Exactly. You have to be willing to work hard, sacrifice time with your family, time for frivolous pursuits and more. You also have to have a burning desire to be more and do more with your life which makes the sacrifice worth it. What you cannot do is sit back and wait for success to come to you - doesn't work that way.
I don't think you need to go to the extremes to create wealth.
Wealth is also created when the employees of a business produce goods the business can sell for more than it cost to make those goods, including the cost of labor. That's not to say that labor is pre-eminent; capital, and capitalists, are as necessary to creating wealth as is labor.
That being said, it is labor that gets the whole game off the ground. Consider: one could treat wealth as being the sum of the store of goods everyone has that each individual could either consume directly or could trade for something else. How can this sum be increased? After all, at the retail level, we're essentially swapping goods, which creates greater utility inasmuch as each party gets something they value more than what they're giving away, so mere buying and selling doesn't create wealth, even if it does create a profit.
However, suppose that I pick up a pretty stone one day and start chipping away at it during my spare time so that, after several months, I have carved a small statuette of, say, a local deity, something that has value to someone else, and thus to me (who is more interested in selling it). I have created wealth; I have taken something that had little or no value to anyone - a rock lying on the footpath, more likely to turn an ankle than an eye - and through my own labor have turned that worthless rock into a statuette of value. If I had taken that rock to market, I probably wouldn't have gotten anything for my troubles; however, if I take the statuette I turned it into, I am likely to get something in return that I will value.
