So on the subject about effort, success, and the existence of talent:
I play Go. It's basically the hardest total information board game out there. People spend their whole lives dedicated to playing the game professionally, mostly in the countries of China, Japan, and Korea. The three countries form basically the top tier of play skill in the entire world, and are the only countries(cept Taiwan, but most people lump them in with China) to have professional Go players: People who play the game regularly to receive a salary.
To be good at Go is a combination of memorization, pattern recognition, visuospatial reasoning, and visualization. The speed, accuracy, and depth to which you can see a position is very important. Along with that are the facts that aethetic intuition comes into play very often, as brilliant plays can come out of nowhere and are often seen as beautiful. Scans of the brains of professionals show that during a game of Go they often use most of their entire brain, portions usually used for things like language processing or understanding another person's emotions are highly active during positions, along with the visuospatial reasoning centers and the memory centers of the brain.
So, to become a professional, you have to attend and pass the professional exam. In China and Korea, the age limit for this exam is 18. Once you reach 18, you are ineligible to take the exam. As a result, most players start young, and drop out of their normal schooling to join special Go schools, where they engage in competition daily and dedicate 100% of their time to playing, studying, and learning the game. Every year there's about 500 entrants to the exam, which is a huge bracket. The top 1-3 players out of 500 every year get to become professionals.
Now... think about this. You've dropped out of school. You play this game 24-7, and you're definitely dedicated. You know that if you can't become a pro by the time you reach 18, you're screwed. It's ridiculously hard for you to get into a university, you can't get a job without any kind of schooling, and you can't try to become a pro anymore. Everyone has this looming pressure over them that if they don't succeed, they're just a bleak future waiting for them.
So by what you're saying, the top 1-3 players there simply wanted the professional status more than everyone else. They clearly must've worked hardest out of all the rest of the players, or else they wouldn't have won such a grueling tournament.
I don't see how you can say that talent plays no role in this. Having visited one of these schools before, I can say, the kids? They ****ing hate losing. I beat this 7 year old one day, he was so mad he looked for me the next day and sat me down just to kick my *** right back. He was #24 in his class of 30(yeah... I'm prolly one of the top 50 players in Cali, but I'd still lose to a 7 year old, eeeeasy). The whole ranking system is cutthroat, everyone's just looking to get better, or quit out of the system.
I don't think I met a single person who wasn't ridiculously dedicated. If they weren't, they had already quit. But if everyone is ridiculously dedicated, there has to be something that puts you over the top.
I think it's both naive and unfair to people who don't make it to the very top to say that it's their own fault for not being dedicated enough or working hard enough. I mean, in some cases, it might very well be true. But in others? There're just some walls you can't get through on effort alone.
TL;DR: I think to look at people at the top and say, "Oh, look how hard they work! That must be the only reason why they're so amazing! Everyone else who isn't as good as them, they prolly just don't work hard enough!" Is what a lot of people tend to do. After all, it's not easy to measure someone's natural propensity, their talent, their own personal potential, but I don't think you can deny that such a thing exists.
