We love to hear an outstanding person say, "I don't have much talent—I just work harder than others."

Even if this isn't entirely true, it still sounds pleasant. Because when a talented person attributes their excellence to hard work, they are in effect giving up a more superior explanation. They don't say they were born smarter than others; instead, they explain the abilities they have already acquired as the result of long-term training. Talent was originally a boundary dividing people, but hard work is an experience everyone can understand.

In this sense, attributing talent to hard work is a kind of humility. It is not exaggerating one's own effort, but downplaying one's own specialness.

Excellence and success are not the same thing

Attributing success to hard work, however, is another matter entirely.

Excellence is more about describing a person's ability, while success means that this ability has been rewarded in reality. A person can become more professional through practice, but cannot decide by professionalism alone whether they will gain wealth, fame, or status. Between ability and success lie market demand, industry cycles, family starting points, institutional environments, partners, and many contingencies that are hard to reconstruct after the fact.

Hard work certainly plays a part in this process, but it is usually just one of many conditions. We tend to overestimate it because hard work is the easiest thing for us to perceive in ourselves. A person remembers how many late nights they endured, how much pressure they withstood, how many times they persevered when they wanted to give up; but the role of the times often has no concrete shape.

The times will not walk into the office to make decisions for someone, nor will they demand credit after success. They simply quietly determine which needs are growing, which abilities are becoming scarce, and which originally ordinary choices can suddenly yield returns far higher than before.

And so, we easily remember how we rowed, but forget that the tide was already moving forward.

Timing determines the price of effort

The same intelligence, diligence, and execution, placed in a rising industry versus a declining one, may yield results that differ a hundredfold. It is not that the former worked a hundred times harder than the latter, but that their efforts were exchanged by the times at different prices.

A person can decide whether to be serious, whether to persist, but cannot decide when the world will need their abilities, nor what price those abilities will ultimately fetch. A person's hard work can explain why they went a bit further than those around them, but it can hardly explain on its own why they ended up standing so high.

So, among timing, terrain, and human harmony, timing may be more important than we are willing to admit. "Important" here does not mean that people need do nothing and simply stand there waiting for the wind to come, but that timing determines the conversion rate of individual effort. You still need ability, you still need to act, and you may still miss opportunities due to misjudgment; but all of this happens within a larger context. What the times need, what they no longer need, and how much they are willing to pay for what—these are not decided by any one person.

Success is certainly not pure luck. A person who is completely unprepared may not be able to seize an opportunity even when it comes. But "without hard work, one may fail to succeed" and "as long as one works hard, one deserves success" are two completely different judgments. The former merely acknowledges personal responsibility; the latter rewrites complex reality into a simple reward-and-punishment mechanism.

The mistake people standing on the crest of the wave are most likely to make when looking back is to count the rise of the seawater into their own jump height.

The arrogance in success narratives

If a person believes their success comes entirely from hard work, it is hard for them not to reach another conclusion in their heart: those who did not succeed probably just did not work hard enough.

This is exactly the problem. If my wealth was all earned through struggle, then poverty seems explicable only by laziness; if my position fully proves my ability, then those who did not attain a position seem to have proven their mediocrity. Differences in outcomes are thus explained as differences in character, and luck is packaged as deserved gain.

Successful people emphasizing hard work are not necessarily deliberately lying. They do remember their own efforts; they simply cannot see the conditions that did not appear in the form of "personal effort." Moreover, after knowing the outcome, people can always arrange a clear causal line from countless scattered past experiences: an accidental choice is called foresight, not exiting in time is called long-termism, and happening to choose correctly after hesitating among several options can also be reinterpreted as firmness.

As for those who made similar choices and put in equal effort but did not succeed, because they have no opportunity to tell their stories, they do not appear in this theory of success. We keep hearing survivors talk about hard work, and over time we come to believe that only survivors truly worked hard.

The arrogance of attributing success entirely to hard work is not just taking an extra share of credit that originally belonged to the times, the environment, and others. Its bigger problem is that while praising the successful, it quietly completes a moral judgment of the unsuccessful.

Putting hard work back in its proper place

Acknowledging these things is not meant to deny hard work. Hard work is still a very good quality; it just should not be treated as a guaranteed success contract.

When acting, a person should look more at the parts they can control: whether they are serious, whether they are responsible, whether they are doing things better within the scope of their abilities. But once success is achieved, it is best to also remember the parts that could not be controlled—to remember what era one entered, who helped, and at which crossroads one was lucky not to take the wrong turn.

Regarding one's own abilities, talking more about hard work can keep a person from being conceited; regarding one's own success, talking more about luck can help a person retain awe for the world. Facing others' success, one can acknowledge their effort; facing others' failure, one should not easily conclude that they did not work hard enough.

Hard work deserves praise, not because it necessarily brings success, but because the world has never made such a guarantee, and people still choose to live earnestly.