Working Hard, Anyway

HARD WORK leads to success, we like to say. In fact, hard work leads to many different things, depending on circumstances, including failure, fatigue, frustration, resentment, physical and mental illness, pride, satisfaction, good health, among much else. It depends on what the hard work entails, and how other people respond to it. Exhaustive, verified research has in fact identified with great accuracy what factors predict and determine a person's success, success defined as personal wealth and social status. The factors include hard work, luck, age, gender, intelligence, education, race, among others. Research has shown the proportions in which the various factors contribute to success in the United States. The future success of anyone can be predicted, within a surprising small range of error, by isolating which factors are most and least influential. This is done by examining the precise circumstances of tens of thousands of people in a meaningful population sample, rather like asking survey question to several hundred or thousand people and from their answers extrapolating for the entire population. Poll taking and surveys yield remarkably accurate results; so does research concerning predicting the future success to any particular person by including all contributing factors. And now for the answer to the question: what single factor most determines a person's, any person's future success? (drum roll) The single most influential factors determining a person's future financial success and social status is the wealth of the person's parents. Not hard work, not luck, neither smarts nor education, but rather, parental wealth. And before you vehemently deny this, please bear in mind, you are not arguing with the author of this essay, you are arguing with sociologists and computes at places like, you guessed it, Harvard, M.I.T, among many others. Go argue with them. They will strike down your arguments like summer flies and present facts to you which will leave you in the dust, unable to other than nod in agreement and intellectual defeat. Harvard and M.I.T. people have a way of doing that, because they never shoot off their mouths unless they know exactly what they're talking about, guaranteed. One's lot in life is determined, more than anything else, by how much money one's parents have. Of course nobody like to believe that, and Americans in particular like to deny any reality which conflicts with their emotional well being. Reality, however, has the annoying habit of being irrefutable.