The “self-made” myth: Why hard work isn’t enough to reach the top

Luck and the family you were born into are two of the big things you can't change. Doesn't matter how much you acknowledge it, it won't change.

Putting in the hard (and smart) work and persevering is all you can do. It's a waste of time and energy to worry about Kylie Jenner calling herself a self-made billionaire or whether others are just "luckier" than you.

Disclaimer: I am probably a target audience of the article and maybe a bit biased. I was "lucky" many times in my life which allowed me to move from a family income of around $30k growing up, to around $400k solo now.

I don't think data support this. Talent efficacy is more of a power law distribution than a sigmoid. Simone Biles is not a very marginally better gymnast. Elon Musk is not a modestly more enthusiastic car company CEO. Michael Phelps was not slightly better at swimming.

The differences between the best and the almost-best at extremely high levels of skill is much larger than the differences between modestly talented individuals.

I think at this point luck gets far more of a focus than it deserves. It's become a thought-terminating cliche around the entire idea of why people succeed or fail.

Almost no one disputes that luck is a component of people making their fortunes, its caked into the word. (Fortuna, the goddess of luck, gives the word its first definition, the second definition as a large amount of money came later).

There's no 'most importantly' about immense success. No one is an Olympic medalist by accident. No one found their way to the moon by accident. And while luck was involved, no one became an oil tycoon by or started an ISP or laid underseas cables by tripping into it.

I think the quip in the image is funny as a joke, but essentially disingenuous, as it doesn't think critically enough about most hiring cases and why someone would choose that

Of course, there are situations where people completely unfit for the job apply and get it due to connections, but that doesn't match the majority in hiring.

Usually you might find yourself comparing a person who looks stellar on paper and in the interview process—which, by the way, based on the number of articles on Hacker News about how bad the tech interviewing process is, isn't a great indicator either—versus a person who you might already have familiarity with and have a history of working together, and seems decent for the role, just not perfect. When doing hiring for a role, BigN companies always talk about how costly it is for false positives, so they might be willing to take someone whose actual job skills have been vetted to an extent

A lot of hiring people would choose decent familiarity over seemingly-great unfamiliarity

If anything, avoiding work by working hard to find ways to automate things and make them less work is what brings more success rather than just putting in 14 hours digging a ditch or hammering in railroad spikes.

Now in pop culture i think hard work is doing the necessary dirty work that pays off in the future. Working a job and taking that money and plowing it into something that will deliver more money for less work. Working hard at a bakery, taking those earnings to start something else that provides returns on other people’s work like a salon owner renting out salon space after years of pouring work into developing a brand or whatever.

Any as-of-yet-unsuccessful person who doesn't acknowledge the value of hard work and focus on things they can control is guaranteed to never be successful.

IMHO its ego on both sides that drives people to debate the exact factor of luck in success; even if you could quantify that what is the point? We're all dealt different hands in life, the trick is to play to your strengths and be grateful for the success you achieve.

Sure, you won’t be like Elon Musk, but you could be better than 90% of the population, since most people don’t want to try hard. Much more “fun” to believe that life is unfair, and therefore no action is required on one’s part.

Recent examples I can think of are:

1) Thousands of extremely hardworking athletes at the top of their sport, in their prime, who have had their value captured by the NCAA, instead of by the athletes themselves.

2) Scientists who have worked hard to invent novel technology but who have been blocked by institutions from licensing the technology they invent or being supported to further that technology.

3) Entrepreneurs who work incredibly hard and have their time, energy, and money drained by patent trolls who use the legal system to extract value.

4) Business owners who have to compete in a marketplace with VC-backed companies that can operate at a loss for years until they monopolize the market.

I could go on, but I'm not surprised that people are questioning whether hard work is enough. In many cases it's not. It's hard work + the system in which you are operating + having the connections and resources to fight entities that will inevitably try to leach off of your hard work.

Hard work != smart work. Given a group of people with a common field of expertise, some of them will seem to be more efficient and naturally better decision makers than the average expert in the group. In some cases this may be fluff, but still believable enough to climb the corporate ladder.

In order to achieve certain goals, nurture may be as important as nature. An engineer in a rich country doesn't have to be especially brilliant to outperform a brilliant engineer who lives in a developing country in terms of wealth and quality of life. If you are experienced and have decent social skills, you can move to a less developed country and "reach the top" with relative ease. The top will of course be lower than in your country, but it will still be the top for the local observer.

But you can only effect the things you control. Perhaps a bit trite, but none the less, it's true. And if you can't control it, then well... you can't control it. It would be better, IMO, to focus on improving in the areas you do control rather than dwelling on the things you can't. Work hard, exercise, try to meet people, try to be aware of opportunities, etc., etc.

In some way, the "hard working elite" is the "laziest class" at the same time.

