Yes, working hard is not an absolute determiner of success. It may not even be a majority determiner, depending upon your personal experiences or philosophy as

Yes, working hard is not an absolute determiner of success. It may not even be a majority determiner, depending upon your personal experiences or philosophy as well as the domain in which you're trying to achieve success. Winning the lottery is an absurdly extreme example of one domain where luck is provably a majority determiner. It's funny as a comic, but that domain doesn't really map onto many other career domains where hard work is a lot more important. One thing is pretty certain, though. Doing nothing at all leads nothing at all. If you don't get up out of bed, eat, do something - you die rather quickly. If you barely get out of bed to eat, but don't take care of yourself, you limp along through life and probably die early from lack of proper nutrition, exercise, and mental stimulation. Somewhere along the spectrum from doing absolutely nothing to killing yourself with work is a sweet spot for achieving success. My observation is that the people who succeed spend more time on the side of that spectrum toward working their tails off than on the side of doing nothing. So yeah, it's a funny comic. It makes a point to remember, but it's definitely not the final word on the value of hard work.