There's a clue in the link to a page "7 traits the rich have in common" featuring Oprah and Sir Richard Branson. The poll is oriented toward determining if you're a workaholic entrapeneur like them who found one or more niches and leveraged so risk to exploit them them. It does not take Mustachianism into account. Lets face it: being frugal is never going to be glamorous. But it works.
Here is a question. Are people like Oprah and Branson just random 'success' stories? Or do people believe that they can get there using a similarly described route of hard work etc etc.?
I would first consider...how many hard working entrepreneurial people fail or fall short of their expectations to be like these 'model success stories'?
I would then suggest that people who become very rich do so by complete accident. They are merely outliers on the bell curve. There is no recipe to get there...hindsight bias is largely at play when folks give the 'recipe' for success.
It's mostly luck at the supersuccess level, unless you believe that the majority of people who work really really really (insert appropriate number of 'reallies') hard end up as famous as Oprah. And considering that Oprah's the 189th wealthiest person in the US, you'd also be arguing that there are only 188 people who have worked harder than her in the last several decades. I can't even continue this thought exercise because it's too ridiculous to keep typing.
However, there's a large number of people who believe that success is chiefly due to work ethic, and are more than willing to discount innummerable advantages they and other successful people have had in order to maintain the belief system that people who aren't well off simply haven't worked hard enough.
A great work ethic is a wonderful thing to have. But to make any money from it you have to pair it with a lucrative job/career. After all, slaves had great work ethics too - at least when watched by the dude with the whip. The definition of insanity where you do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result brings this quality into sharp relief.
On the reverse side, I'm reading a book titled #GirlBoss about a young woman with ADD who never graduated from high school, bounced from McJob to McJob as the typical slacker employee. Instead of continuing down that path to becoming a fat McJob loser or a scrawny drug addict she chanced on a way to combine EBay with her interest in vintage clothing. In a few months she combined scavenging hunts in estate sales and thrift shops with sorting, marketing, modeling, and shipping the stuff on EBay while living with her mom. While she describes this as the "Sad Bunny" phase because at home she worked from her bed in an old pink bathrobe and often a towel over her head that vaguely resembled rabbit ears. Except it wasn't so sad. While her mom was nagging her she should go back to school, she was on fire. She was too busy to spend money for anything but product and her tiny business was eventually pulling in $2500 a week. She paid friends to model her stuff with hamburgers. Splurging for daily Starbucks was her only dumb move. But since it was her ONLY splurge it hardly hurt her. Flash forward 8 years and some kindly investors later it's a $100 million dollar business. This is not an unusual story. The thing it has in common with others like it is a person found something they could do, do well, liked to do, and it happened to pay. The realization it was hard work usually came after the fact.
