I talk to them? Ask them “how’d you get so good at Thing?” and they often tell you just how hard it is to do Thing, but they love it and feel so lucky that they can get paid to do Thing, then tell you all the challenges they ran into, etc.
This incorrectly assumes that people are self-aware about how much their genetics / environment contributed to their success (they are not) but also misses the fact that lots of people work very hard at things without success.
When I think of my singular biggest external achievement, I worked my ass off for it. But no amount of hard work by someone who didn't have some of the advantages I have would have gotten them anywhere close to it. The second part of that comes up approximately never when people ask me about it, I always emphasise the tremendous amount of gut-busting work it took, because that's the part I'm proud of. All that said, I've worked just as hard (maybe harder?) on some things that came to nothing.
There's still a missing part. As a kid I didn't have to learn how to read. I saw the words on children books while my mother was reading when I was 5 and my brain did the rest. It's thus unrelated to time spend trying a particular task.
The "funny" part is that since high school, my brain kinda lost the ability to parse / infer things I don't know most of the time, but not always, and the few time I was able to understand new topics was when I altered my own thinking patterns to not search for answers right away but let myself swim in stimuli/data smoother and let idea come up slowly.
