A question for those who are irked at the "If you truly want to have money, you will." comment in the article. Where do you draw the line between circumstance a

A question for those who are irked at the "If you truly want to have money, you will." comment in the article. Where do you draw the line between circumstance and personal engagement? I used to find those sort of comments naive. A big part of that was because of what I thought was a reasonable thought experiment. In particular if every person tomorrow was replaced with Elon Musk. What would happen? Well not a whole lot - you'd certainly have Elons flipping burgers and scrubbing toilets. After all it would be literally impossible for everybody to be the CEO and entrepreneur. And so if we can even Elon scrubbing toilets, how could it ever be reasonable to suggest that everybody could succeed if they just tried harder? What changed my view has been life experience. Even if the number of individuals that can achieve great things is a sort of zero sum game, I don't think that the lack of possibility of success is the thing holding individuals back. What does seem to hold individuals back is them, for whatever reason, never seeming to understand what it takes to succeed. People will try to find a better job or whatever, but rarely will they try to independently monetize what skills they already have, or teach them skills with that goal in mind. That is not to say these people are lazy -- many will work themselves to the bone even when it's not really expected of them (the "overtime as a badge of honor" as the article phrases it), but it's like the idea of spending some of that energy to try to do their own thing is something that just doesn't seem to register with them. And I think that's what this article is really hitting on, all be in an unintentionally less than tactful way. And I also think that's why there's about a million different derivatives of the quote from just as many successful individuals that 'doors don't open themselves.' And of course once you fail, which you will - try again. The advice is so ubiquitous that I think people no longer even think about the wisdom within. We can even go back to the one Shakespeare quote most every person knows: "To be, or not to be, that is the question."