Working hard is one thing. Everybody's working hard by some metric. When I got curious last year and looked at how much I write on sites like this, the result was staggering. So theoretically I'm a hard worker.
I guess it depends what you mean by working hard. Pretty much all the artists I consider best in class put themselves in positions where they could work on whatever they wanted without distraction. I don't consider that working.
Can't you two see that you are talking at total cross-purposes?
You are talking about success by other people's measures: getting your paper accepted, being rated as "top" by other people, best in class this, accepted that.
He is not talking about those things at all.
You are never going to see eye to eye if you can't both A) see you are talking about entirely different things, and B) meet somewhere in the middle.
To bring us back to the original point, I would be shocked if the artists that you consider best in class did not work hard.