@thesotiris 6 January 2026 more from that month

Hard Work Is Easy When You Have a Why: Motivation is circumstantial

The richest friend I have is a multimillionaire who started from nothing, but for all the hard work he put into his fortune, he had the honesty and decency to admit he was lucky. He was lucky first, and only after did he work hard. ***“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” — Friedrich Nietzsche*** Yes, yes, I know that success is not only money. But it is an aspect of it, which I use here as an example. **Anticipation** Hard work is easy when you have everything lined up for you, or at least when things indicate that your hard work will pay off. When there is hope, faith, anticipation, or a credible prediction that your efforts will be rewarded, there is nothing you won’t do if it’s worth the reward. And even your assessment of risk-reward and effort-reward is a matter of circumstance. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/losing-hope-part-2 https://sotiris.substack.com/p/doomer https://sotiris.substack.com/p/muh-optimism People who choose not to work hard aren’t lazy; they just don’t expect their hard work to deliver. They don’t see how the juice could be worth the squeeze, whether their assessment is right or wrong. **No one works hard for nothing**. Even the hardest worker will quit when the work stops paying off. For this reason, **there are no lazy people; just people who can’t see their efforts paying off**, whether they are correct in that view or not. **Humility** What makes hard work pay off? Random circumstances beyond our control. Some people are deluded in their overestimated self-belief, and they end up succeeding by sheer luck. But they never really knew how they succeeded; they just attribute it to their hard work alone, because self-aggrandising is tempting. Most successful people don’t even know why they succeeded. They think they know. They tell themselves that they are smarter than the rest or more hard-working by default (an appeal to determinism). Yet, billionaires fall for obvious scams like Theranos, and other blatantly bad investment decisions (Metaverse, Google+, the scrapped Apple car project, horrible filmmaking by recent Hollywood nonsense). This proves they aren’t smarter, and in many cases, even less intelligent than the average Joe who could see through these bad investments a mile away, even without insider, first-access information that the billionaires enjoy. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/what-is-god https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos Yes, sometimes it helps to be deludedly confident because you will take chances that might just pay off. But unrealistic confidence will usually fail; no matter how cocky you are about your fighting game, you will not prevail against an adult bear — not even close. Most of those deluded in their self-belief will fail because of the gap between delusion and reality. There is no shortage of failed actors, entrepreneurs, rockstars, athletes, or influencers. They once believed in themselves, and they based their belief on nothing but blind faith, so they worked hard up to a point. The point was when they realised that their hard work wasn’t paying off, when they recognised a pattern. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/knowing-when-to-give-up There is no free will or credit due simply because you worked hard. If anything, **working hard proves that you had all the comforts available to you to enable you to work hard**. Either it was an opportunity, a circumstantially favourable situation or position, first-access insider information, first dibs on a piece of capital, an ability to be sociable and likeable, or generally a positively confident mindset, all of which are the result of early childhood, upbringing, environment, genetics, and developmental window. You can’t really escape who you are, nor your trauma that plays a role in defining you. You can choose to mitigate your trauma and improve yourself, but whatever you accomplish will be based on an unalterable, bruised foundation. Psychology is a bitch. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/free-will-revisited https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-narcissism-of-free-will When you admit you “succeeded” because you made smarter choices or worked harder, you confess that you were somehow smarter and more hard-working by default. It’s an admission of determinism, not free will, and therefore, there is no credit due to you, no excuse for deluded narcissism. Humility is success in itself, and arrogance, failure. