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> I don't know who is learning from their parents that if you work hard you'll get rich

Rich people. It's the result of survivor bias, "I worked hard and got rich, so if you work hard you can get rich too." And they discount the "luck". And it is reinforced by the fact that being born to wealthy, well connected parents is really luck.

> I wasn't raised to believe that if you work hard you WILL get it. No, it's that if you DON'T work hard, you WON'T get it.

Well said. I think the common misconception comes from reducing these wisdoms into aphorisms that are short, but easily misunderstood. Any adult who has lived more than a few years in the real world quickly understands that hard work doesn’t guarantee success, but that success isn’t going to fall in your lap without putting in work.

The online discourse has become particularly bad, with the pendulum swinging between extremes of “You can do anything if you follow your dreams” to the opposite of “Nothing you do matters because it’s all blind luck”.

The latter, cynical mindset has become particularly popular as a way of dismissing or downplaying the success of others. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people try to attribute Jeff Bezo’s success to that one time he was lucky enough to receive a loan from his family. Yes, it was a lucky break, but it should be obvious that something like receiving a loan from one’s family doesn’t automatically predispose someone to lucking into building a trillion dollar company. Yet there’s a growing contingent of people who want to believe that Jeff Bezos tripped and fell and landed in the founder seat of a successful company by pure luck.

I think the truth is that a lot of people, especially younger people still finding their way, are insecure about their own success or place in life. It can be extremely comforting to surround yourself with explanations that nothing is actually within your control or that others’ success or happiness is the result of randomness. I think this is why we see the oft-repeated trope (on HN especially) that people who post happy photos on social media must actually be secretly sad and miserable behind the scenes: It’s a convenient excuse to downplay the happiness and success of others.

Ignore the extremes. Accept that success isn’t guaranteed. Know that luck is a factor, but it’s not the only factor. Hard work is your lever to maximize the cards you’ve been dealt. We’re all dealt different cards, but it still comes down to your own actions in leveraging the hand you’ve been dealt.

> I think this is why we see the oft-repeated trope (on HN especially) that people who post happy photos on social media must actually be secretly sad and miserable behind the scenes

This is not about success, but about being realistic about what you can expect from your life. Everyone is going to be unhappy from time to time and everyone will have downs ; this is just not what you usually see on social media. So when people say this, it's to reduce people's feeling of being inadequate, not to take away success.

If you think about it, it's actually two sides of the same coin: People only see humongous companies and insane salaries, but not the years of hard work that went into getting there. Similarly, they only see happy faces on social media, but not the bad sides that everyone has.

> It can be extremely comforting to surround yourself with explanations that nothing is actually within your control or that others’ success or happiness is the result of randomness.

On the other hand, accepting responsibility for results is empowering, because it means one can be successful.

I don't see anything happy about deciding one is a hapless victim of others.

The comfort in shifting your locus of control outward comes from relieving the shame of failure, not from being an overall positive experience. In fact, it's common for people to both take credit for their successes while blaming their failures on external factors to relieve the shame.

Blaming failure on others or external factors doesn't lead to success. It leads to bitterness and resentment.

Right, I wasn't really disputing that.

There's a saying: the harder I work, the luckier I get.

I read this as the harder you work the more you're able to take advantage of lucky moments. But those lucky moments still need to happen for you to take advantage of them. I think a lot of people don't like to admit that luck had anything to do with it because we have a culture that often suggests that it's luck or work but not some combination. While there are cases on the extreme ends of the spectrum I'm willing to bet that the vast majority are from a combination of hard work and high luck.

Veritasium did a (pretty obvious) simulation that showed those on the top end up having both high luck and hard work.[0] I think this should make sense to most people given how the simulation was run.

[0] https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I

Interestingly though, when asked Americans rate luck as much less important in financial success than other cultures. Euro countries in particular are more comfortable attributing a higher fraction of their success to luck than those in the US. And by asked I mean a reasonable well designed study… I can’t find the ref just now but will post if I do when home again.

It makes perfect sense to have an irrational belief in hard work.

You are likely to have more success if you believe in work. Certainly believing that 100% of outcomes is luck seems like a bad strategy.

