Please spare me mindless stupidity. Only a complete moron would say that working through failure after failure until you finely found something that works through your determination and effort...... is luck.
The only one here guilty of mindless stupidity is you. If hard work equals success then failure proves that your premise is false: Hard work does not equal success.
Second, I didn't mention celebrities, and this is the first time in 20 years of talking about this topic, that someone brought up Joel Olsteen in a discussion about wealthy elite and how they became wealthy.
There's that mindless stupidity again. I'm not accusing you of celebrity worship of Hollywood celebrities, but of celebrity worship of the mega-rich. Joel Olsteen was a parenthetical comment about celebrity worship of the wealthy.
A software engineer does not live out a middle class life. More like and upper class life. Unless you think $150K is middle class....
In the places of tech industry concentration, I'd say $150K is middle-class. Even a thousand miles from Google and Microsoft offices, I don't consider $150K to break out of the upper-middle class. In any case, you don't consider that mega-wealthy, do you?
Second, I highly doubt your counter-factual opinion. Bill Gates was driven to start a company, just like he did before. If the IBM deal had fallen through, he would have started another company, and kept going.
You don't think there are thousands of hard workers who started companies, but who aren't mega-rich? The only thing to distinguish Bill Gates from thousands of others is: Luck. I've already pointed out a few examples of his luck. You have only wishful speculation that he would have still been mega-rich if IBM didn't out-source DOS.
Most of the super wealthy just kept going until they found something that worked.
Your thinking is completely backwards. We could be talking about lottery winners and you would be proudly declaring their virtue of continuing buying lottery tickets until they won, and insisting they won because of persistence, not luck. Yet, there are millions of persisted lottery ticket buyers who don't win. The only thing that distinguishes the lottery winner from the persistent loser is luck.
Phil Robertson was literally laughed out of the store, when he first started trying to sell his duck callers. But he kept going. He was laughed out of the store again. He kept going. He kept trying to sell his duck callers until some stores started selling them.
1) Being lucky enough to be chosen for a cable show is what make Robertson wealthy, not his duck whistle.
2) Being lucky enough to have a single idea to allegedly improve a duck whistle is what made a better duck whistle, if it were better (the patent expired long before he was wealthy).
3) Being lucky enough tap into the public's fickleness and becoming a big celebrity rather than just another guy on a cable show. His merchandise sales follow his celebrity.
Phil Robertson would never of gotten rich trying to sell a duck whistle, no matter how determined he was to sell it.
The more you speak, the more you prove yourself an idiot. Duck Commander was a multi-million dollar company, with revenues of over $20 Million, in 2010. The Duck Dynasty series didn't start until 2012.
Phil Robertson was a multi-millionaire before he was ever put on TV in any capacity.
"We could be talking about lottery winners"
Only a moron would compare the two.
"Joel Olsteen was a parenthetical comment about celebrity worship of the wealthy."
No it's not. I don't know anyone who even knows who he is. If I go to work, and ask people who Joel Olsteen is, not a single one will even recognize the name. If that's your idea of celebrity worship, then apparently the worshipers is a very small crowd. I only know his name because I'm in the Evangelical Christian community.
"You don't think there are thousands of hard workers who started companies, but who aren't mega-rich?"
Mega-Rich? Or rich? Not everyone who starts their own company is "mega-rich" if you define that as billionaires.
But if you mean rich... and successful.... yeah most are.
The exceptions would be people who started a business, and it failed, and they just gave up. Well giving up excludes you from the hard working category. If you fail, and just give up, that isn't working hard.
Working hard means when you face failure, you try again. And fail, and try again. Until you succeed.
I worked for a guy who was an immigrant from Egypt. He opened a company here in my home town. His first company failed. He tried again. Another company failed. He tried again. This time he was successful, and moving thousands of dollars in product every single week. He drove a Mercedes, and had a upper-middle class home, worth over $200K, and made good coin.
That wasn't luck, that was working hard, and putting in effort, until he found something that worked.
"If hard work equals success then failure proves that your premise is false"
Wrong. Failure is a fact of life. Working hard, means working through failure until you succeed. Those that fail, and only fail, do so because they quit, or they never learn. If you keep doing stupid, and never learn to do better than stupid, that's not working hard, that's working dumb.
Anyone can achieve success if they keep trying, and work smart. I know guys that run their own trucking company. They started off learning to drive truck, then working for a company for $30K a year. Now they have their own trucking company, and make $200K a year.
It wasn't brilliance. It wasn't luck. They saved money, instead of spending it, and bought their own truck. Then they saved money instead of spending it, and bought a second truck, and hired someone to drive it. Then they saved money and bought a third, an fourth. And when of the guys crashed the truck, he saved and bought a truck to replace it.
It's not luck. And failure didn't stop them, they simply worked through the failure.
You are still wrong.
