National Review’s senior political correspondent Jim Geraghty writes,

Americans fantasize about the good life—a big house, a fancy car, stylish clothes, vacations in far-flung exotic locales—and they often envision this luxurious life paid for by a wildly lucrative career, most often in entertainment, athletics, or music. But research demonstrates that a lot of those who ended up wealthy did so by living the opposite of that ostentatious champagne-and-caviar lifestyle. And they often did so by working hard, in jobs that required a great deal of education and dedication. Some formed a small business and steadily built it over a lifetime. The good life rarely ‘just happens’ to people.