his whole point was that once he found joy in it, he could excel. I'm confident there's loads of things I could be good at - I'm only good at the things that I enjoy putting effort into.
There are tens of thousands of people who love basketball playing right now and only 300 places in the NBA. Most people are average and never excel at anything, ever. Being 4th out of 20,000 is excelling and the proper response to someone using their own freakishly unrepresentative self as an example for normal people is to point out that they have no idea what it’s like to be normal.
and yet, without joy in the process, he could not have done it.