More seriously. Lots of people work very 'hard' for (what we would consider) very little compensation. Its more important to work smarter than 'harder' or with more 'effort'. (eg. Sometimes you also need to acknowledge when your efforts are leading nowhere and drop something - this might not be considered 'working hard' - though perhaps it should be)
And you obviously don't have to be in a sweatshop to work hard. You can work hard as a Janitor, driver, programmer, stock trader, president or whatever.
To be 'lucky' through hard work you've got to be clever enough to pick up the area where you want to work hard.If by any means you can't start where you would have liked, you need to keep moving gradually to the place you would like to go.
My advice: If your hard work doesn't look rewarding in both the long and short term. Iterate quickly, take a quick feedback and play a different game. But whatever game you play work hard while playing it.
EDIT: To all those people who are downvoting. Hard work in the wrong direction doesn't give the results you expect. Is this such a difficult and surprising thing to understand?
In the end, they did not get the big record deal, the band fell apart, and they all went on to different things. I've had a hindsight talk with the leader of the band and he's basically said, we thought all our hard work touring would pay off, but we probably should have been working on other things (like marketing and woo-ing labels, I presume).
Kind of OT, but the big change in my career came when I realized that promotions are not rewards for "hard work", moving up comes from demonstrating you'll be more effective at the new job. As a worker, you think that you get promoted as a reward for what you've done, but as a manager, you promote because of what the worker can do in the future.
"The luckier I got, the luckier I get"Luck, working smarter, working harder.
Luck is a major factor for everyone, but you can't control it. You can certainly influence working smarter, but it is often a matter of juding in hindsight what was smart rather than determining it before hand. Working harder is much more under our control than the others.
It is important to acknowledge luck. This helps use be humble in our successes, not be too devestated in our failuers, and be compassionate to those less fortunate. It is also just plain true.
It is also important to try to work smart - creating a startup, writing a novel, etc at least has a chance of creating huge rewards and even changing the world...the odds of changing the world from inside the sweatshop you mention are close to nil.
But it is how hard we work that we can mostly control, and there is some truth to Goldwyn's quote...it just isn't all of the truth.
It definitely is, but it only takes you there. You have carry it from there on.
Most of rich kids feel its their 'right' to be rich, regardless of whether they 'deserve' it or not. I have a lot of friends who inherited crazy fortune from their parents. According to them poor people getting rich due to whatever reason is 'unfair' to them.
Most rich kids just like the status quo to remain unchanged. Their idea of getting rich, is they staying where they are, without much effort and others remaining poor.