Social media was buzzing as Emma Raducanu, at just 18 years old, became the US Open Champion. Her remarkable achievement attracted millions of new admirers, but what was most interesting was how differently her success made them feel.

On one hand, you had people who saw the performance and felt inspired. An 18 year old had just done something incredible, and if they applied themselves correctly, they could too. Videos of her preparation led to some people adopting it as their new blueprint to model their own successes on.

On the other hand, you had people who felt disheartened. “There she is achieving all these great things, and here I am doing this. She’s so lucky, I wish I was good at something”.

This isn’t unique to Emma Raducanu either. It’s how many people look at high achievers. “They were dealt a good hand and I was dealt a bad one”. Rather than feeling lifted by seeing someone else’s remarkable achievements, they allow it to make them feel inferior and justify it based on luck.

When I see people discussing achievements in this way, I think back to what James Clear explains in Atomic Habits. He talks about the swimmer Michael Phelps, one of the most successful athletes of all time with an amazing 28 Olympic medals.

Biologically, Phelps is built for swimming, which gives him a big advantage over his competitors. It would be easy to look at him and say, he’s built for this, he’s destined to win, he’s so lucky!

But when you dig into the details of his career, you discover that Phelps trained for 6 hours per day, 365 days a year. He claims that for six years straight he didn’t even miss a single day of training — that’s over 2000 days of consistent effort.

So how fair is it for people to say he succeeded because he was lucky to have biological advantages, when he clearly worked much harder than most other people would?

If you committed 6 hours per day, for 365 days straight, how great could you be at something after six years? It’s a choice.

Likewise, we can easily say Raducanu is lucky, she’s going to be highly sought after for sponsorships thanks to her age and appearance. But those factors would mean nothing without the huge amount of work she has put in and sacrifices she has made over the years to develop her ability.

As James Clear says:

“Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on. Once we realize our strengths, we know where to spend our time and energy. We know which types of opportunities to look for and which types of challenges to avoid. The better we understand our nature, the better our strategy can be.
Biological differences matter. Even so, it’s more productive to focus on whether you are fulfilling your own potential than comparing yourself to someone else. The fact that you have a natural limit to any specific ability has nothing to do with whether you are reaching the ceiling of your capabilities. People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.
Furthermore, genes can’t make you successful if you’re not doing the work. Yes, it’s possible that the ripped trainer at the gym has better genes, but if you haven’t put in the same reps, it’s impossible to say if you have been dealt a better or worse genetic hand. Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.”

There are many people we look at in this way. One of the most common ones is Elon Musk, who people admire for his exceptional mind. We can look at him and think we lack the brain power to achieve what he has, but his ridiculous work ethic is something anyone could push themselves to adopt if they wanted to. That in itself would yield amazing results.

You see, unless we are willing to put our maximum effort into something, we will never know just how great we can be. When you compare yourself with high achievers, you might focus on the talent but the real difference is the work.

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