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I'd agree; you can't boil it down to just luck or just hard work. I think it a correct notion that fortune favors the prepared, and neither luck nor hard work on its own suffices.

If you look more closely, I believe that hard work, luck, nepotism and sociopathy all become apparent factors in successful business, with their levels being able to be exchanged to some degree (with some having a greater amount of variability, depending on variation of the others).

In the end: you are right; a bar of gold can fall onto a dead body, but he's no better for it.



Luck alone is sufficient. As a simple example: if you've been born into the Gates or Zuckerberg family you will have as many tries as you need until you succeed.

And if you've been born in some parts of Africa you're almost certainly going to be SOL


You'll still have to work at it. And losing money at ventures is not success, regardless of whether you can afford the loss or not.


Luck and the innate or learned tendency to get other people to do things for you, both propagated by access to wealth.




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