If you want to win, become a masochist

Most people organize their lives around the avoidance of discomfort. This is a reasonable default for an animal, and a terrible strategy for a person who wants to accomplish something difficult. The difficult thing is difficult precisely because it is uncomfortable, and the discomfort is the part almost everyone flinches away from.

The advantage available to you is simple, if not easy: learn to want the discomfort. Not to tolerate it, not to endure it grimly, but to actively seek it out as the signal that you are somewhere worth being. If you can retrain yourself to move toward the hard thing instead of away from it, you will find the competition thins out dramatically.

The thinning crowd

At every level of difficulty, the crowd gets smaller. The reason is not that fewer people are capable at each level. It is that fewer people are willing. Willingness, not ability, is the binding constraint for most of what you might want to do, and willingness is trainable.

When you learn to find something almost pleasurable in the strain, you gain access to rooms that stay empty because everyone else refused to walk through the discomfort at the door.