I think magical is exactly how to think about vigor
It has to to with the ability to harness inarticulable forces. To get energy and power from places that aren't mapped. To use feel and "vibe" over programmatic logic orlaw. Vigor is spirit, rigor is letter. Vigor is religion (in its true, non-cargoculted, pre-institutional form) and rigor science. Rigor is about drilling and vigor is about passion.
But vigour is also to do with actual, yunno, powerful power as I understand it. There are players with magical talent, let's say Le Tissier, but who are lazy and slow and lack the things that I think of when I hear the word vigour. If you are seeking to describe the dichotomy between the hardworking, dedicated and regimented path to success on the one hand vs with free-form, spontaneous creativity on the other then I feel that - sadly, given the neatness of the rhyme - rigour/r doesn't quite capture it I feel.
But whatever, we clearly have a different understanding of the definition of one particular word and that's something that is not really that important or interesting - I do now realise and understand both the concepts you are trying to get across and the opposition between them to which you refer and how we label that overall thing and its constituent parts is neither here nor there.
I am not upset that someone tagged this "grandpa's a cuck" but I do think "cuck" isn't the right word for it. it's almost the opposite pathology, which involves not living up to the responsibilities of power, and caring too much about his dignity
I'd agree what you described doesn't fit my understanding of a cuck. I am really interested to know how the man reacted to the whole thing - particularly so cos, in my experience of capitalism, the winners tend to be convinced that all of their success was entirely down to their hardwork and skilful decision-making, with the result that they judge those who have not been so successful (by the metric that the system imposes) as lazy and or stupid. It's one of the things I find most frustrating, to see some stupid billionaire lecturing people on how to succeed like he did, totally failing to realise that there are countless others who acted in the same way but due to one or more moment of luck did not end up wealthy and who are therefore invisible cos of the selection bias which means that only the winners end up interviewed. This lack of empathy and cast-iron belief in their own genius which I see repeated again and again is something that appears to be horribly damaging to society as a whole, especially cos these people, by dint of being on top of the pile, tend to have a disproportionate say in how society is organised and how it perceives those defined by the wealthy as "losers".
I often wish that such heartless winners would get the chance to lose all their money for a day and see whether they would gain any empathy. So, while I don't mean to wish any ill on your grandfather, I would like to know the following
a) When he was wealthy and on top, did he ascribe his success entirely down to his own personal attributes and actions?
b) When the system turned on him and kicked him in the goolies, how did he react?
I suppose that I would like to further split b) into some options - did he see what happened as his own failure or some freakish bad luck or did it cause him to blame the system itself and then to question it? And did it make him think differently about those that he'd previously dismissed as failures (assuming that he did think that)