Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .
Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.
Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.
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