When in doubt, apply Occam's razor. Consider a room full of 1000 coin flippers. Each flips his coin, and if it comes up tails, he must leave the room. After ten

When in doubt, apply Occam's razor. Consider a room full of 1000 coin flippers. Each flips his coin, and if it comes up tails, he must leave the room. After ten flips, there will be likely be one player who has flipped 10 heads in a row. He will be hailed as an expert coin flipper and make millions writing a book about how he did it. What's more, unlike coin flipping, money has memory. Having money makes it easier to get more. Capital provides interest income with no labor required, and more significantly, investors are much quicker to invest in someone with a track record. Hard work and intelligence can buy you the opportunity and provide a good standard of living, but they alone cannot make you rich, at least not in the short time frames we tend to think in.