I believe that anyone can get what they want in the long run.
I’d peg this as analogous to Buffett’s long-only value investing framework. Good people (and businesses) compound meaningfully over time and accrue value accordingly. Whether this value is ascribed to capital, happiness, or any other metric doesn’t necessarily matter other than to the individual themself, and I believe that every individual can get what they want (and be willing to work for) in the long term.
A meta-analysis by Roberts in 2007 points out that conscientiousness is the biggest predictor of “pronounced success” even after controlling for intelligence (r ≈ .2 - .3). The simple, yet obviously difficult, act of staying consistent outweighs short-term failures.
In the near term, however, there are certainly idiosyncratic cases to consider. One may see delayed outcomes, sickness, or pure unluckiness / luckiness, among a million other short-term outcomes. Someone may win the lottery, be born in war-torn land, or even get hit by a truck.
In the long term, this volatility normalizes. Better put, outcomes regress to the mean, as shown by Barnett’s research from 2005. This is where you see consistent, risk-seeking, and hard working people accrue value and potentially achieve tail-end outcomes. Conversely, consistently lazy or unambitious people will also regress to their own mean, despite short term volatility (or what one may call luck).
Incentives must be aligned, in that a janitor wouldn’t fare well if they sought to amass money, so one must pursue something that has the ability to compound to their desires in the first place.
Past that, life is like Buffett’s approach to markets, a self-correcting mechanism… and people can always get what they want in the long run.