Hard Work Always Pays Off

# Chapter 6: The Bootstrap Trap

The hole was thirty feet deep.

Stephen Blackpool lay at the bottom, both legs shattered, staring up at a circle of stars. He'd been walking home from work—the same walk he'd made every day for twenty years, the same factory job he'd held without missing a shift, without complaint, without hope of advancement but with the steady faith that honest labor meant something.

The pit had been unmarked. An old coal shaft, abandoned and forgotten. The kind of oversight that kills the careful and spares the reckless.

Charles Dickens put Stephen there for a reason. Not accident, but intention. The most honest worker in Coketown—the man who never missed a day, never joined a strike, never asked for more than his wages—dies in a hole no one bothered to mark dangerous.

It's the perfect death for the perfect worker. Anonymous. Avoidable. Absolutely meaningless.

We tell ourselves that hard work pays off because we need it to be true. The alternative—that effort is necessary but not sufficient, that the virtuous sometimes starve while the vicious prosper—threatens the foundation of every comfortable belief about fairness.

So we invent stories. Rags to riches. Bootstrap narratives. The mythology of merit, where virtue and wealth align like planets in perfect orbit.

Stephen Blackpool was Dickens's answer to these stories. Here is your bootstrap hero, he said. Here is your self-made man. Watch him pull himself up by his own effort, his own decency, his own unshakeable faith in the system.

Watch him die in a pit.

*Hard Times* was published in 1854, serialized in Dickens's own magazine while Manchester and Birmingham belched their smoke into English skies. Factory owners were getting rich on the mythology of merit—the idea that their wealth reflected their virtue, that their workers' poverty reflected their vice.

Dickens had walked through those factories. He'd seen the children, eight years old, tending machines sixteen hours a day. He'd met the Stephen Blackpools—men who worked themselves to death and died owing money to the company store.

The bootstrap myth wasn't just wrong. It was cruel. It took the victims of an unjust system and made them responsible for their own suffering.

The phrase itself was originally a joke.

Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" appeared in early American literature as an example of something impossible—like lifting yourself by pulling on your own hair. The physics don't work. Try it. Stand up, grab your shoelaces, and attempt to levitate.

But somewhere between the 1800s and now, the impossible became the required. The joke became doctrine. What was once obviously absurd is now obvious wisdom, carved into motivational posters and graduation speeches and political platforms built on the idea that poverty is a choice.

The cruelty isn't accidental. Making individual effort the sole determinant of success serves a purpose: it protects the successful from having to examine their luck.

Because luck is everywhere, and we pretend it doesn't exist.

You were born in a specific year, to specific parents, in a specific place. Your zip code predicted your adult income better than your work ethic. Your parents' education level predicted your college attendance better than your intelligence. The quality of your elementary school—chosen for you before you could read—shaped your trajectory more than any decision you made as an adult.

This isn't fatalism. It's math.

Raj Chetty, the Harvard economist, mapped American mobility with satellite precision. His data shows what Dickens observed: where you start matters more than how hard you try. A child born into the bottom quintile of income has a 7.5% chance of reaching the top quintile. A child born into the top has a 36% chance of staying there.

The bootstrap isn't just broken. It was never attached to anything.

Yet we cling to the mythology because admitting randomness is terrifying. If success depends partly on luck, then it can be taken away by luck. Better to believe that your achievements are entirely earned, your security entirely deserved.

The cost of this comfort is measured in Stephen Blackpools—people who internalize their failure, who die believing they didn't work hard enough, who never understand that the pit was unmarked by design.

Warren Buffett calls it the ovarian lottery.

He was born white, male, American, in 1930—statistically speaking, about the luckiest combination possible. Smart, yes. Hardworking, yes. But millions of people are smart and hardworking. How many were born with his advantages in his century to parents who could afford his education?

Buffett acknowledges this. He talks about winning the ovarian lottery like winning Powerball. Pure chance, transformative consequences.

Most successful people don't. They tell stories about their work ethic instead, their sacrifices, their unique insights. They mention luck only in passing, if at all. Not because they're lying—they did work hard, they did sacrifice—but because focusing on effort feels safer than acknowledging randomness.

The stories we tell about success matter because they shape the stories we tell about failure. If the rich earned everything, then the poor must have failed to earn anything. If success is pure merit, then poverty is pure deficiency.

Stephen Blackpool worked harder than most millionaires. He also had worse parents, worse schools, worse opportunities, and worse luck. The pit that killed him wasn't a metaphor. But it wasn't an accident either.

Stephen's last words before he dies. It's all a muddle—the system, the fairness, the promise that virtue leads to reward. He worked his whole life trying to make sense of it, trying to find the pattern, the rules, the logic.

There wasn't any. There never is.

The muddle isn't a bug in the system. It's a feature. Randomness protects the random winners from feeling guilty about their luck. Complexity protects the complex system from being reformed. The muddle serves the muddled.

So what do we do with this knowledge?

Not abandon effort. Work still matters—it's just not the only thing that matters. Not surrender to fatalism. You can't control your starting point, but you can influence your trajectory.

But you can stop lying to yourself about merit.

You can stop pretending that your success is entirely earned, your security entirely deserved. You can acknowledge the luck—the country, the century, the parents, the health, the thousand small breaks that went your way instead of someone else's.

And you can extend that same grace to the Stephen Blackpools. The people working two jobs and still behind on rent. The people who did everything right and still ended up in pits they didn't dig.

Their failure isn't moral. It's mathematical.

The bootstrap trap isn't just about individual delusion. It's about collective responsibility. As long as we believe that effort alone determines outcomes, we can ignore the systems that stack the deck, the pits left unmarked, the accidents that aren't accidents.

Dickens knew this. That's why he killed his hardest worker in the most random way. Not to discourage effort, but to expose the lie that effort is enough.

The American Dream isn't false because it's impossible. It's false because it's incomplete. Work hard, yes. But also acknowledge that you need more than work. You need systems that mark the dangerous holes. You need societies that don't abandon the fallen.

You need to admit that some people work just as hard as you do and never catch a break.

The pit is still there. It's still unmarked. And Stephen Blackpool is still falling.