> I don't know if it's just that life is so random that the effect of hard work gets washed out by random life choices or what. It's also plausible that working

> I don't know if it's just that life is so random that the effect of hard work gets washed out by random life choices or what. It's also plausible that working hard just puts you in a very non-creative mindset and creativity is what gets most of the work done in a complex environment in the end. Don't overestimate how much actual work is getting done by "hard working" people. They put in the time, but procrastination doesn't stop just because you work hard. And that certainly includes the types of "productive" procrastination that doesn't look/feel like procrastination, like making Figures/Powerpoints more pretty or doing another rewrite on a piece of text nobody is ever going to do more with than glance at. Seriously, otherwise intelligent people can spent an hour re-writing a single email.