Yes, luck plays a big part of it, so it's important to redefine your perspective so you don't value dominance over others or class or such things, because that can be a lost cause. You were given a hand of card at random, and while there is some wiggle room in terms of how far you can make it given the cards you were given, a bad hand is still a bad hand, and can only let you do so much.

Focus on your personal growth, but understand your circumstances and where you start from, and recognize how much you managed to optimize and accomplish relative to that.

And in my opinion, there's no place for hard work within this framework. The feeling of hardship is your body telling you your circumstances ain't cut out for this thing. You also have the ability to reason, so you can reason that some hard things are worth pushing through the pain, like say for a life saving surgery. But sometimes I think people reason that they will be able to push through something, yet fail consistently to be motivated to do so. That's when you need to realize, hold on, ok, this ain't gonna work for me, I need to find something else that's easier. And no, the people who made it where you failed didn't do so because they just pushed through that same hardship, generally it just wasn't as hard for them to find the motivation to push through.