If you ever feel discouraged by how much more others are getting through or getting to, remember that for any kind of accomplishment you notice, that person had to make sacrifices. Usually that isn't the part you hear about. You don't hear about the times someone got furious with them because they didn't pick up the phone, or the times there was a deadline more urgent but less important and that thing blew up for several people at once as a result of neglect, or the legitimate doubts about the value of what they were doing compared to other life directions they might still take.

You don't hear about the arterial plaque that accumulated while someone sat many hours and days and months in a row grinding away to build this talent. You don't hear about the repetitive strain injuries that could have destroyed a career, or did destroy one before it started. You never hear about the books a person would have read while rereading a classic twenty times so impressively, or the lives they could have saved, or friends they could have made instead. I'm not trying to undermine accomplishment at all. Just remember that everything comes with something else. Usually you only know about one aspect or side of many.

It's easy to look around and see accomplishment everywhere and feel... overwhelmed, as if the average successful person were good at all of these things you are seeing, rather than one or two at a time (in a lifetime), and many, many, many sacrifices you don't see in order to get there.

We might call this notion the Mythical Success Savant, this feeling that a truly, respectably successful spirit-person hides behind the examples you see, and accounts for many of them at once. This idea that you're up against a many-armed, many-headed ideal - hello, Mythical Success Savant - that makes you endlessly not good enough. The CEO, the scientist, the painter, the hobby baker turning a side gig into a main gig. They aren't all the same. Each one is only one, a highly finite and imperfect person, and you are generally missing the warning labels, provisos, and other costs. Some traits and habits tend to facilitate success and translate across domains, that's true. But you can always learn and develop more of those. Nothing is stopping you from learning how to be more successful.