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> Just work hard and it will be fine.

I didn't say work hard. Nor did I say it will be fine. I said it IMPROVES THE ODDS OF SUCCESS.

> they also got talent

I don't buy that. When I was younger, I enjoyed competitive ballroom dancing. I was terrible at it, but I kept at it for years, and finally was able to get on the floor in a competition with the good dancers. I'd get complimented on my "talent". What a laugh. Talent is good for about 1%. The other 99% comes from working at it.

> doing something is usually better. But just doing something will not bring you closer to success.

You just contradicted yourself.

> Not doing crimes is such an odd thing to mention here

Considering the number of people in jail who thought it was a good idea, it seems an obvious thing to mention.

Dropping out and doing drugs is a choice. Odds of being a success dim considerably if you take that route.

But it isn't my definition of a loser. If you read my posts consistently, a loser is a person who believes he does not have agency in his life. They drift along, never trying, always making excuses, always blaming bad luck. Their journey through life is predictable.

You can always tell the winners, too. He may be poor, middle class, or wealthy. But he's always excited to face the next day, always has ideas he's working on, always fun to talk to, never dwells on past failures, and most importantly, takes responsibility for his life - the good and the bad.

You can always tell the winners?

So scammers like MLM/Gurus/Influencers and the rest are seen als winners.

Still they are what they are scammers.

That single person responsibility thing is nice in theory but breaks really fast in the real world.

Yes it works for people who already had a great start and they can decide.

But that for me is a pretty middle class western world view and has led to were we are now.

If that is good or bad I don't know but could it be better? Sure.

First we need to understand that sometimes things are not in our hands. Sometimes the system is rigged against us (not always). If we then start to make the play field fair for everybody then your theory would work but I don't see this happening in the next 10 years.

>Just work hard and it will be fine. Which if you look was never true.

I don't know, but I still think the first strategy beats the hell out of the alternative: "don't do anything and wait for life to pamper you" - because it won't.

Life is a fight and one's attitude, while not the only factor, will go quite far towards determining the outcome. A can-do attitude, optimistic and oriented towards success will often encourage a person to take the necessary steps and gambles.

While a victim mentality, a losing attitude will discourage a person and make it lose the fight before even starting.

I mean these sound nice in a book or in a blog post but in real life.

Attitude to fight everybody and be better then everybody can lead to being alone because nobody wants to be your friend or only as long as you have money or other stuff.

Yes some people have victim mentality but again just because someone has a winning attitude does not mean he/she will win.

The odds are bigger of course if you do something but again how much? from 0.001 to 0.002? or 0.05? Just doing stuff is most often not a better advise then doing nothing.

Its more important to do the thing that brings you near to your goal. Which these days is taking hack after life hack. Which usually only benefits the people selling you stuff.

What about the person who has to work 2 jobs? yes they still can learn that 1 hour when they have a break.

But in most of the definitions they would be a looser which they are not.

Sometimes it is the systems fault. Sometimes it is random luck or misfortune.

What has a bigger impact on you being healthy and wealthy then doing hard work?

Your parents being healthy and wealthy.

If you look at studies this is the biggest impact not working hard.

If you put in the work on guitar, your odds of having some kind of success are very high.

The degree of success is often largely beyond your control. Maybe it'll be weekly shows at the local Holiday Inn. Maybe it'll be the cover of Rolling Stone. That part of it doesn't correlate to the amount of effort all that much.

But having any success vs having no success is very largely correlated to the amount of work you put in.

Get a guitar and start practicing is so delusional.

The guitarist Buckethead is a great example. He isn't just great on guitar, he also wears a mask and KFC bucket on his head and is good with nunchucks. The idea "talent" and hard work wins out in the end is just complete bullshit.

Marketing is far far more important. That seems incredibly obvious.

The idea of talent and hard work is some kind of Christian residual value that is still hanging around even though marketing dominates in literally every domain in the modern world.

If you want success you need to find your KFC bucket, mask and nunchucks because most domains can't really be differentiated by the actual task at hand.