“Working hard will not guarantee that you will be successful, but I guarantee you, that all successful people worked hard.”

- Coach Kamogawa thru George Morikawa

Honestly, I'm not really sure if that's really true any more.

I wasn't working hard when I bought Bitcoin at three bucks a coin. I was just intellectually curious. If anything when I was working hard was two years before that on a soon to be failed startup. We crawled the web for ads just before the ad business went hyper targeted. I made -$20k from working hard.

I made a lot more from Bitcoin. I would have made way more if I'd put that $20k in Bitcoin and slacked off at some day job.

I guess I don't really follow my own advice though, as I'm presently working on a Sunday morning and I've only taken like two days off this month.

Edit:

Writing this comment briefly made me re-consider my whole life and I've come to the conclusion that being lucky and prescient observations are more likely if you've worked hard at some point. I did do an engineering degree with some economics electives at the best school in Canada, and understanding Satoshi's paper wouldn't have been possible without this background knowledge.

This is true even across generations. The reason white people (or anyone with a rich family) are able to live comfortably and not work today are due to the efforts of their ancestors at one point or another. "There's no such thing as a free lunch" is actually just true, and not a stupid idiom. At some point somewhere, work had to be done to get a reward.

You are equating money with success.

Yeah. I realized that at the time I was writing it. But in software it's usually that way. Very few data points are Torvalds. Most are Gates or Zuck.

After writing the above, I Googled Linus. Apparently he's worth over $100m.

But you're right. Plenty of really successful poets or athletes are poor.

Pyramid schemes are very profitable if you get in at the beginning.

The problem is that, by definition, most people are in a pyramid scheme at the bottom.

Great post, yeah sometimes doing nothing or something that seems unproductive pays off quite well actually! It's why I'm a little more lax when it comes to enjoying life nowadays. Ultimately, in my opinion a lot of luck is involved, so why bother? Enjoy the ride. Having said that, I still like to build things and hack just like you :)

How did you sell Bitcoin? For cash? Was it dangerous?

Well I mostly got out at $200 because I thought competent people regulated our economies and figured crypto would be banned by regulators, so it was pretty easy to spread it out over a couple wires. The remaining chunk I sold at the $10k-$20k window. I still think it could hit $50k/coin, but it was too large a percent of my assets and I figured I'd already made such a crazy return (1000x on average I think?) that squeezing out another 4x or 5x seemed reckless.

If only I hadn't been relatively broke when I bought in. I was suffering burn-out and basically working odd contracts here and there to keep the lights on.

If you're in the US, then Coinbase and Gemini are mature exchanges that you can directly transfer dollars to or from your bank account. I assume he probably used them or an exchange like them.

It's not totally clear to me that hard work involves quantity (the OP, seemingly) over quality (others who have started fewer, more successful businesses).

In general, there are lots of activities which give the appearance of hard work but are actually fairly superficial and detrimental to your long-term goals.

Not at all saying that's the case here, more just musing on the idea of grinding for the sake of grinding.

The keys to success are your social connections to capital and your acting skills; that's it, nothing else matters. Find a rich person, get them to like you (the difficult part), then get them to invest in your startup. Then you'll succeed. The richer your friends are, the more likely you are to succeed. However, it should be noted that the richer your friends are, the better your acting skills need to be (competition is tough).

I think that's a very simplistic view.

While there are of course people who have been extremely successful relying on those two things alone (and they dominate the headlines, of course), there are countless successful people who succeeded without either of those two things.

It's pretty disingenuous, for example, to argue that Katherine Johnson's (admittedly delayed in recognition) success is the result of social connections or acting skills.

An even more trivial example is that many pro athletes (in the US, at least) didn't achieve success because of their social connections to capital; most of them certainly aren't great actors either.

It's almost as if there's a stark difference between working hard and working smart. No one wants to acknowledge that.

I don't know if it's that necessarily. I think most people understand (in theory, anyway), the benefit of working smart.

I think there's an assumption that the most successful people both work smart AND hard, which is likely true to some degree - e.g. successful pro athletes have staff that likely conduct well-targeted and thoughtful practices, but the hours and effort involved are still quite intense.

I more-so think the problem is that "working smart" requires a lot of careful planning and forethought, and is quite ambiguous in most cases what it actually means - and in many cases just happens serendipitously. Because of that, the process isn't as obvious.

It's much easier (intellectually, at least) to emulate the "working hard" part and to a large degree it's the one we reward the most societally (even in more intellectual circles), so it's not surprising that it's the one that people assume is the most necessary component of being successful - and that the "working smart" part will either come naturally, or after success is had.

It depends on what level you're playing at. If you have access to capital and social connections then yes you need to play smart in order to succeed.

If you're some random person with no access to capital or social connections then your focus should be luck.

As a random person who started with no social connections and no capital, I think about luck all the time and it helps me to make decisions. Mostly, it helps me to weigh up future opportunities against current opportunities - I think about things that happened to me and I ask myself how unlikely they were to occur; if they were very unlikely, I try to stay on that unlikely path. Never waste your luck; you have to keep moving forward wherever it takes you. Sometimes it leads you to places you don't want to be, but beggars can't be choosers.

Also, hard work puts you in positions to get lucky, and it lets you leverage your opportunities more than others. There is no ladder to climb. You run around until you find the pay-dirt, and the people that run more find it quicker.

"Sold for" column does not at the same time means that he earned 0$ from such projects until he sold them.

Actual value is only what someone else is willing to pay.