> The lesson is that you need to figure out what you're good at and where you have opportunity, and then work hard in those areas. Just working hard is a recipe for failure for most people.
You are right, but too often what people take from this is that the hard work doesn't matter and the people who succeed only did so because of random talent and/or opportunity. No, if you have talent and opportunity but don't work hard, you still won't succeed.
But the people who are really successful in a field don't find it hard work to do that. They genuinely enjoy it, and find it extremely satisfying to do what the rest of us would consider to be a gruelling schedule.
There's also a cohort of people who are insanely talented in a field but don't really enjoy it that much, and find it hard work. One of my best friends is an incredibly talented artist, but burnt out doing commercial work in his 20's and rarely puts pencil to paper these days. I consider it a criminal waste of talent, but it's his life ;)
Then there's the cohort of people who are a bit talented in the field, but have decided for whatever reason (usually parents) that this is what they'll do with their life, and hard work is how they're going to do it. Watching them beat their heads against the brick wall is horrifying.
In the end, we need to avoid survivor bias. For every person who says "I did this, and you can too!" look for other people who did the same and yet didn't succeed. Learn from them, too.
Life is so much more complicated. One could be born into success. Luck is a factor. Understanding and exploiting risk is a factor. Persistence is a factor - you could continue to fail until succeed, or you could continue to fail until you teach yourself what is needed to succeed. You could have brilliant ideas but no capital and still fail even though you work hard and are talented. Reducing to success to two or three factors may be true in some cases but those two or three factors may be different in the larger set of successful cases.
You are right, but too often what people take from this is that the hard work doesn't matter and the people who succeed only did so because of random talent and/or opportunity. No, if you have talent and opportunity but don't work hard, you still won't succeed.