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Comment by hpoe | Hacker News Reader

I see this a lot and I know that there are a lot of factors that contribute to someone's overall success and failure. But there is the saying that "when opportunity knocks hard work is what answers" it just seems to me that working hard at what ever you are doing is always a good thing even if it doesnt guarantee success it seems like laziness always guarantees failure.

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The concept of "laziness" is bulls*t to me - humans have an innate drive to survive, learn & be curious about surroundings, plan and gather resources.

The only way to halt that is by experiencing something out of your control: bad parenting & trauma, burn-out, depression, ADHD. If someone wants to fix their "laziness" they gotta get help for those.

Is not working hard always a result of lazyness? what even is lazyness? Humans have an inate sense of fairness, if you look around and see people getting more for no clear reason, get a sense the game wont reward you fairly and choose to focus on other things, is that lazyness?

> Humans have an inate sense of fairness, if you look around and see people getting more for no clear reason, get a sense the game wont reward you fairly and choose to focus on other things, is that lazyness?

No, but it might lead to it. You might see the CEO getting a million a year, but you don't see him financing his company from his hard-saved own money, possibly risking everything he has, and putting in 12 hour days for years to not go under. You only hear of his paycheck at the end of the month. Throwing your towel because you think his current work is worthless does not do you any good.

Now, sure, there are lazy CEOs who inherited the company or got lucky otherwise. It's not fair to some extent. But simply defaulting to doing nothing does not help you get anywhere, either - you're just hurting yourself.

So, if you think someone is getting more than you, you should really check whether the is a non-obvious reason they're getting more and whether the doing nothing in spite really brings you forward.

A lot of rewarding jobs open to everyone are really hard and it's fair game to say you don't care that much about success, playing games is fine. But just complaining because "they have more and I want it too" is laziness (pointing out actual inequality and proposing solutions, on the other hand, is not).

It's a good way to get the game to reward you even less, and then to blame the game for doing so. That might comfort people, but it doesn't help them very much...

I think that's what the article was trying to relate to when it wrote, "If you’re not prepared when an opportunity comes along, what the hell difference does it make? If you’re not prepared, you won’t be able to capitalize on an opportunity if one happens to come along. But you still have to be lucky to get that opportunity."

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