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/when-success-is-failure-and-failure **Safety** Nothing can be achieved without some sense of safety first: financial safety, emotional safety, etc. Every entrepreneur, every scientist, every whatever, succeeded because they had safety. All the scientists of the Renaissance and industrial revolution were lords or just plain rich. They didn’t have to work 10 hours a day for a living. Every successful entrepreneur, athlete, whatever, has safety from their relationships or their finances, usually both. This safety allows them to focus on what they can do to succeed rather than how to get through their day. And if they fail, then their time invested won’t cripple their life. Knowing this allows them to risk more and work harder than someone who can’t escape a full-time job. Furthermore, without wasting all their time, energy, and mental capacity just to provide minimum safety for themselves, the “hard workers” are free to work hard towards accomplishing something great. But to accomplish something great, you must already have safety given to you by others or by chance. It’s all chance. Nobody made it alone. And again, working hard deserves no credit because it only proves how lucky someone was to be able to work hard, to have the emotional support, the financial base, and the infinite time to focus on improving and working hard. **Hard work doesn’t feel hard when you know it’s getting you somewhere**. Conversely, the easiest errand feels like torture when you don’t see a point in doing it. So, it’s not the hard work that is the catalyst to success; it’s the driver behind it, and that driver is circumstantial. Do not trust people who claim credit for supposedly working hard. They are deceiving you and themselves, and they are either knowingly or unknowingly dishonest. **Blessings** Those who attribute their successes to themselves fail to show gratitude and appreciation for their blessings, blessings that most never had. Not everyone can succeed, yes, but those who do are those who had that one extra little blessing that made all the difference. It’s deluded and ungrateful to say “I did it all by myself,” and “I deserve full credit for my efforts”. No, your efforts were made easy by your circumstances. And effort is easy when you anticipate a reward for them. Think of the stereotype of the ultra-successful entrepreneur who started in a garage, or of the stereotype of people living with their parents, while they focus on a project. Perhaps the smear “living in your mother‘s basement“ is really just a shaming tactic to deprive people of an advantage, if indeed that is used as an advantage and not as an excuse to do nothing. Perhaps living in your parents’ basement is a good strategy if it allows you the time, focus, and safety that sets you on a path that you’ve committed to. **Explanations** My thesis is that no credit is due for success and no blame is due for failure (I make a distinction between blame and responsibility; we can have responsibility for our actions without the self-blame). For my thesis, I am accused of making excuses for failure. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-source-of-all-evil https://sotiris.substack.com/p/demiurgical-responsibility https://sotiris.substack.com/p/why-the-world-is-fcked-up This is not to make excuses for failure or to make light of people’s achievements. This is to give an explanation for success, to help the successful avoid the tempting pitfall of narcissism, and to prevent the unsuccessful from identifying with their failures. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/excuses-vs-explanations https://sotiris.substack.com/p/excuses-vs-explanations-part-2 https://sotiris.substack.com/p/when-success-is-failure-and-failure https://sotiris.substack.com/p/how-to-know-when-to-give-up-and-when **If you recognise that success depends on circumstances beyond your control, then you maintain the virtues of humility and gratitude when you do succeed**. And when you don’t succeed, you **give yourself some credit for fighting against the odds, and losing gracefully**; not because you weren’t worthy, but because there were things beyond your control. It’s one thing **blaming yourself**, and another **holding yourself responsible**. You can’t blame yourself for things beyond your control. You are responsible only for **what you can control (which is only your attitude to things beyond your control)**. The delusion of absolute free will only promotes narcissism in the successful, and failure-identification in the failures. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/free-will-revisited https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-narcissism-of-free-will https://sotiris.substack.com/p/when-success-is-failure-and-failure **Takeaway** Having a ‘why’ is just opportunity. You don’t choose it; it falls on your lap, if it ever does. Mourning the life unlived is wondering who you would have been had you had a strong enough ‘why’ to keep going; a ‘why’ that would have been meaningful and in line with your true self. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/your-unforgivable-sin https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-false-self-tribulation-part-2 Deep down, you know you could have kept going, since you’ve witnessed how disciplined and relentless you were when you made up arbitrary ‘whys’, given your lack of meaningful ones. But now you’re fresh out of ‘whys’, true or otherwise. You can’t delude yourself anymore. And all you wish for is a reason to strive. https://sotiris.substack.com/p/the-hell-of-endless-aspiration