This is related to the general "is it luck or is it skill" question: At the broadest scales, luck increasingly explains every factor of experience. But in the everyday situation you can always point to factors of skill, until you get down to the most raw performance indicators of speed, strength, reflexes, etc.: then it becomes luck, unless you have a way of training those things, improving them with nutrition, pharmaceuticals etc. And then it becomes skill again, until you are limited by stuff inherent to a human body, and then it could be luck that you have long swimmer arms or bodybuilder genetics. You can then switch to considering mechanical assistance and developing original inventions, and now you are considering mental performance. It goes on and on like that.
The most practical thing I've found to do, in light of this problem, is to focus on developing better feedback: success and failure signals for each problem that you can use to summarize how you are doing. Then the skill/luck question becomes less reliant on external comparison and more on inner growth - hence more in control, more skill-driven.
But as a society our measures are mostly external. If someone succeeds, that's all we see.
The most practical thing I've found to do, in light of this problem, is to focus on developing better feedback: success and failure signals for each problem that you can use to summarize how you are doing. Then the skill/luck question becomes less reliant on external comparison and more on inner growth - hence more in control, more skill-driven.
But as a society our measures are mostly external. If someone succeeds, that's all we see.