Our illogical President

As some with a full-time job who has started a small business and typically works on that small business nearly every weekend, President Obama's ridiculous statement that I "didn't build that" business hits me on a personal level. I know for a fact that my hard work and long hours did "build that" business in spite of the ineptness of government bureaucrats who instead of making building my business easier, have at numerous times made it more difficult and costly.

But instead of going into depth about that, I'd like to look at the paragraph preceding President Obama's statement and show how completely illogical the thought process of the man leading our country is.

ABC News has the context of the quote.

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me, because they want to give something back. They know they didn't -look, if you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

Besides the obvious strawman which acts like successful people think they obtained their success completely on their own, President Obama is arguing that because some smart people and some hardworking people don't succeed that means the success of other smart people and hardworking people isn't caused by their smarts and/or hard work. That's a hasty generalization.

Sometimes people who are hardworking do fail but that in no way means that hard work doesn't often lead to success or wasn't the primary factor in the success of someone else. Many factors can lead to being successful and they vary in importance on a case by case basis but how illogical is it to assume that the success of all successful people isn't caused by their hard work because "there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there" and some of them aren't successful?