At the level of a society then average beliefs matter. I find some less successful countries seem to obsess over the role of external influences, fate, god, and chance.

This is wonderfully North American. I would judge countries like France, Germany much more successful than the US because they still have functioning political and cultural life. Those are only things that can survive if individual financial success is not the only metric used.

> There's this characiture of American culture and the idea of our meritocracy

But earlier

> if I work hard and have a little luck, I'll get by. A little more luck and I'll be successful. A little less, and I might need to rely on my family or community.

This isn't a meritocracy that you are describing

Sure it is. Hard work weights probability in your favour and gives you more opportunities. Surely that's the best anyone can ever hope for? Do you have a system in mind that makes guarantees?

A meritocracy isn't about guarantees, other than ranking is by performance not externalities. By most definitions, a meritocracy is impractical, granted. In a real-world sense, the socio-economic status of every individual on earth is primarily governed by luck/circumstance. Not to say there aren't exceptions, but there has to be an inordinate amount of "merit" AND luck to overcome the initial state, statistically. To whit, a human lifetime is more complex and complicated to navigate, than the 3 body problem.

Right. Successful people make their own luck.

> No, it's that if you DON'T work hard, you WON'T get it.

There are plenty of born-rich counter examples. New-rich counter examples as well (see Bitcoin millionaires). Frankly, this is just as false as the other one.

Never mind the fact that “working hard” depends quite a lot on the beholder. For example, I would challenge a lot of those self-declared gritty, hard-working ideologists (such as Bezos and quite a few armchair billionaires) to live a year as a minimum-wage single mother in a city.

In any case, there are lots more hard-working poor than hard-working rich, regardless of how you define hardness. So it’s about as valuable as “all the winners played the lottery”, i.e., amusing to say but not really a good way of living.

Anyway, my feeling is that successive people are very good at gaslighting the others to justify their wealth, and that America has a workaholism problem.

> I wasn't raised to believe that if you work hard you WILL get it. No, it's that if you DON'T work hard, you WON'T get it.

Reminds me of when the CEO of GM said "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." Except he didn't say that. The press did a hatchet job on him by reporting it that way. The actual quote is "what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Erwin_Wilson#General_M...

you think that making the "and vice versa" explicit ("... and what's good for General Motors is good for our country") is a hatchet job?

Leaving off crucial parts of the statement makes it a hatchet job.

Just like if someone says "more or less" and the journalist leaves out the "or less".

You believe that the first clause somehow balances the second?

When this (partial) quote is used, it's generally in a context where the first clause is arguably irrelevant. I don't think it's like your "more or less" analogy. There are not many corporations that fail to benefit when the country does well, so the first clause is broadly agreed upon. The second clause, however, is controversial, and has implications that are quite independent of the first clause.

"It will be sunny today, and tomorrow there will be snow" - if you hear this weather forecast at 13:00 on a sunny day, the first clause is close to information-free, but the second is very striking.

So it is with the quote from the head of GM.

> You believe that the first clause somehow balances the second?

It doesn't matter if I believe it or not. It's a hatchet job to selectively misquote people to pursue the journalist's agenda.

You think it is selective misquoting. I think it's entirely appropriate quoting. We disagree.

"I don't know who is learning from their parents that if you work hard you'll get rich."

I read that line a lot from successful people: "I have achieved X. IF I can achieve it, you can too. Let me explain how. "

> No, it's that if you DON'T work hard, you WON'T get it.

Depends on how much you start with.

My parents’ attitudes are very much more oriented toward hard work becoming success and that if you haven’t gotten what you wanted, it’s because you haven’t tried hard enough yet.

In a way, they’re right. I’d love a 911 GT3, and I could almost certainly get one, if only for a short period of time, and with the benefit of armed robbery.

There’s a lot of things I’ve “chosen” to consider instead of putting everything aside to chase a dream. In more concrete terms, anyone can have anything they want, but what you have to give up for it matters. And that’s something I think my parents and people like them don’t think about. Not everyone has the emotional construction, or even the ability to give up aspects of their life to achieve what they want. I think a large part of “luck” is when the time comes to make a hard decision like that, some fortunate circumstance made swallowing that pill a bit easier.