Comment by chefandy

While the carrot problem is real, it alone doesn't explain the shittiness of rich people's advice on becoming rich. So much opportunity is either created or destroyed by external circumstances that we don't perceive, let alone control. Since we all subconsciously write our own creation myths, it's not easy to discover and attribute forces that we aren't aware of when looking back on our life paths. The perennial bullshit self-explanation is hard work. How hard they work is one thing that they can control, and they know they worked hard, so they assume it had more of an effect than it did... and in turn, others that worked less hard didn't succeed. For example, they might assume that their uncle was willing to set up that meeting with their first big client because they worked hard enough to be worthy of it, rather than realizing that others who worked as hard or harder lacked a connected uncle.