ONE of the great joys of working from home is the ability to eat handfuls of cereal out of the packet without fear of judgement. Another, perhaps somewhat more productive joy, is being able to potter around the internet and stumble across hidden gems that do not necessarily reach the mainstream media. A few months ago, I came across a site called Universal Tennis, on which Eric Butorac writes a regular blog.

Butorac is an American doubles player who, at his best, was in the top 20 in the world and he is also president of the ATP Player Council. He blogs on everything and anything in the tennis world, but his latest offering caught my eye because it applies to every sport, not only his own. It is entitled The Path of Discomfort: If It Were Easy, Everybody Would Do It, and it begins with a Navy SEALs maxim: “Get comfortable being uncomfortable".

While top-class sport is a tad less pressurised than being in the special ops, his general point is that to become an elite athlete, one must push oneself beyond where one is comfortable. This is a quality that every top athlete possesses, irrespective of their sport or nationality or background. It is also a quality that is often underestimated, or ignored completely.

Butorac’s blog made me think of a radio interview I did last month talking about a poll that had been carried out in Britain asking "normal" people if they think they could have been an elite athlete. Over one quarter of those surveyed thought that if things had gone differently for them, they could have made it in the professional sports ranks. I was not one bit surprised at the poll’s findings; in fact, if anything, I was shocked that it wasn’t an even higher percentage. If I had a pound for every time someone – almost always a man – said they could beat me at badminton because they were the best in their Standard Grade PE class, I’d be minted. Because clearly, my training twice a day, every day for over a decade will struggle to compete with their 40 minutes twice a week when they were 16.

So many diverse factors go into becoming a professional athlete that these people who think they could have been up there with the Murray brothers or Katie Archibald or Eilidh Child are, frankly, deluded. While there are many individuals who have a talent in a particular sport, aptitude is only a tiny percentage of what makes an athlete successful. As Butorac suggests, you need to be able to make yourself uncomfortable day in, day out; you need to be able to remove yourself from your comfort zone and not want to go back. How many people, however talented at a sport, can do this? Almost every athlete who has made it to the highest level has done this: Andy Murray moved to Barcelona as a 15 year-old, Michael Jamieson moved to Paris, living in a room the size of a cupboard, and Hannah Miley gets up at the crack of dawn, or earlier, every day in order to get pool time. How many people could do this? And these examples merely scratch the surface of the commitment required in order to even have a chance of making it.

It is why Scotland has so few world-class footballers: they are not willing to commit to the level that is required. How many of Scotland’s footballers got smashed at the end of the season? A lot. Yet Andy Murray celebrated his first-ever grand slam victory with a glass of lemonade. There’s the difference. Murray has the commitment that is needed to make it to the top.

Last month, Radio 5 Live broadcast a programme about a father, Ray Wood, who is training his daughters to become tennis champions. His eldest is just seven years old yet is on court at 6am most mornings. Wood believes that by giving his daughters an early start at the sport, he can guarantee their success. It’s along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory: if you practise anything for 10,000 hours you will master it. This may be true for many things but for sport, so many more factors come into play. How many "normal" people would celebrate a grand slam victory with one, single square of chocolate like Novak Djokovic does? It’s this obsessiveness that cannot be manufactured. When people say they could have made a career out of sport, if only they hadn’t been so unlucky, they underestimate just what it takes.

In Butorac’s blog, he talks about being in situations which made him hugely uncomfortable. Most would turn and walk away. It’s only the few who embrace being uncomfortable every single day who will make it. Being a decent footballer at 15 is not enough.