Why Hard Work Alone Doesn't Make You Rich

Why is it so hard to get rich, even when you work hard?

Watch to the end, and you will see why just turning time into money won't solve it, and what to hold on to in the age of AI.

And in an age when machines take on more and more of the work, how should we earn money?

Ancient Egypt, as the famine dragged on. People came to the granary with silver, to buy grain.

Scripture; Genesis 41 & 47

When the money ran out, they brought their cattle and sheep. The following year, they gave up their land.

Scripture; Genesis 41 & 47

All we have left is our bodies and our land. Just give us grain.

Reconstruction; scripture paraphrase; Genesis 47:18–19

The man who opened the granary was Joseph, who had stored up grain during seven years of plenty. That is the story told in the Book of Genesis.

Scripture; Genesis 41 & 47

When you're hungry, you can't eat silver. And yet we live chasing money. Our pay just brushes past our bank account on its way out.

Let's do one calculation. This year's minimum wage is 10,320 won an hour. Leave an AI subscription of about 30,000 won a month running all month, and it comes to a little over 40 won an hour. Not that they do the same work, though.

Note · Minimum wage 10,320 won an hour (2026) · An AI subscription of about 30,000 won a month, divided over a month (720 hours), comes to about 40 won (an analogy)

Record; 2026 minimum wage notice; Interpretation; illustrative calculation

Most of us have earned money by selling our time. If that time gets cheaper, what will money now be the price of?

Record; Statistics Korea (2025)

Today, let's ask two people who actually made a fortune. Stay to the end and you'll take away one thing each from history, philosophy, and science.

1706, Boston, back when it was an English colony. In a candlemaker's family of seventeen children, the fifteenth was born. That was Benjamin Franklin.

Record; The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

He left school at ten. At seventeen he left home and reached Philadelphia, with only a few coins in his pocket.

With that money he bought three big rolls, and he wrote himself that he walked the streets with two under his arms, eating the third. The young woman who would later become his wife saw him and thought he looked quite ridiculous. So his first impression was bread.

Record; The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

The face on America's 100-dollar bill started out like this, with bread under his arms.

He learned the trade in other people's print shops, set up a print shop with money from his partner's family, then bought out the whole business with money borrowed from friends. He printed a newspaper and almanacs, and his almanac full of proverbs sold briskly year after year.

At forty-two, he stepped back from business and threw himself into science. It's said he flew a kite on a stormy day to show that lightning is electricity.

Record; details debated

And he left the world two words. One: he was the first to give the name 'battery' to a device that stores electricity.

Record; letter to Peter Collinson (1749)

The other is this saying, which he spread widely: Time is money.

Record; Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748)

1883, Cambridge, England. John Maynard Keynes studied mathematics, and mixing with philosophers, debated what a good life is.

When World War I ended, he went to the Paris Peace Conference with the British delegation. And when he saw defeated Germany being made to pay excessive reparations, he resigned.

The book he wrote became a bestseller. When war broke out again twenty years later, his warning was brought up again. Opinions on that are still divided today.

Record; the causal link is debated

But he didn't get rich on a salary. He lost almost all his money investing, then got back on his feet, grew what he had, and became very rich.

Three words are all we need for today's story.

Time. Most salaries are the price of the time we sell.

Note · Time = the hours I work; a salary is their price

Energy. The ability to move something or make it do work. There's energy in food, and in electricity too.

Note · Energy = the ability to do work

Record; textbook definition

And other people's needs. Something someone really needs. Money comes to whoever meets that need.

Note · Other people's needs = what someone really needs

But more than 2,000 years before these two, there was a philosopher who is said to have made money. Thales, who is called the first philosopher of the West.

Tradition; Aristotle, Politics I.11

It's said that while gazing up at the stars he fell into a well, and a servant girl teased him for looking at the sky without seeing what was at his feet.

Tradition; Plato, Theaetetus 174a

Aristotle passes on another story too: that this same Thales read the stars and knew ahead of time that next year's olive harvest would be a big one.

Tradition; Aristotle, Politics I.11

In winter, he rented all the olive presses in Miletus and on the island of Chios at a low price, and at harvest time he made a great deal of money, so it's said.

Tradition; Aristotle, Politics I.11

Not buying, just renting — the philosopher who fell into a well got hold of every press. Had the servant girl heard, she might have felt a little sheepish.

Tradition; Aristotle, Politics I.11

The two were born nearly 180 years apart and never once met. From here on, it's an imagined conversation, built from what the two of them wrote.

And now there's a new machine that runs on electricity and does work. AI. AI uses enormous amounts of electricity in data centers.

Record; IEA, Energy and AI (2025)

But AI is different from a printing press. Give it only a goal, and it can make decisions on its own. In 2016, AlphaGo's 37th move was one that professional players would rarely think of.

Record; AlphaGo, Game 2 (2016)

To the question in the title, let me answer with these words of Keynes. Time stops at 24 hours a day, but what you own can keep growing even while you rest. That's why just turning time into money won't solve it.

Note · Salary = the price of my time · Capital = the money and machines used to make money · Interest = money that money already owned produces

Interpretation; host

That's something Keynes actually wrote in 1923. He meant that saying the sea will be calm once the storm has passed is no answer for people caught in the storm right now.

Record; A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), ch. 3

In 1790, Franklin left 1,000 pounds each to Boston and Philadelphia. The terms were to lend it to young tradesmen at 5 percent interest a year, growing and spending it over 200 years.

