Does Hard Work Lead to Success?

[ButterBeast]

or use your body if you're a woman ofcourse lul

[agnarr]

I did say if, you also ignore the majority of my post we all want to be the hero of our own story but statistically speaking you have been very lucky and are an anomaly.

I'm not the hero of my own story. I'm the guy who wouldn't quit. I'm the guy that, when his daughter was born, saw her as a blank tapestry that I could only screw up. I'm the guy that decided right then and there, that I will not let her down. I'm the guy that made the sacrifices necessary to move in a better direction

Your focus, is where you will go. Your focus leads you. It's a compass. If you focus on how the system is against you and you can never succeed because of it, guess what? You won't.

If you focus on how to succeed and how others have succeeded, if you study it as hard as you studied in school.... you'll succeed.

[Ghier]

Some pretty good insights from one of the most successful, start at 25:56

[Daelak]

I'm not the hero of my own story. I'm the guy who wouldn't quit. I'm the guy that, when his daughter was born, saw her as a blank tapestry that I could only screw up. I'm the guy that decided right then and there, that I will not let her down. I'm the guy that made the sacrifices necessary to move in a better direction

Your focus, is where you will go. Your focus leads you. It's a compass. If you focus on how the system is against you and you can never succeed because of it, guess what? You won't.

If you focus on how to succeed and how others have succeeded, if you study it as hard as you studied in school.... you'll succeed.

None of this would be relevant in South Sudan, Bolivia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Honduras, El Salvador...

[agnarr]

Hmm...

Yep! Refuses to recognize luck...confirmed.

Yep! A candy-ass that makes every excuse for his own failure in life.... confirmed.

[Deleted]

And this is also drivel. Sure being successful (whatever the hell that means) has an aspect of luck, it's also achieved by hard and smart work. You kind of need all three things in some sort of ratio.

I was talking about becoming rich, that can not be done without luck. Luck is the only thing that every rich person has in common, not hard work or being smart, you do not need those things to become rich. They might help you, but there is no need for them. And being smart is also being lucky, there are enough dumb bastards out there who didn't get those brains.

[Felya]

For me it does. Every job I've had since leaving HS has resulted in a raise and promotion within 6 months, without me asking. Be it that the time difference between the last promis and it actually happening legitimately was 8 month, but that was the second time within a year that I would have been promoted.

Even when I was 14, within a week I went from an assistant to being sports coach/counselor in Sunday school, with the worst 20 kids. They were not bad kids when I was around. I had them expand energy by chanting 'we are number 2' and laughing, while the primo group that won, was sitting there brooding. My team was the worst, but you couldn't tell, because unlike the teams winning, we actually had fun. As an example, one kid everyone on the team hated because he was terrible. I had him do jumping jacks behind the pitcher, so every time there was a strike we cheered the kid as if it was him distracting the bater... we still lost, but that kid went from no friends, to everyone giving him high fives within an hour. Plus, we largely lost because it's hard to throw and catch when you are laughing your ass off. I worked there until I was 20 and they were pissed when I quit... so pissed... but, had to quit, was my 3rd job while having a course schedule that I needed a dean's signature becaus it was more credits than they permitted. My only day to do anything, but work or school was Saturday, with all other days being 7 am to 9 pm of work/school. Oh and my yearly cost for school was 2k, everything else was merit scholarships, wasn't working to pay for school. My first "job" was running around a gypsy bazaar at 9 y/o screaming 'Una milla', selling little trinkets during immigration through Italy. I'm a worker bee...

[agnarr]

None of this would be relevant in South Sudan, Bolivia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Honduras, El Salvador...

Cool story bro.

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I was talking about becoming rich, that can not be done without luck. Luck is the only thing that every rich person has in common, not hard work or being smart, you do not need those things to become rich. They might help you, but there is no need for them. And being smart is also being lucky, there are enough dumb bastards out there who didn't get those brains.

Do you know this from experience?

[Daelak]

Cool story bro.

Reality is far more complicated and interconnected than what people percieve.

[Swizzington]

I think hard work matters most in school and college. If you get good grades, get into a good university and graduate with a good masters degree or something, your going to have a way easier time of things in the real world. From there I don't think hard work matters as much, certainly doesn't guarantee success. Strategy, tact and timing matter more there.

Also depends what you mean by 'success'. If you want to be a billionaire, theres some good fortune required in that. But in general I like to think that you make your own luck and have no sympathy for people who blame their loser existence on 'bad luck'. Take some responsibility for your actions.

[agnarr]

Reality is far more complicated and interconnected than what people percieve.

“Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.” – Douglas Adams

[Shadowferal]

Yep! A candy-ass that makes every excuse for his own failure in life.... confirmed.

