The other side of this coin, the far bigger side of the coin, if you will, is that you can be one of the uncountable people who "worked their behinds off, day-in and day-out" and never hit it big. This is true not only of sports teams and movie casts, but Silicon Valley start-up employee rosters and Fortune 500 upper management ranks.
This is the mentality that makes people think that the “rich” and “successful” must either be lucky or alternately, they must have done something wrong by default.
Half true, half motivational speaker "you can be anything you want to be" happy-talk to keep you on the treadmill all your life. Again, you can be as good of a software engineer as a guy who's already got a million dollars worth of google stock, but maybe you didn't live here when they were interviewing for that position. Or any of a million other differences that have nothing to do with your skill.
Asserting that luck can never have anything to do with the success of Person A vs Person B is simply foul propaganda to explain away the simple fact that we cannot all be millionaires, so many of the rest of us are working our behinds off, day-in and day-out, simply to enrich those higher up in the economic food chain.
IOW: ‘Success is Preparation, meeting Opportunity.’
I'm sorry, that's so far from the truth, it pains me to read what you said.
Working hard, striving for excellence in what you do not only leads many to success, but those who don't reap big financially (and there are some) reap in spades the developed character of honesty, loyalty, and the capacity to deal with life in a whole different dimension. Developed character is its own reward.
Long ago I heard this quote from George Gobel (successful entertainer at the end of his life): "It took me thirty years to become an overnight success." You might want to think about that for a while........
That's an envious statement, which is leftist loser thinking. Envy is a side-effect of excessive vanity. Many higher on the economic food chain are surprisingly humble people, humble enough to do the work and suffer the failures to get there. They have little to do with their excess wealth but wisely allocate their capital to create jobs and opportunity for others. Their wealth may or may not bring them more happiness. If you want to experience more moments of hedonistic euphoria than a rich person, become heroin addict.
Yes, but working hard for something gives you a much better chance for success than sitting back and waiting for things to come to you.
No, not everybody who wants to get rich and works hard for it becomes wealthy. But I'll bet on that person to have a better life than people who sit on their backsides giving as little effort as possible blaming others for their situation.