Rand lived in a perfect and imaginary world.
Effort = Reward.... A thousand times no, because the world isn't "fair...." Right now, there are an enormous amount of underemployed or unemployed people that Rand would've happily written off, though they don't deserve this. These people had jobs/were productive/etc. Whatever happened wasn't their fault.... Heck, the book Atlas Shrugged literally lets the United States collapse.
Every conflict has two sides (or more) and one of them almost always loses. Does that mean... anything? The fact that they lost? We feel all disappointed at the losing baseball team that got beat by the Yankees in the World Series, but COME ON #2 isn't a bad spot. We bitch when our team loses the big game forgetting that they're in the #2 spot. Never mind the fact that, I couldn't play in a major league game if my life depended upon it half so well as the #2, "losing" team. It was a good game and the "losing" team certainly contributed something, because without them, there wouldn't be a World Series of Baseball.
Then there's the bell curve. Basically all of statistics says you're going to have a bell curve (of some type) distribution. The idea that if we all worked extra special hard that we could be these Atlas Shrugged Superhero characters isn't true and can't be true. It's the same thing as saying you can be an Astronaut, or President of the United States.... Yeah, it's technically possible, but entirely improbable/not gonna happen.
Then there's what other people do to you, directly, indirectly, and even unintentionally. Let's say you're kicking ass and doing great professionally for a bit then. Suddenly, a family member you care about greatly gets severely injured/killed. Let's say somebody hits your car and severely injures you but doesn't have insurance/you can't collect a court judgment against them and now you're seriously injured. Wow, still have that superhuman amount of devotion Rand worships? Let's say you have kids and they're born with special needs; how do you and the kids manage? Same thing with crime. No, you're not going to get restitution back in full most of the time. It's not practical/possible to manage that. Finally, let's consider the economy. A HUGE part of "luck" is when you come into the working world: during boom or bust. You could have the best [insert business or profession here] ever, but if everybody's broke and unemployed then they can't afford your awesome [service/good/employment], so it doesn't matter.
The number of people making a decision isn't conclusive, fine. She has one point, one. She basically points out argument ad numerum (Argument to numbers as correctness). A bad decision made by one person is as bad as one made by a thousand. What she fails to point out, is that the individual can be just as wrong as a thousand. The implication is that an individual can make a better choice than a group (basically her deal) but that's no more true than saying a group can make a better choice than an individual.
Simply speaking, shit happens. Effort does not always equal reward. Rand doesn't account for chance/luck/outside factors/imbalances in resources/etc. Instead she basically says that if anything bad happens to you, then it's your fault because you could've somehow either prevented it or compensated for it. There is a reason that her most famous books are fiction.