The best explanation I've ever heard of it is the concept of "luck surface area", which I was first introduced to on the TechZing podcast. It's the product of "work you do" and "people you touch with it."
There are hotel maids that work harder than any of us ever will. Nobody knows their name. This does not result in them getting appreciable amounts of career-enhancing luck.
There are people who achieve a brief bit of Internet stardom, on the basis of a shallow connection, such as e.g. being the person a photo a meme was based on. You will probably not retire on being a meme.
However, if you've written OSS that is key to 100 companies or if you have a blog read that 5k developers would cite as one of their top five or if you got two dozen people their jobs or yadda yadda, you'll be freaking amazed how many lucky opportunities come your way.
The phrase "The harder I work, the luckier I get." is often spoken by those who believe in the "Just World" theory. It allows them to believe that their success is due to their own "goodness" and conversely, that others who aren't as successful must not be as "good".
In reality, luck plays a huge part. When you see the hard working landscapers around your building some morning, you should be thinking "That could be me if I hadn't won the ovarian lottery."
Winning the "ovarian lottery" means you were born with advantages that you didn't earn. Someone born in the US, has a huge advantage over someone born in a 3rd world country. Luck probably plays a bigger role than hard work (in success) due to these non-earned advantages. Many successful people would rather believe that their hard work was the reason for the success than admit their good fortune.
For example: I don't doubt the the Winklevoss twins are hard workers [you don't get into the Olympics without hard work] but I think it would be reaching to ascribe their current station in life to just hard work.
Working hard is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. Like Patrick said, working very hard at digging ditches is not going to land you in a C-suite, obviously, but very few people end up successful WITHOUT working hard.
Personally, I could not agree more. And five years ago, I think if you'd asked that question on this site, and overwhelming majority of respondents would have said that this is a no-brainer, where the answer is clearly "yes".
Now? The dominant clique here now will laugh at you for saying this, and accuse you of believing in Horatio Alger stories, and will tell you that all success is good luck, and that you can claim no credit for your work and any resulting success. Work ethic, dedication, passion, sacrifice - these things are verboten now. Now everything is luck, "white privilege", "male privilege", "western privilege", or some other excuse to disparage the individual and encourage a feeling of helplessness.
There are hotel maids that work harder than any of us ever will. Nobody knows their name. This does not result in them getting appreciable amounts of career-enhancing luck.
There are people who achieve a brief bit of Internet stardom, on the basis of a shallow connection, such as e.g. being the person a photo a meme was based on. You will probably not retire on being a meme.
However, if you've written OSS that is key to 100 companies or if you have a blog read that 5k developers would cite as one of their top five or if you got two dozen people their jobs or yadda yadda, you'll be freaking amazed how many lucky opportunities come your way.