I do not wish for some utopian work world - I'd only wish we would not expect from others what we would not want for ourselves. And if the rich would never work for someone else, I'd be happy if they would not expect anyone to work for them.

Rather it's usually 'necessary' and a pretty good qualifier in most ways.

Finally, who on earth said 'the top' was an aspiration for most people? Or even noble?

If you 'work hard' consistently, you'll probably be 'ok' and if you apply a little big of grit and consistency, you'll do 'alright'.

The 'apex' is whole other thing entirely.

On a related note, does anyone know of non-profit orgs that aim to teach people how to use their time and money wisely? Unfortunately there are plenty out there who, either through ignorance or lack of willpower, do not use either wisely, and there are plenty of people and companies happy to take advantage of them.

The first point I'll make is that success is a probability game. A person from a certain socioeconomic rung might "make it" through hard work, another by sheer serendipity, and yet another might grind their lives away in relative poverty. I prefer looking at this in terms of aggregate rates across cohorts. "What are the chances", given someone's circumstance, that talent and hard work lead to a relative degree of success greater than some other person.

On this question I do find that luck is the primary factor that stands out. But simply saying "luck" doesn't really reveal much. It's more worthwhile to understand the _nature_ of how luck interacts with the likelyhood of success.

The best analogy I've come up with this is that society and success and opportunity are a lottery where some people are able to obtain more tickets, and others fewer tickets. Each ticket represents an opportunity to fail and try again for success.

In this game, inherent talent and success may buy you 100 tickets, compared to someone else less talented who can only obtain 10 tickets. The 100 tickets does not guarantee success, but greatly increases the probability of it.

In that same vein, pre-existing wealth is able to buy you 10,000 tickets. Failure is not out of the question, your tickets might not pan out, but the probability of success is exponentially increased. Not only that, but one or more of those first 10k tickets paying out (in terms of success), leads to more wealth, and the ability to once again buy many more tickets.

Speaking for myself, many tickets were handed to me due to my circumstance. I immigrated under stable circumstances, not as a refugee or somebody fleeing violence and subject to stress. I had loving, caring parents that were educated enough to understand how to search and seek out opportunities that they could put in front of me when I was a child. Thus when I was 10 I found myself the owner of a Commodore 64 that my father obtained for me from a garage sale, for free, because the original owner no longer wanted it. Later on, my parents would scrimp and save to buy me a (then state of the art) 486 DX, 33-Mhz computer with 8 megabytes of ram. Some opportunities were disguised as disadvantages: social ostracization in school led me to spend most of my time indoors, on my computer, which never judged me. My isolation from physical socialization led me to seek out online communities online at a time when the world wide web was an academic curiosity.

I was afforded the opportunity of recovering from many failures because my parents built a support system around me, and encouraged and nurtured my talents through personal sacrifice. That's how I got my 100 tickets, and a few of them were lucky ones. And that led to some initial success, which allowed me to reinvest that success towards more tickets, which eventually snowballed to the point where I find myself living a kind of life that my parents could have never imagined for me when we first left our ancestral home.

I know for a fact that there were many like me who did not get as many tickets as I did. Talents wasted. Kids who were bright, brighter and more motivated than me, who did not get as many tickets, or who did but whose tickets simply didn't pan out enough returns before they ran out entirely.

I feel that we as a society are supporting and encouraging an incredible amount of waste by not finding better ways to afford more people more opportunities to fail and recover - "more tickets".

It is one of the reasons I am highly supportive of social support programs, public health care, and other collective tools to improve social welfare. Those sorts of policies fundamentally serve to reduce the distortion in opportunity inherent in the social lottery. Those programs allow people to fail and try again. They raise the floor. And we have more human wealth to tap there than we can possibly imagine.

1) Belief in luck and futility of hard work is a useless, in fact harmful belief. I can say this from personal experience of changing beliefs based on nothing more than buying into American self-help gospel for a short time. Even though in Russia, it was/is probably more likely for a rich person to be a crook, believing that hard work is therefore useless is one certain way to go nowhere. I'm happy I was actually deluded the other way ("it's only hard work") for a short time; it paid off immensely.

2) Overall (related), the developing "resentment zeitgeist" around this reminds me of the Soviet joke where the devil is giving a new hire a tour of hell. First, they come upon a pit of fire with bunch of people in it, and a burly demon nearby. "These are Americans", says the devil, "every once in a while one would try to escape; the demon would then shove him back in"... then they come upon a similar pit, with a whole squad of demons "these are [let's say] Swedes; when one of them tries to get out, all the others would try to help him, so we need a whole squad here" ... finally they come upon a pit with a frail, elderly demon napping on a chair nearby. "What about this one?" asks the new guy. "Oh, these are Soviets. Every once in a while, one of them would try to get out, but then the others would just drag him back in."

An irrational belief in merit and your own hard work likely helps one succeed.