No One Cares, Work Harder?

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A lot of people say, “No one cares, work harder.” My interpretation of this phrase is this: If you aren’t getting the recognition or results that you want, if you just work harder, you will get there.

At first glance, this seems like a reasonable supposition - if we just try harder we will get whatever it is that we want. And this idea certainly subscribes to the philosophy that we can dictate our paths in life via sheer will and effort. After all, hard work leads to success, right?

Maybe, but maybe not.

I do believe that our attitudes and actions influence where we end up. In short, things that we control, to a degree, dictate our paths or outcomes. However, I also believe that there are factors beyond our control which influence our trajectories and this brings the “no one cares, work harder” dictum into question.

There are, of course, stories of successful people who committed to a goal and suffered immeasurable hardship for years and years after which they finally achieved their utopia. And we as humans love these stories; they inspire us and make us believe that, with enough effort and sacrifice, anything is possible.

A logical conclusion of these stories is that individual suffering creates a “moat” (to use a Warren Buffett term) which enables one person to get to the promised land while many others do not. The entrepreneur who is willing to shovel gravel to pay the bills for 5 years until she gets her Series A funding will outperform the others who won’t make the financial or ego sacrifices. And she will survive future hardship because she will do whatever it takes where the person who got lucky out of the gate will fold when they face tough times.

But here’s the important question to ask: Was it her hard work and sacrifice that made her succeed or did other factors over which she had no control change to deliver her from suffering?

It is easy to say that her success can all be attributed to the sweat of her brow but, in the real world, things are more complicated. In fact, the real world has led me to arrive at one of my personal truisms: The truth is usually somewhere in the middle.

The fact of the matter is that we have a bit of selection bias in our writings about the successful. We cherry pick the stories of the ones who suffered and made it because it works with our vision of how things “should” be. But, in my day-to-day travels, I find that people who achieve financial success tend to do so pretty quickly. Sure, it takes a year or three and they might not make millions for a decade or two, but they’re achieving enough success within a year or three to pay the bills.

Thus my contention is this: most people who achieve big financial success do not spend years struggling, they tend to achieve enough success early on to at least keep the lights on. Let’s shift gears and talk a bit about trading.

In trading, if a trade isn’t working, as evidenced by dozens or maybe even hundreds of successful practitioners, the right thing to do is to cut your losses, to move on and find something new. Further, I increasingly find evidence that great traders want trades to work pretty much right away (subject to their trading timeframe). The trades that take days, weeks, or months to get going have related opportunity costs (you could be in better trades) as well as emotional costs (you’re usually frustrated your trade isn’t working which exhausts emotional “capital” and makes you susceptible to emotional {i.e. bad} decision making).

Ok, so?

If you find yourself saying that no one cares and that you should work harder, I think it might be wise to consider how your situation aligns with what I’ve written here. While we love the stories of the person who struggled and made it, I meet more successful people who had some luck in the early days which financially allowed them to press on.

Also, I notice the ones who make the most in any given sector or industry are usually the early entrants. When complimented on his success, Stan Druckenmiller has repeatedly pointed out that there were 9 hedge funds when he started compared to the current 9,000+.

Bottom line, each individual has to decide how much hardship he or she will endure on their path to their goal but it likely pays to consider what I’m saying here in conjunction with your own analysis of those who “made it”. Did the successful “work harder” or did things come relatively easily to them?

Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.