Drive out to the desert. The middle of nowhere. Bring a shovel, and, for safety's sake, sunscreen, water, and some sandwiches. Spend an entire day digging a massive trench.
Boy, you sure worked hard.
Are you any richer?
Of course not. No one paid you for all that hard work.
Hard work doesn't make you rich. Persuading people to give you money makes you rich.
Now, sometimes, people will give you money in exchange for your hard work. But if you look around, you may notice that some of the hardest work — I'm talking back-breaking physical labor — is some of the worst compensated.
A wage isn't a reward for hard work. It's a bribe for valuable work. And the value of work is not inherently connected to how hard the work is.
Increasingly, valuable work relies on knowledge, and when hiring, employers use credentials as a proxy for that knowledge. Acquiring credentials costs money — actual cash laid out for tuition, and the opportunity cost of studying rather than working for a wage. Poor people often have a difficult time acquiring credentials.
Also, acquiring knowledge and/or credentials requires certain skills and aptitudes that some people simply do not have. Some people are great ditch-diggers, but no amount of studying will turn them into great engineers. They can work hard their entire lives, but because the work they perform is of limited value, they will never persuade anybody to give them lots of money in exchange for that work.
Hard work alone doesn't make you rich. If you have the right skills, and you work hard, you may become rich — but as it requires the cooperation of other people, it's far from guaranteed.
Because effort doesn’t equal cash, as stupid and contradictory as that sounds look at people who earn fortunes they don’t break their back like working class people do. The reason why is that certain jobs pay different rates as well as taxation coming into the picture, out going vs income etc. There are hundreds of reasons why but one easy reason is because life doesn’t always work that way, some people work hard and make it others get nothing but a bad back.
hard work by itself is not enough. You also need opportunity in order to become wealthy, and most people who are poor are not merely low on cash, but also systematically low on opportunity.
It’s not completely impossible to end up wealthy despite very low opportunity, but it’s extremely unlikely, even with hard work.
Let’s look at just one example that influences opportunity: the geographical spot you’re born in.
If you happen to be born in Stavanger, Norway, and you’re a 18 year old person with no education beyond compulsory school, then odds are you can still find entry-level work here such as working in fast-food and earn around $18/hour.
If you’ve got the very same skills, and are equally willing to work equally hard, yet you live in Garowe, Somalia, then odds are you can’t find any job paying even 1/10th of the above. And sure living-costs are lower, but they’re not a factor of 10 lower, so you still end up behind poorer through no fault of your own.
And in reality the gap is much larger than just a factor of 10 in salaries.
The Norwegian has access to excellent education at zero tuition, up to and including university-level, the Somali does not. The Norwegian gets cradle-to-grave health care of good quality. The Norwegian is surrounded by 100+ things specifically created to aid his progress and help him get an education and a decently paid job; there’s a lot less of ALL of this in Garowe.
And that’s just one example of a factor outside your control that has a huge influence on the opportunities you’re likely to have in your life.
Other examples of important factors include your gender, how well-educated your parents are, your race, how good parents you have, how wealthy your parents are and whether or not you’re born with any significant disabilities.
In order to get rich, you have to have many people working for you. That’s why it generally takes generations - not one lifetime - to get rich. Working by yourself will never get you rich. Even if you have a billion dollar idea, it is not likely that you can build it all by yourself without help. And then, people who are already wealthy will try to take it from you when they see that it is succeeding. It’s called a hostile takeover.
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