Ad-hominem makes my case.
After all, if you had food on the table, a roof over your head, never had to worry about freezing to death on the street...then you're far too stupid to think that you're just o-so-smart and all hard work...when you had the basics covered already.
You thought life for you was difficult when you don't know anything about how hard life could have been for you. It's so obvious that you never once thought "It could have been worse."

[Deleted]

It certainly cant hurt, but the road to (financial)success is alot more than that, especially today and especially if you come from the lower classes. If youre born to wealth, and you have it set, or as we say in my country "pappa betalar"(daddy pays), its not that required.

[agnarr]

Ad-hominem makes my case.
After all, if you had food on the table, a roof over your head, never had to worry about freezing to death on the street...then you're far too stupid to think that you're just o-so-smart and all hard work...when you had the basics covered already.
You thought life for you was difficult when you don't know anything about how hard life could have been for you. It's so obvious that you never once thought "It could have been worse."

Yup, one point lived in the projects in a Cleveland suburb, charged with 3 felonies...

Originally, the question was, does hard work pay off and the author was depicting a specific scenario.

You came up with the irrelevant (to his specific question) scenarios of Sudan, etc...

And you are sooooo trapped in your own world of failures that you hold steadfast in your belief that luck is the only factor.

whatever, enjoy that in which you wallow.

Edit 1: And yeah, the basics were covered.... by me.

Edit 2: Yup, it could've been worse, if I had made even more bad decisions.

[thatmikeguy]

Hard work becomes tolerable if you love what you do, and who you do it for.

People want to put one or three tags on things and call it a day, but life is not so simple. Location, luck, upbringing, status, health, attitude, job volatility, environment, and other people are just some of what can factor in what some people call success.

A much better starting point for this question would be.. What is success? ALL the different answers in this thread are from their many viewpoints of what success is.

Many people that start out on top, end up on the bottom. Without real world development, many have relational problems that cause other problems. Dependency is not an option for most people, and if it is, it is usually not sustainable.

[Roujeaux]

Not necessarily. Smart work always brings proportionate success though. It's entirely possible to work hard most of your life then find out after all those years you've wasted decades of time on fruitless methods.

[Deleted]

Cool story bro.

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Do you know this from experience?

It is called reasoning.. Name one person that is rich and didn't get the fortune by being lucky. Being born in a wealthy family? Luck! Having a decent brain/ are smart? Luck! Taking a risk that panned out? Luck! You are lucky when you have a business that succeeds, yes it takes hard work, but only with lady luck on your side will it succeed. That means being in the right place at the right time (luck), knowing the right people (geee isn't that lucky...).. And the list goes on and on, you can be very lucky and be a dumb screwup who buys a lottery ticked and wins a cool $100 000 000,-.

With hard work you can make something off your life, but you won't get rich from it unless you get lucky, im sorry to burst your bubble, but that is the way the world works.

[Allerius]

They all help. A lazy idiot born rich is prone to waste their fortune away. Plenty of people have become billionaires from middle/lower class families. Hard work only helps if you're smart though. Grinding away at a dead end job won't get you anywhere no matter how hard you work.

[thatmikeguy]

It is called reasoning.. Name one person that is rich and didn't get the fortune by being lucky. Being born in a wealthy family? Luck! Having a decent brain/ are smart? Luck! Taking a risk that panned out? Luck! You are lucky when you have a business that succeeds, yes it takes hard work, but only with lady luck on your side will it succeed. That means being in the right place at the right time (luck), knowing the right people (geee isn't that lucky...).. And the list goes on and on, you can be very lucky and be a dumb screwup who buys a lottery ticked and wins a cool $100 000 000,-.

With hard work you can make something off your life, but you won't get rich from it unless you get lucky, im sorry to burst your bubble, but that is the way the world works.

Luck doesn't just happen, you "choose" from whatever cards you get. If everyone sits around and waits for money to fall on their heads, it will be a long wait.

[Drutt]

My experience is that hard work means nothing compared to nepotism/brown nosing the right people.

I've seen no shortage of extremely competent co-workers screwed over in favour of poor to mediocre workers who only do a good job of kissing up to the important people. It's quite sad how often I've seen the wool pulled over the eyes of high ups in the places I've worked at.

Case in point: part time IT worker who didn't know the difference between an A record and CNAME in DNS, didn't know that Active Directory objects names need to be unique, didn't know what RAID is or how it works, can't use Powershell, can't deploy anything without a vendor handwalking her through it and once left a VM host down for a whole weekend when on call because she didn't want to drive into the office to restart it getting an IT Manager position over candidates with multiple certifications in various enterprise technologies and who actually knew what they were doing.

The sad reality is you don't need to be a hard worker or even good at your job to get anywhere in the US. You just need to be good at making the people above you like you and believe you know what you're doing, even if you're borderline incompetent.

Obviously this changes if you're self employed, and for any intelligent hard workers it's the best option by far.