Agree and disagree with the premise of this article. Agree that hard work is the key to success. Disagree that hard work alone is always what leads to success. Creativity, IHMO, can’t be ‘muscled’, and creativity is a huge driving engine of innovation and progression of humanity. There are other things like that. I don’t know much about sales, but I would venture a guess that even if you work for 14-16 hours a day as a salesman, if you don’t have good social skills, the man or woman who does have them may do substantially better than you - working less hours. Yes, arguably you can become ‘better’ socially by working hard at it, but some people by the nature of their genetics and upbringing just have better social skills - without having to work so hard at it.
It’s the nature vs. nurture issue in a slightly different way. Both are important.
The other issue that can’t be ignored, if one is honest about the world, is that deceitful, selfish, manipulative behavior is also, unfortunately, sometimes the fuel to success. A substantial number of ‘success’ stories involve stealing other peoples ideas, intellectual property, and contributions - often after many years of hard work by the people who wind up the victims. Some Nobel prizes have been won that way. In many circles, working hard just gets you tired, if you aren’t capable of watching your back.
I don’t know.
We have shipped entirely too many jobs to China.
Bring back jobs to America. We currently buy (last year) 440 billion dollars of goods imported from China.
We only sold last year, 122 billion dollars to China.
We are sending our jobs away. Bring them back to America.
It does seem that people who are career successful are successful early in life. I’m not sure if this is a credit to nature or if as one ages their energies are diverted elsewhere (e.g. being a successful parent).
Then again, perhaps we only read about the young successful and their IPOs (not that success needs to result in a need for investors or selling your business to shareholders, but it is a visible metric) as it is considered more newsworthy.