"If hard work pays off, show me a rich donkey."

Persistence will make you a master in a skill -- and you can do it almost subconsciously afterwards.

It doesn't give you a broader culture and overview of the world though. Or at least, it rarely does.

> ”If hard work pays off, show me a rich donkey."

What a weird analogy, as if spending all night pointlessly digging hole in your background correlates with wealth. Though I think if you did have the grit to do that you will find success in many endeavors.

It takes hard work to go from nothing to something. People doing the hard work are not confused about what’s meaningful.

"What a weird analogy"

Not sure why you find it weird. There are a lot of hard working people out there. And very few of them ever go "from nothing to something" as you put it.

I don’t know where the concept of meaningless physical and mentally hard work — regardless of its effect or purpose — is somehow guaranteed to produce wealth comes from. I don’t know anyone who believes that.

You don't, but here in Eastern Europe most of the working people I know absolutely believe exactly that.

Around here "work smart, not hard" is a mind-blowing revelation for many. And it bears repeating since people forget it regularly.

> It takes hard work to go from nothing to something. People doing the hard work are not confused about what’s meaningful.

If that were true, every startup would be successful.

As opposed to success not being predicated on hard work and perseverance? I think if that were true there would be many more successful startups.

I have always liked the saying that "the only place success comes before work is in a dictionary". It's clearly not entirely accurate, because of course you can gain advantages through something like inheritance that look a lot like being successful, but there is a lot of truth in it if you look beyond factors that really are dumb luck.

The outcome of a high quantity of deliberate practice isn’t an opinion. It may be true that it’s more popular to deride top performers and perhaps try not to hire them, but we can’t help but value the contributions that people with deep expertise make to the economy, the arts, infrastructure, and so on.

Is it? My impression is that nowadays people accept hard work and persistence are still necessary but no longer sufficient.

I thought "grit" was the watchword a few years ago, but maybe what you're describing is even more recent than that.