Empirically the answer seems to be that working hard is a necessary if not sufficient condition for doing great things, and for getting rich in particular.
It's an interesting question why you can't simply find suckers who like to work hard, and get rich off their efforts while you sit back and do nothing. One reason is that they'd have to be stupid to let you do that, and it's not much use having stupid people working for you, no matter how hard they work.
Another reason is that having people work for you is not zero work for you. You have to tell them what to do, and often this requires a great deal of effort. In fact, it's probably not possible to have good ideas about what to do in some field without at some point having worked hard in it yourself.
This doesn't truly answer your objections, but one company I've always been fascinated by is McDonald's. It's always amazed me that they can take relatively uneducated individuals and get them to turn out a hot meal every 90 seconds.
I'm convinced that the real money comes from designing good systems. I once heard that the reason McDonald's color codes the register buttons is so that even employees who are basically illiterate can hit the right button quickly and accurately. Brilliant.
The problem with being stuck in a system like McDonald's is that even though it makes the least skilled/productive people much more efficient, it also puts a cap at how efficient you can ultimately get. I suspect the most successful people are the ones that are able to recognize when they are trapped in someone else's system, especially if it's inefficient, and break out of it.
I suspect that's the key to success in entrepreneurship too, designing good systems. What most people don't realize is that the money doesn't come from mastering systems, but from designing and creating them. The guys running scientology are making a lot more money than the guys trying to get to Thetan level whatever.
Not that designing systems isn't work, but at least it's the kind of work that one might enjoy even if one doesn't enjoy toiling away in traditional institutions.
It's hard to explain well since no one ever talks about this stuff, but hopefully this post sort of makes sense.
Read Jim Collins' Built to Last. His thesis is that visionary corporations don't result from markets or products or ideas, but from cultures. Entrepreneurs whose companies survive for centuries work very hard to create a whole system of values and beliefs and purpose and then institutionalize them into every aspect of the organization. Clock-builders, not time-tellers.
I'll check it out. To use organization behavior speak, I'd bet that culture is to knowledge workers what systemic design is to routinized labor. That being said, I think there is a lot more money to be made from designing systems than from designing culture for three reasons:
A) Everyone knows about the importance of corporate culture for knowledge workers. While different businesses might require different best practices, there is still going to be a lot of overlap between different companies with "good" cultures. WHEREAS few people know how to design efficient systems for routinized labor, and the systems will be very specific to the company.
B) Routinized labor scales much more, so creating good systems gives you a lot more leverage than creating good cultures.
C) Knowledge workers don't create wealth in predictable patterns. With the best culture all you can do is make it more likely that someone will create something of value. But with a good system you are actually increasing measurably increasing your yield, just like finding a better catalyst for a chemical equation.
edit: Of course this isn't to say that it isn't possible to design systems for knowledge work also. Public schools are an excellent example of this. (Although, strictly speaking, schools are designed to be like factories so maybe not.)
I read 'Good to Great' and wasn't impressed. It's not bad... but I wouldn't call it "great", either. He strikes me as some sort of "management guru", who is very unhackerish compared to other business books that actually introduce clever ideas.
I know we're diverging from the original topic a bit, but I'd like to make a couple of comments about 'Good to Great.' I enjoyed it solely on the fact that there was a tremendous amount of research and data mining involved. He set it up as close to experimental standards as you could get in that area and pulled out the threads with the highest correlation. Adding buzzwords like hedgehog to it, however, is another story.
Since I have a mild fetish for management books, I've drawn a couple conclusions on the whole genre itself. 'Clever ideas' are subjective. I feel that if a book gives you a straight-line recipe to success, then the message has failed because it has overlooked the nuance and gray(grey?) areas that is associated with running organizations and working with people.
"I'm convinced that the real money comes from designing good systems."
This is also the thesis of "The E-Myth Revisited" by Michael E. Gerber, which I'd recommend given the above comment. It's an easy read that talks about developing systems not just for profit, but also in a way that is ethically sound to both you and your employees and your customers. The book speaks mostly about small retail franchices (an example of a hotel is also given), but it is easily applicable to other areas.
You are bringing a very good point. I was not implying that one should not work at all and run a sweat shop, but rather break the whole process into piece and find people who can do it better than you at a lower cost (physical, mental and financial). As I said earlier it is more like using my money . to fund the company or use Angel's money. I will go with other people money and now I also think I will go with other people hard work if I can outsource mine.
How do you each define "working hard"? Is it the difficulty of the problem you're trying to solve or is it more so the time spent thinking about and/or physically solving the problem?
I ask this because I often find that at my job, the work is more frustrating than hard. Yet, at the end of the work day, I still feel drained physically and mentally, although the work is not challenging (or satisfying).
his question is abstract, which is evidence of an individual unable to concentrate on a demanding task, "including" the one of understanding what you just said.
> Empirically the answer seems to be that working hard is a necessary if not sufficient condition
I think the empirical evidence overwhelmingly indicates that connections are way more important than working hard. The majority of rich people got there mostly by knowing the right powerful and well positioned people. Modern tech is anomalous regarding the value of hard work and skill. It also accounts for a small fraction of the wealthy.
Carnegie wrote explicitly against hard work and in favor of the value of networks. I'm sure the other robber barons agreed.
Read "They Made America" and see page after page of brilliant inventors of the last 200 years who died broke, but whose inventions produced fortunes for other well positioned people.
It's an interesting question why you can't simply find suckers who like to work hard, and get rich off their efforts while you sit back and do nothing. One reason is that they'd have to be stupid to let you do that, and it's not much use having stupid people working for you, no matter how hard they work.
Another reason is that having people work for you is not zero work for you. You have to tell them what to do, and often this requires a great deal of effort. In fact, it's probably not possible to have good ideas about what to do in some field without at some point having worked hard in it yourself.