Record; codicil to his will (1789)

And sure enough, 200 years later, in 1990, Boston's fund had grown to about 4.5 million dollars.

Keynes wrote this in 1930: barring major wars and a surge in population, the problem of making a living might be solved within 100 years.

Record; paraphrase; Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)

Then work could be shared out at around 15 hours a week, and the urge to clutch at money would come to be seen as a somewhat disgusting sickness.

Record; paraphrase; Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)

Four years left until 2030. And yet we're still busy. Here's how I see it: as long as we live by selling our time, the time machines save is unlikely to become ours.

Interpretation; host

Britain's railways in the 1840s and fiber-optic cables around 2000 were both laid all at once, and many of the companies that laid them collapsed, but the lines they laid remained, and scholars see those who rented them cheaply as the ones who opened the next era.

Record; Interpretation; scholars' view

AI looks similar now. Big tech companies are building data centers all at once. On top of them, we can rent intelligence.

News reports

Before I share my view, I'd like to hear yours first.

On the day machines do all the work, what would you hand over to AI, and what would you hold on to until the end? Just one of each, in the comments. Comments are free.

If everything so far has been facts and scholars' interpretations, from here on it's my own view.

Why can't we get rich, even working hard? Keynes knew. Those who work sell their time, while those who own earn simply because what they own is scarce.

My view · Record; paraphrase; The General Theory, ch. 24

Here's my answer. Just turning time into money won't solve it. Money comes to those who turn energy into other people's needs.

My view

Too much money is never the problem. It was only ever too little.

My view

So how do we earn in the AI age? I think it comes down to one line: what to hand over to AI, and what to keep in your own hands. Let's try it with the owner of a side-dish shop.

My view

First, you hand things over. Replying to order texts, describing the menu, keeping the books. Save just one hour a day, and in a year that's 365 hours. Two months' worth of working hours. There's even an experiment in which AI cut writing time by 40 percent.

Note · 1 hour a day × 365 days = 365 hours ≈ two months of work (8 hours a day, 22 days a month)

My view · Record; Noy & Zhang, Science (2023)

With that time, you make something to sell. Thirty years of cooking know-how, turned into recipe videos and meal kits. Borrowed intelligence helps with the scripts and the packaging copy too.

My view

And then you build up. A list of regulars, recipes, the shop's name. Things that sell even while you sleep. Because if you rely on a single delivery app, you get shaken along with it when its fees go up.

My view

In the past, you had to borrow money to buy assets like these. Now, just as Thales rented the presses, you can borrow intelligence and build first. Like Joseph's granary, which keeps working even in a famine.

Note · Old formula: borrow money → buy assets → money that comes in without working (passive income) · New formula: borrow intelligence → make something to sell → build it up as assets

My view

What you hold on to until the end is the goal. Tell AI only to raise sales, and the answer might be to switch to cheaper ingredients. Sales go up, and the regulars leave.

My view

In engineering terms, a machine given the wrong target value goes, precisely, to the wrong place. So: the seasoning stays the same, and 50 a day is enough. That line is drawn by the owner.

My view

Companies are the same. Rather than people who do the work directly, we'll need more people who manage and supervise what AI has done. People who check that contracts don't break the law and that the numbers are right, and then sign.

Note · Management & supervision = checking what AI has done against the rules, and taking responsibility

My view

Value attaches not to efficiency but to character. There may be many side-dish shops, but that shop's kimchi is one of a kind. Customers come once to a fast shop, but for a long time to a shop they trust.

Note · Brand = your own character. Like "that shop's kimchi," something people seek out just by hearing the name

My view

Today, try writing just two lines on paper. One job to hand over to AI. And how much is enough.

My view

Today's story isn't investment advice. It's not telling you to buy any asset, or to take on debt.

My view

Use AI — but how far must we not give way to it? The standard for drawing that line comes from history, philosophy, and science.

History. After the railways and fiber-optic cables were laid, scholars see those who rented them as the ones who opened the next era. So even if we borrow intelligence, we build up our regulars, recipes, and name as our own.

Interpretation; scholars' view

Philosophy. Keynes held that those who work sell their time, while those who own capital earn simply because capital is scarce.

Record; paraphrase; The General Theory, ch. 24

So just turning time into money won't solve it — that's my answer today. What we earn for, the goal, is ours to set.

My view

Science. There is research suggesting that money worries take up room in our minds and can even reduce our capacity to think. Sugarcane farmers in India did better on the same test after the harvest than before it, when money was tight.

Record; Mani et al., Science (2013)

Scholars see this as one of the reasons why having too little can easily lead to having even less. Repeat experiments have had mixed results, so it's still debated. Leave the repetition to AI, and spend your thinking power on your own work.

Debated; replication studies

We spend our lives chasing money, but we can't take it with us.

But there is money that outlives us. Money left where it meets other people's needs.

Over the 200 years after his death, Franklin's money was at times lent to young tradesmen, and at times spent on technical education in the two cities.

Record; Franklin's bequest funds (1790–1990)

Just turning time into money won't solve it. Money comes to those who turn energy into other people's needs.

My view

In the famine the silver ran out, but Joseph's granary fed Egypt.

Scripture; Genesis 47

Here's my last question. Is there something in your storehouse that can meet other people's needs?