The people who make it often aren’t the most talented. They’re the ones still around in year five.

Fields thin out, and most of the thinning has nothing to do with ability. People leave because the money is slow, or rejections accumulate, or life needed them elsewhere, so by year five the group remaining is simply the group that stayed. Staying is a form of selection and hardly anybody describes it that way. The competition shrinks on its own if you can afford to remain in it.

So think about what would let you still be doing this in five years: cheap living, a job alongside it, people who keep you going. Protecting your ability to continue is a strategy, not the absence of one.