Natural ability (physical or mental) is not strongly correlated with the personality traits that enable a person to "perform", "succeed", or "achieve" in society the way it is structured. In fact, they may be inversely correlated (consider how often people in leadership positions are not apparently exceptional).
I think there are 0 people in NBA that don't have natural ability placing them in 1% of general pop.
Your statement might be applicable to jobs that can be performed more than adequately by 20% percentile talent but not to most sports or music, which have brutal odds due to "winner takes most" dynamics.
There are 540 NBA players. There are ~40 million men aged 18-35 in US.
To beat those odds you have to supremely talented and supremely hard working.
Contrast this with estimated 1.6-4.4 million software engineers.
You can be mid but hard working programmer and beat brilliant but otherwise flawed programmer (not as hard working, oblivious to politics etc.), for some definition of "beat" (like better pay or higher position in company).
As to people in leadership position: consider that to succeed as a manager / leader is more about being good at politics than at solving complex equations.
Then again, the outsized successes were created by competent leaders: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos.
There's a story about, I think, the kickboxer/fighter Alistair Overeem that he was playing Connect 4, and lost, and kept demanding rematches until he had the winning record. Just a refusal to be the loser. That matches every story I've ever heard about Michael Jordan.
I always think of a kid who was a friend of my daughters. He just really liked winning. I mean, when I was a kid and our team won a soccer game I was happy enough. This kid - if his team was playing a tomato can of a team and the score was 12-0 he was just as ecstatic about making the score 13-0 as was with that first goal. I honestly think he was happier about that kind of game then a struggle to beat a reasonable opponent. Heaven forbid they should lose.
Oddly he drifted away from sports (physically he was too small and honestly fragile - 2 or 3 broken bones before he was 12) and into the arts.
At the same time, I can refuse to be a loser in chess and I'll still have 0% chance of beating Magnus Carlsen.
I'm very much a proponent of hard work to the best of your ability but I'm also a realist.
I'm pretty good at programming. I doubt Usain Bolt would ever be as good as I am at programming, even if he tried, and I certainly wouldn't be even close to be as good as Usain Bolt in running no matter how hard I tried.
I know how fast I was running in high school compared to 30 of my peers (my class) and there was never a path from there to a world class athlete.
Miserable way to live, if you ask me.
Everybody playing forced games of connect4 is the loser.
The only winning move is not to play.