&gt;<i>You sound like some bitter guy who&#x27;s tinkered around with some self help stuff and gave up after a bit. Or maybe you haven&#x27;t even tried.</i><p>And you sound like a guy who likes ad-hominens (and still believes in self-help books).<p>&gt;<i>For one Bill Gates who worked hard to become who he is, there are tons of other people who were in similar or even better situations than him who didn&#x27;t.</i><p>You forgot the tons of other people who worked as hard or more hard than Bill Gates, but didn&#x27;t get anywhere. Which is the whole point of this thread.<p>Nobody said that Bill Gates didn&#x27;t work hard. Just that working hard doesn&#x27;t mean much as a means to be a billionaire for three reasons:<p>1) You can work the same or even 2x as hard, in the same business, and get nowhere. Or do you think that failed Microsoft competitors didn&#x27;t work just as hard, or weren&#x27;t smart enough?<p>2) It&#x27;s many times easier for someone with the backhistory of Bill Gates (the family, the education given to him, being white etc) to be able to even try to do what he did, that for people with less fortunate back histories. And that has nothing to do with smarts or hard work. There are tons of hardworking smart blacks, latinos, LGBT, Nigerians, Sudanese, Venezuelans, etc. Just being white and middle class (or upper middle class even better) means you play life in &quot;easy mode&quot;.<p>3) And obviously you can work 2x or 10x as hard and&#x2F;or smart in another business, as a scientist, coal-miner, surgeon etc and never get nowhere near making millions, much less billions.<p>Of course you also overestimated how hard Bill Gates actually worked to get where he got -- because you thought backwards to support your belief: &quot;oh, he is a billionaire therefore he must have worked much harder than people that aren&#x27;t billionaires to get there&quot;.<p>Instead of making an empirical observation: lots of company owners, in startups etc, bleed sweat for their company, often working 16 hours a day, toiling for years etc, and then fail. And that others are often made millionaires for being in the right place at the right time (Google&#x27;s first cook, for one).<p>Gates was smart and worked hard indeed, but there were lots of CS pioneers who worked harded and were much smarter, without billions to show for it.<p>In fact if Digital Research&#x27;s boss haven&#x27;t blown IBM lucrative DOS contract for totally BS reasons, Microsoft would probably have gotten nowhere fast.