The Myth of Getting Ahead Through Hard Work
One of the dumbest questions I’ve ever been asked is if I’m currently working my dream job. I’m a huge stats nerd who is currently getting paid far more than I need to work with data every day. So of course, my answer is…“No!” Shockingly, I did not grow up dreaming of becoming a Data Scientist. Sure, when people used to ask me “what do you want to do when you grow up,” I would typically answer something like “Statistician.” But this was a lie. My real dream was to play in the NBA.
As a kid who hit 6-foot in early Middle School, this dream might not have been as far fetched as it sounds. I knew my monster growth spurt would continue through High School. All I needed was to get to grow one more foot and I would have a 17% chance of making the league! To bump these odds up to 100%, all I would have to do was work my ass off. I started running and lifting weights for the first time in my life. I brought a basketball with me everywhere I went. Even though the park where my brothers played Little League didn’t have a hoop, I could still practice my ball handling (one of my brother’s coaches actually noticed this and successfully petitioned our suburb to install a hoop in the park). And I practiced shooting in our backyard every chance I got, typically more than an hour a day. One day, our neighbor across the alley walked up to me. He told me he was impressed by all the work I was putting in. “Larry Bird made it because he shot for hours every day in the school gym. Keep it up!”¹
I reached a height of 6'2" the summer before 9th grade. But then disaster struck: I would only grow one more inch throughout all of High School. Thankfully, my hard work hadn’t been for nothing. I was able to start for my Freshman basketball team, which was quite the accomplishment for a kid who grew up extremely scrawny and uncoordinated. And I was able to parlay all the running I had done into a fairly successful High School cross country career. But my hopes at making the league were completely dashed when I failed to make the varsity basketball team as a sophomore. Yes, Michael Jordan also failed to make his varsity team as a sophomore. Spoiler alert: I’m not Michael Jordan. Or Larry Bird.
In America, we grow up being told that you can do anything you want if you just work hard enough. You’re struggling to survive? You must be lazy. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! You want to become a multi-millionaire? Dedicate yourself to the grindset! You want to make the NBA? Just work a little harder! Let me get one thing out of the way: I‘m not saying hard work is useless. I still enjoy playing rec-league basketball in part because of all the work I put in during middle school and high school. I am certainly a better player than I would have been otherwise. On the margins, hard work absolutely matters. You will never reach your full potential without it. Many people will say this is all that matters anyway. The problem is that society sends us mixed messages. On one hand, there’s no reason to compare yourself to others, the most important thing is to be the best YOU can be. On the other hand, all the rich and famous people on Earth simply got where they are because they worked harder than you. Jeff Bezos simply worked billions of times harder than the average Amazon warehouse worker, which is why they make $15 an hour while he’s the third richest man on Earth. It has nothing to do with the almost $250,000 loan he got from his parents. The guy from my high school who was the lead in every musical and play since his freshman year isn’t a movie star, and it’s not because he isn’t as handsome as Brad Pitt. It’s simply because Brad Pitt worked so much harder. And of course, Larry Bird only made the NBA because he worked so much harder than me.
I feel the need to clear the air again, because I don’t want to be misconstrued as saying something I’m not. Yes; Brad, Larry, and Jeffrey all certainly worked very hard to get where they are today. Not all absurdly handsome men are movie stars, not all athletic 6'9" dudes are NBA legends, and not everyone who was loaned $250,000 by their parents is a billionaire.² But the point of this article is not to disparage the people who “make it”; rather, it’s to have an honest conversation about those who don’t. Hard work is not the end all be all. Just because someone is struggling to pay the bills doesn’t mean they’re lazy. In fact, many of the poorest people in America are the hardest working. For many, there even seems to be an INVERSE relationship between how hard you work and how much money you make. Anyone who’s worked both a white and blue-collar job will tell you they worked MUCH harder and made far less money doing the latter.
The final objection I’ll handle is by far the easiest. If you ask an economist why Jeff Bezos has billions of times more money than his warehouse workers, they’ll tell you it’s because he creates billions of times more value. Amazon (and its many warehouse jobs) would not exist without Bezos’s vision and execution in creating one of the largest companies in the world. But whether or not you agree with this claim doesn’t matter, because “value created” is not the same as “hard work.” Perhaps Kim Kardashian provides significantly more value to society than your average retail worker, but she certainly doesn’t work significantly harder. That’s why comments like this come across as so out of touch. Millions of Americans do “get their ass up and work” every single day and never sniff the level of success they’re promised. So even if you want to insist that poor people don’t add enough value to society, it’s time to stop chastising them for being lazy.
My favorite example of someone who fell for this narrative was a friend of mine from High School. Unlike me, he was able to make his varsity team as a sophomore and started his senior year. Did he work hard to get there? No question. Is the reason he made the team over me because he just worked that much harder? No. He was much more athletic than me. But he didn’t necessarily see it that way. One day, we had a conversation about our favorite NBA players. This is a conversation that stays with me to this day because of how delusional it was:
Me: “So who’s your favorite player?”
Him: “I love Steph Curry. The dude is proof that anyone can get to the NBA by just working hard enough.”
Me: *spits out my drink*
The idea that Steph is an underdog story who worked his way to the NBA is heavily overstated, to say the least. Sure, he wasn’t super highly recruited out of high school, and he certainly worked extremely hard to get to where he’s at today. However, there’s one super important fact this narrative leaves out: his dad was in the NBA. Not only does Steph possess the genetics of a professional athlete, he also had access to the best trainers, coaches, nutritionists, etc., growing up. He is an extremely elusive athlete with ungodly aim and hand-eye coordination. And despite the perception that he is “short,” he is the same height as me: 6'3", putting him at 2 standard deviations above the rest of the population. And unlike me, a lumbering rec-league big-man with no ball-handling skills, Steph is one of the quickest players and best ball-handlers in the game. Ironically, Steph is not the poster-boy of the Protestant work ethic; rather, he’s proof that hard work can only get you so far.
Footnotes:
1: This, of course, was a gross oversimplification. Larry Bird may have looked un-athletic, but in reality he was an exceptionally strong 6'9" player with ungodly aim and hand-eye coordination, who was also extremely quick for his size. The only real similarity between mine and Larry’s game is that we’re both white. Which certainly plays into people thinking he needed to “work way harder than everyone else” to become good at basketball.
2: I find this tweet absurd on its face, because it still acknowledges that creating a company like Amazon requires having connections to the upper echelons of society. Yes, not every rich kid creates an Amazon, but everyone who creates a massive company needs massive amounts of help along the way
