Comment by achenet
9 hours ago
"if hard work was all you needed to get rich, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire".
The clothes I'm wearing right now were probably made by a sweatshop laborer working 12 hours a day under awful conditions, getting paid something like 1% of what I make in my tranquil 7 hour workday sitting comfortably at a computer.
I therefore think that just hard work has an almost zero correlation to success by itself.
If you add in "addressing a valuable market", then yes, hard work helps, in that more effort spent addressing that market will likely yield higher rewards. But working hard on something people don't want will not yield success, in my view.
"The horse was the best worker in the kolkhoz, but never became its chairman". Heck, there is an entirely too depressing to read (but probably mostly correct) theory about how the office politics work [0] and I imagine it roughly translates to the other fields as well. Putting lots of efforts into some random thing most likely won't make you rich and/or powerful. It's putting the effort into becoming rich and powerful that gets you there — but that takes a rather particular personality and skill set.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...