Almost every sport has a dominant body type. Basketball players are tall. Quarterbacks too have to be tall enough to see over the offensive line. Swimmers tend to have long torsos. Gymnasts tend to be on the shorter side.

Over generations, the way the sport is played selects for a certain type of athlete. But just because height or speed or body type is a strength, it doesn’t mean that athletes lacking those attributes are weak or out of luck. In fact, often the opposite is true. The new HBO documentary on Tony Hawk talks about how early pool and vert skaters needed a certain amount of strength to yank the board up and out of the ramp to get air for a trick. As a skinny kid, Tony Hawk simply did not have this strength. It seemed like a disadvantage up until the very moment that it drove him to innovate ollying as he rode up to the lip, and thus changed skateboarding forever.

It’s a classic example of, as Marcus Aurelius said, how the impediment to action advances action. What stood in the way—Hawk’s inability to perform a certain task physically—became a new way, which his mind and creativity and courage was able to create from nothing.

It’s funny, we sit here and we curse ourselves for not being as well-funded as our competitors. For not having the contacts or network of our peers. For not being able to go to a better school or live in a certain place. For the market being what it is right now. And yes, this is unfortunate. It would have been preferable for things to have been more fair, been easier, been simpler. But without that unfairness and difficulty in the world, we’d have been deprived of so many innovations, so many breakthroughs, so many better ways of doing things.

We can turn our weaknesses into strengths. We can convert our disadvantages into advantages. Indeed, that’s what every great company, athlete and artist has ever done.