Luck >>>> hard work.
But hard work helps you get a bigger dividend out of luck.
But hard work helps you get a bigger dividend out of luck.
I spent a lot of time reading (easy), some time developing social skills (somewhat difficult but not work), then got an opportunity (the exact opposite of hard) and it worked out.
I agree that there’s no substitute for hard work. It’s its own thing. I disagree that it has some sort of inherent moral value or virtue, as far as I can tell that’s a line invented by management to make you feel better about not receiving a tiny fraction of the money you generate for your company.
I recommend starting your own business, where you get to keep 100% of the profit.
Edit: To clarify, seriously no I do not “work hard.” Running my business is so, so much easier than building a deck or carrying sliding glass doors on my back 4+ stories. I got lucky in that I found myself in a situation where I fell ass-backwards into a bunch of clients wanting something that I can do easily (general IT and website stuff) that I learned as a kid (stuff I learned while also not doing hard work.)
I am literally just lucky.
There’s literally nothing about me that’s special, least of which my work ethic. I’m very happy about where I’m at in life but I have no illusions about how I got here.
I wasn’t born remotely wealthy and didn’t have all the advantages that many others have but I did not get to where I am through “hard work.” I got lucky.
I have friends that are smarter than me, harder workers, more creative, more entrepreneurial, better communicator, etc that have had a worse professional experience than I have. I literally just met the right people at the right time.
The only contribution that I can seriously point to that I did objectively was just being a nice person at the right time in the right room, without knowing what was going on.
> I was lucky that my childhood interests gave me a basic skill set
Normal childhood interests can lead to lucrative careers, if one decides to follow those interests. These days, that's only a google search away.
You don’t make luck. Luck happens to you.
There are a few things that make it more likely to be able to take advantage of an opportunity, but those are available to a huge number of others who are not as lucky.
And there's no guarantee that what you're doing will prepare you for the opportunity at any given time.
Suppose next 20 years 2/3 middle managers will get replaced by AGI. They may have been lucky before but it does not hold. Combine with people who lost a lot of resources by investing. There is an old adage about not investing what you cannot afford to lose, they thought you could not lose that job, but it happened anyway.
Nobody likes to hear about hundreds of thousands of losers every day, who will be then unable to follow up on opportunities.
Unlike games of skill, life is much more of a game of chance with a lot predetermined from outset. It's closer to a deck builder but sometimes you just get trash picks.
Nobody said anything about a guarantee. It's all about making choices so luck can find you.
Do you really believe that you're just as lucky to find opportunity by staying home and playing video games vs getting educated and visiting trade shows, etc.?
Do you really believe that you're just as likely to get lucky with investments by never investing in anything, vs doing some research and doing investing?
I’m highly educated in several fields that have exactly 0 overlap with my business, so reading all that Kierkegaard and Pharmako/Poeia over the years didn’t serve to make me any “luckier” when it comes to my professional life.
If I hadn’t been “staying home and playing video games,” I would have never met my partner. That’s luck. If I hadn’t been doing nothing in the middle of what should have been a workday for most people, I wouldn’t have been available to do a friend a favor that turned into a job that turned into a business. That’s luck.
I’m not advocating for everyone to just do nothing — many people find that excruciating. I’m just saying that good luck and bad luck can happen to anyone at any time in any way.
I personally find it just downright odd when human beings decide that they’ve somehow gamed the RNG in life rather than just uh… getting lucky.
For example, by my estimation “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne is not representative of reality. People cannot actually manifest things, however nice it must be to feel that one can. There’s a whole lot of randomness in the universe and I’m not in the habit of thinking that I have conquered it.
No amount of "oh you just worked hard" will convince me I got that. I'm 100% sure it was not only luck, but the fact that also I was the only one who applied because they mislabeled the position in a major city like 150 miles away haha.
For example, if you have no coding skills, nobody is going to invite you to join their software startup.