Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life
As trite as it sounds, &quot;Success = Hard Work + Opportunity&quot; is still the default equation that makes the most sense to me.<p>And while people from all strata of life work very hard, opportunities are obviously and incredibly unequally distributed (and perhaps becoming more so?).<p>If you were born middle-class in US&#x2F;Canada 20 - 40 years ago, your access to opportunities to improve your station were&#x2F;are immense. Layer on your ethnicity, if your parents were in a stable relationship, if you grew up in relative safety, if you had a decent education... hard not to think that your opportunities were 10x or 100x someone who had none of those things.<p>But you also need to define &quot;success&quot;. To this crowd, is &quot;success&quot; merely &quot;leading a better life&quot;? I&#x27;d argue most of us already have this as our default reality. I.e. the gradual reward for working hard via promotions and relative safety of career.<p>I remember after my startup was acquired, a few people would say to me (well-meaning obviously) &quot;wow it&#x27;s great your hard work paid off!&quot;. And I just said something like &quot;thanks, ya, lots of people work a lot harder than me but didn&#x27;t get the same outcome - so there was a lot of luck involved too!&quot; etc. Even thinking of my own immigrant grandparents - what THEY did was HARD.<p>I think about those exchanges often. Tech -- at this particular moment in history -- disproportionately rewards &quot;hard work&quot; (which many of us find fun anyways). Or perhaps better to say that Tech provides access to the right kind of opportunities that allow for a DEFAULT &quot;life gets better&quot;, with the possibilities of &quot;life suddenly gets 100x better&quot;.