How lacking data affects your decisions in real life.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

-Peter Drucker

Some say that certain people succeed because they simply work harder than their peers. The people that say this also include the convenient caveat that the work has to be valuable and worth doing. They say this as if the hardest part of success is doing the work and not picking out of the multitude of options the right career or startup that will lead to their success. If the relationship between working hours and prosperity were as tight as they make it out to be, we would expect to see poorer countries work much less than the more prosperous countries. However, According to a study by the world bank, it is the exact opposite. Individuals in the poorest countries seem to work almost twice as much as those in the richer countries, as the chart below shows.

The question is then, “why do some people, specifically those that are poor, don’t benefit from hard work just as much as others?”. Of course, there are several explanations for this variance, but here I would like…