For if you do succeed, it won't have been a miracle: you should be able to pin down at least approximately the causal factors that got you to where you are. And it has to be a plausible story.

The causal factors, that got you to where you are, might not be that obvious. Which is why teaching success is not trivial at all.

Also, I agree with most of what pjeby is saying in this thread. Successful people didn't become successful throught the sheer brute force of their willpower. If someone who's successfull says he achieved it "throught a lot of hard work and determination", people usually imagine "a lot of hard work" to mean things like "do stuff you don't enjoy all day, be all stressed-out, endure sleepless nights, not have a life". They imagine that in order to become successful, first you have to be go through an extended period of being miserable (i.e.doing the hard work), and then you stop being miserable because you've become successful. This strikes me as completely wrong. Successful people do not achieve success by punching through concrete walls of misery using their extraordinary willpower. Fighting akrasia does not need to involve the horrifyingly heroic efforts some people suffering from akrasia imagine it to necessarily involve.