> "Do we need to be told that wild success is an outlier just because a few adults need instructions to operate Shampoo?).</rant>"

No, we need to be told that wild success is an outlier because there's a huge push for people to work ever-longer hours with the wild success stories dangled in front of them as the carrot. There's a huge chunk of people arguing and voting that suffering poor humans shouldn't be helped based on the simplistic idea that work -> success, therefore !sucess means !work, and !success is inherently shameful. Your father clearly worked hard to provide for his family, you also say that his passion was solving problems and organising the system, a passion you don't have - is "being born the right kind of person" not a kind of luck? Another commenter says their mother was an incredibly hardworking person until she got ill and couldn't. Is there no luck in your father's health staying good enough that he could do those sleep-interrupted-nights for years on end? You say in another comment "as if saying so implies that people who are unsuccessful /don't/ work hard" but if people who are unsuccessful also work hard, what is it that distinguishes them from Bezos if not luck? You could say it's the /type of hard work/ they do, and I'd partly agree and say that's a good reason to push back on the meme "work harder, work harder!". Would you say that Jeff Bezos worked 170x harder than your father, for example? Why does pointing out the role that luck plays diminish your father's life in your eyes so much that you're posting multiple times about it? Elon Musk didn't "luck-in" to running SpaceX by sitting around playing video games waiting for the world to discover him, but if you try and follow in his hard work footsteps by setting up an online bank you'll be somewhat stumped by it not being 1999 and you not having a father who owned an Emerald mine.[1]

I am someone who often does your "growing trend with hating on people who are successfull by dismissing their success as luck", but it's not hating on Bezos with a claim that he didn't work hard, it's hating on the idea that if everyone worked hard they could be Bezos. It's hating on the idea that Bezos is a superior person to all the people who worked hard and got nothing from it, more deserving of being in the spotlight. It's hating on the idea that Bezos earned all the money he controls through his hard work and dismissing the contribution of all the other Amazon employees to that wealth. It's hating on the way the media puts the materially successful person because it's easier to make a "top 100 richest people" list than a "top 100 contented people" list. It's hating on the implication that everyone should strive for material success and the way to achieve that is by working harder, even though for almost all employees working harder will not get them much more than burnout - even people who want to improve at something need to focus their practise on improving, not just churning harder and harder. Would you not say that your father's life would have been better if he'd achieved the same success with less work? Would you say he was less respectable if he'd achieved the same with less work?

I don't exactly encourage "not working hard" when I say these things, I more encourage that hard work should be on your own terms, for something you love the process of working on - as you describe your father was passionate about organising and solving problems. Hard work that you are forced into by circumstance and necessity is a worse kind of work than hard work you choose to do of your own free will, and is different again from that which society pressures you to do. Donald Knuth works hard on TAOCP, it's not done for vast financial success, it's very respectable nevertheless. A hospital pushes an ICU nurse into another 12 hour shift with too-few coworkers, while cutting back on staff to increase profits; that's respectable that the nurse endures it, but objectionable for the system to be exploiting in that way. Jiro Oni from the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi - a lifetime of searching and striving hard for perfect sushi got him 3 Michelin stars and a family run restaurant which could seat a dozen people, and that's a far better kind of hard work and success than a 90 hour weeks striving to make partner at a law firm doing work you hate, because society told you that you don't matter unless you're visily suffering long-hours and own a McMansion. And society is telling us that, that the poor don't matter, that the rich and famous do matter, that the way to get higher social status is to sleep less and work more, that it's more respectable to stay 10 hours at work than to leave early to walk by the river. That it's intensely shameful to be unemployed. That your contribution at work isn't measured by the customers you please, but by the much easier to measure time you spent in the office. That it's awful to be part of a union which pushes for more pay for less work.

HN is a place of generally more educated people than average, doing work that's paid higher than average, and having more range of places to work than average, and there's still a continual trickle of comments saying "I could do much better work in less time if I could change ___ but the company doesn't want that, they want longer hours and people looking like they're suffering at crunch time". It's the orientation of life around work, the systemic pressure to treat employees as resources to extracted wealth from by working them harder and the corresponding messages for employees to align with that by seeing it as the only thing which is virtuous, which is objectionable. Not because of some "instructions to operate Shampoo"(???)

If working hard at a job you hate provides for your family, that's good on you, but it's not praiseworthy that that's how society is. It's the sacrifice for others which is respectable, not the lack of sleep or the Calories burned in themselves. If working less hard at something else brings you more money, that's not inherently bad because you aren't chasing material success and aren't working as hard as you can, there are other things than work.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-elon-musks-family-came...