just lies around goofing off.
So we have the "bullshit job" phenomenon, to distribute and obfuscate who is doing all the actual work, making the other 9 put up the appearance of work for the sake of the one still actually doing the critical labor, or dividing up the work so that 10 people each do 10% of a real job and 90% flimflammery.
What we should be telling the kids is "own something now, before it is too late."
The few who make it past the third generation, generally continue on indefinitely (the Roosevelts, who bought a 40-acre farm on Manhattan Island in the 1600s and still own it today, should come to mind; likewise the Rothschilds and Rockefellers in more recent times); but getting over that three-generation hurdle is a formidable task.
There is no guarantee for anything in life, it's an absolute certainty that you will get nothing without some semblence of hard work.
I thought we tell children that hard work pays off and is more likely to get you into a better position than being a slacker.
I don't know when it became OK to use these logical fallacies online to support propaganda.
I also don't know at which point even the people with above average intelligence (AND definitely know about what a logical fallacy is) decided that they will pretend it suddenly doesn't exist.
Lastly, I don't know why the HN readers who I'm sure know ALL about all this AND even more end up going all groundhog day and have the same battle every time this type of article comes up.