Mostly out of curiosity, I looked into what it looks like to go pro now. Basically you go into a machine as a young kid, and if you show promise, you get focus from the coaching staff at the academies. Everyone else is basically just a warm body whose parents are paying a ton of money for their teen to be a hitting partner for the academy's golden goose.
THEN if you make the show, you're fighting for rankings through some absolutely abysmal satellite tournaments that you're essentially losing money to go play in. Losing in the first round of a major makes you more money than winning one of these things.
The delta between the 20th ranked player in the world versus the top 150th insane, too, with one worth millions and one worth maybe a small six figure salary, with a notable portion of it going toward travel/training expenses.
He didn't have that next level of extreme athleticism- he could make every shot and was very proficient and earned a good living on tour, but if he hadn't come from good money he never would have been there in the first place, because he didn't have the native talent, never getting into the 60s in ATP rankings.
Doing great as a coach though.
Sadly (or is it?), it's like the real world. Marketing, image, having a product people want is still important.
That's not luck, that's paying attention to the market and adjusting accordingly.
The hardest part is putting in the work. Being your own motivator and then working away at something is very difficult in the long run.
I'd also like to add that $10k a year in numerous countries is decent income.
Many big tech companies arise from disintermediation plays--finding some market that has high overhead and figuring out a way to transact it more cheaply. This is great: it lowers barriers to entry and liberates a new surplus, but it's not clear who then captures this new surplus, the market participants or the marketplace?
I would posit that the lottery system is a mechanism to enable the excess surplus to be siphoned away from the market participants towards the marketplace. Humans are _terrible_ at estimating the expected value of low-probability high-impact events, and dangling a few rags-to-riches stories lets your participants imagine they're going to make it. In reality, it bifurcates the market and drops the median outcome (presumably, this surplus is captured by the transaction fees of the marketplace).
As an example where this could play out, I might look at restaurants--if delivery apps and shadow kitchens lower the clearing costs for me to find a dinner, does that then mean the "best" restaurant in town can now scale up, to the detriment of the second or third best? (On the other hand, the physical limitations make this story a harder sell than purely digital goods.)