A professor of mine once said that becoming a professor requires equal parts intelligence, hard work and luck. Usually I cite him to stress the importance of luck: being talented and working hard often isn't enough. However when someone says that someone else just got lucky, I cite it to make another point: without talent and hard work, luck is often useless. You need vast amounts of luck to get somewhere if you're talentless and lazy. If you are talented and work hard, the tiniest amount of luck is enough to lift you from your peers.
According to me if a person is lazy and unproductive, even luck gives up on him.
You need to work hard anyway. And you need need luck on top of it. Things work in that order.
But a lot of people first expect to get lucky and then work hard. IMO that never happens, because the person tries to reverse cause-effect scenarios. The person expects reward before work, whereas rewards always come after work, never before it.
