I'm jealous that he's made so many things, surprised by the small amount of money they've been sold for, and unsure whether this is someone I should emulate or someone I should view as a cautionary tale.
- Coach Kamogawa thru George Morikawa
I wasn't working hard when I bought Bitcoin at three bucks a coin. I was just intellectually curious. If anything when I was working hard was two years before that on a soon to be failed startup. We crawled the web for ads just before the ad business went hyper targeted. I made -$20k from working hard.
I made a lot more from Bitcoin. I would have made way more if I'd put that $20k in Bitcoin and slacked off at some day job.
I guess I don't really follow my own advice though, as I'm presently working on a Sunday morning and I've only taken like two days off this month.
Edit:
Writing this comment briefly made me re-consider my whole life and I've come to the conclusion that being lucky and prescient observations are more likely if you've worked hard at some point. I did do an engineering degree with some economics electives at the best school in Canada, and understanding Satoshi's paper wouldn't have been possible without this background knowledge.
After writing the above, I Googled Linus. Apparently he's worth over $100m.
But you're right. Plenty of really successful poets or athletes are poor.
If only I hadn't been relatively broke when I bought in. I was suffering burn-out and basically working odd contracts here and there to keep the lights on.
The problem is that, by definition, most people are in a pyramid scheme at the bottom.
In general, there are lots of activities which give the appearance of hard work but are actually fairly superficial and detrimental to your long-term goals.
Not at all saying that's the case here, more just musing on the idea of grinding for the sake of grinding.
I think there's an assumption that the most successful people both work smart AND hard, which is likely true to some degree - e.g. successful pro athletes have staff that likely conduct well-targeted and thoughtful practices, but the hours and effort involved are still quite intense.
I more-so think the problem is that "working smart" requires a lot of careful planning and forethought, and is quite ambiguous in most cases what it actually means - and in many cases just happens serendipitously. Because of that, the process isn't as obvious.
It's much easier (intellectually, at least) to emulate the "working hard" part and to a large degree it's the one we reward the most societally (even in more intellectual circles), so it's not surprising that it's the one that people assume is the most necessary component of being successful - and that the "working smart" part will either come naturally, or after success is had.
If you're some random person with no access to capital or social connections then your focus should be luck.
As a random person who started with no social connections and no capital, I think about luck all the time and it helps me to make decisions. Mostly, it helps me to weigh up future opportunities against current opportunities - I think about things that happened to me and I ask myself how unlikely they were to occur; if they were very unlikely, I try to stay on that unlikely path. Never waste your luck; you have to keep moving forward wherever it takes you. Sometimes it leads you to places you don't want to be, but beggars can't be choosers.
While there are of course people who have been extremely successful relying on those two things alone (and they dominate the headlines, of course), there are countless successful people who succeeded without either of those two things.
It's pretty disingenuous, for example, to argue that Katherine Johnson's (admittedly delayed in recognition) success is the result of social connections or acting skills.
An even more trivial example is that many pro athletes (in the US, at least) didn't achieve success because of their social connections to capital; most of them certainly aren't great actors either.