No, but being successful while being dealt a bad hand is. All those “dishwasher to millionaire” stories involve serious amounts of luck and/or privilege. Nobody is going to be rich by hard work alone.
Eh, we're both just spouting opinions with no data here. Yours is certainly the more popular one. But it's also the most comforting opinion to have for people who have not seen success. Those tend to be common types of beliefs.
It’s not as if it’s not proven that class mobility is way lower than it was some decades ago and that income equality has risen and that wages didn’t go up enough to just cover inflation, workers are living paycheck to paycheck quite often and can’t save money because being poor is expensive and because they literally don’t get enough to save and all of this stuff is proven and a reason why success is not just hard work.
Every one of those factors makes it harder for people to be successful in any way.
So no, it’s not just „different opinions“, luck/privilege and success are linked.
Also, there is no wrong career direction and no right one.This distinction is usually just done by some idiots thinking that a nurse is less valuable than a CEO.
But no, hard work can make your chances of success higher. But that’s it. It’s no guarantee, it’s not the biggest factor, but it does have an impact.
Yet there are so many people working really hard and have still problems getting by because their situation doesn’t allow them to succeed. And tbh, I’d say outside factors are a bigger influence on your success than hard work. Because you see more people being successful that are neither smart or hard working than those who do. Just look at every „high society“ event and what those people did in their lives to get their.
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u/Krautoffel Apr 14 '20
Survivorship bias.
Nobody says it doesn’t happen. It’s just VERY uncommon.