Hard work alone doesn't determine success or worthiness. Michael Phelps won Olympic gold partly because of natural physical advantages, not just effort. Tying what you deserve to how hard you work creates a false loop that ignores luck and circumstance.
That's the biggest trap that there is, right? We have this love affair with hard work, and we believe that work is what makes you deserving of a thing, right? Let's put it in a different analogy. Sports. You think the person who works the hardest wins the Olympics? You think that the top 25 or 100 or 1,000 people in the world probably work about the same amount? Michael Phelps win all those medals because he worked a little bit harder than the second place guy? We love though to be like, oh, he works so hard. No, he didn't. The dude was gifted with flippers of feet and like, and like 7-foot wingspan, and he worked hard. But when we tie our outcome to hard work, always going to be stuck in this loop because you're not working harder than a janitor, you're not working harder than a guy in a construction site, you're not working harder than someone breaking rocks. Like, whatever it is, the reality is you don't deserve it more than they do because deserving has nothing to do with work.
