I think the largest factor is delayed gratification. People are not randomly wealthy...delayed gratification often is the driving force. Build a career over the long haul, save, invest, build a pension, and avoid “sugary” spending.
Distance running is a close surrogate. The pay-off is a PR thousands of miles away, or good health 30 years on. Distance running is quite boring, except for those elusive magical moments, with the next one always harder to attain. In many other sports, things are much more fun and much more exciting right from the start. A new distance runner is icing shin splints while a new basketball player might be shooting a buzzer beater for an C team.
The Stanford Marshmallow Study illustrates this
“ Follow-up studies with the children later in adolescence showed a correlation between an ability to wait long enough to obtain a second treat and various forms of life success, such as higher SAT scores. And a 2011 fMRI study conducted on 59 original participants—now in their 40s—by Cornell’s B.J. Casey showed higher levels of brain activity in the prefrontal cortex among those participants who delayed immediate gratification in favor of a greater reward later on. ”