The main under appreciated influence in all this is how much talent can reinforce work. There are outliers on either side (pure talent, pure work) if you squint, but ultimately the best of the best are the ones who are extraordinarily talented but put in an incredible amount of work (and are intelligent enough / discerning enough to find the right coaches to work on the right things). From the outside we look at the work as superhuman, but for many "common" people, we all spend ridiculous amounts of time on things we enjoy. The academic finding that I always found the most illustrative of this was that the correlation of IQ to outcome increases after age 18. The environmental influence of your parents goes away, both the overeager parents who push their kids when the kids don't care and the dreadful parents who drag down their kids success.