If you think about it, to be “successful”, you need a few big wins… That’s it. There’s no rocket science to it. You need to either have built one solid product, or one solid company, or earned a lot of everything, or have impacted a ton of people. Usually, it’s a mix of all.
When success happens to people, what really happens is a discrete, step-function increase. You level-up in a moment. This surprises many people, but it feels pretty normal to you.
One way these paradigm changes have happened to me is due to the unreasonable effectiveness of small-scale optimizations. Another way is by realizing the mundanity of excellence.
But the first step is understanding that, the bar for success is actually easy to achieve.