Yeah being an extremely lazy person myself, I can see why such perspective is infuriating. Personally I’ve even spent a great deal of time battling that false perception: That hard-work is the key to success. Well, I can’t write general recipes, but my personal experience tells me that it really is not.

But, that doesn’t mean that I can fully sympathize with your perspective either. The way I see it, people cling to the concept of hard-work because it is incredibly easier to quantify and explain than what really is the key here, which I believe is passion. Hard-work is among the most significant signs of passion, so yes if there are people who will work on weekends on their own accord, statistically they do have a higher chance of success, simple because they are more passionate about what they do, which simply implies that they simple desire the success more than others.

In that sense, yes you can come up with a really good guess about how successful someone will become by merely knowing how much they want to be successful. I am not going with cliche slogans here, simply put the more you desire something it will become less probable that you will encounter an obstacle which persuades you to let it go, which will significantly increase your chance of achieving it.

So, just to summarize:

• yes, hard-work is not the key here, but it is indicator of passion, which actually is.
• nope, passion alone is not enough to become successful, but it does get you a long way.
• however you define your own success, being passionate about what they do actually means you are spending your life merely doing what you do, which even subjectively is a metric for success hard to beat.

P.S. just based on experience, yes, working remotely can be useful but it has really limited use cases. Simply put, when you have a team, what you need mostly is the team and not the work any single individual on the team can do (because in most cases, you can find a team-player that can do the same and also can enhance your team’s team-ness).