If only it is not one a shot thing. Say, you could become great if you initially was lazy, but something forced you to take yourself in hands, but is it possible when you already was great in something, but somehow lost that ablity.

Also there is that thing with reward for your labour. If you work hard all the time and as soon as you get a decent reward that reward is depreciated, you inevitably lose the motivation to repeat that senseless thing again. Same is with civilisation - when it work hard for a century and in the end rewarded with "140 characters in twitter instead of flying cars" and just another stupid generation of smartphones instead of personal termonuclear reactors and spending vacations cruising over Solar system planets, despite all techonlogy necessary is created, when somebody else still decide that you will get smartphone instead of flying cars, then there is no much reason to continue. What is the point to invent and develop, if somebody else eventually will not allow you to use that as you want, will license, limit or even prohibit nearly everything you do?