On "framing personal success", Michael Sandel puts it very well[0], when he says:

"Meritocratic hubris reflects the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. It is the smug conviction of those who land on top that they deserve their fate, and that those on the bottom deserve theirs, too. This attitude is the moral companion of technocratic politics."

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PS: I wouldn't give much weight to Newport's words—he's a clever marketer[1][2] and repeats the same few points ad nauseam in endless "books". The antidote to Newport is the classic originals that he's poorly paraphrasing from. I mentioned a few here[1] in the past.

[0] In his book, The Tyranny of Merit — https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374289980/thetyrannyofmer...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29035998

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20082125