Naruto is about using the potential you have.
If Naruto didn't have these inherited advantages, but still wanted a rare position such as famous hero or Hokage, he would have no better chance at it than any of the thousands or millions of people who were also striving for such a position and also trained. Given that the number of such positions is much smaller than the number of candidates, it is a statistical likelihood that he would fail. It's the same reason why most kids who want to grow up to be president will not become president no matter how hard they try--the number of job openings for the presidency is really low compared to the number of kids.
It just isn't realistic that Naruto could achieve what he wants to achieve unless he has some unearned advantage, whether superpowers or just plot armor or dumb luck. The best the story can do and still make sense is having his goal require both unearned advantages and training; the unearned advantages reduce the improbability by enough that he can train hard to get the rest of the way.
The best the story can do and still make sense is having his goal require both unearned advantages and training
But what the story actually does is having all of his greatest powers granted by others, completely unrelated to any of his training. In the early to mid story, he only survives due to fast healing and occasional berserk-god mode granted by Kurama. In the late story, he gets powers from all nine tailed beasts and the ghost of his ancestor. None of these require or rely on any training; they would work the same on anyone.
What tricks are there t...
As people who care about rationality and winning, it's pretty important to care about training. Repeated practice is how humans acquire skills, and skills are what we use for winning.
Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to get System 1 fully on board with the fact that repeated, difficult, sometimes tedious practice is how we become awesome. I find fiction to be one of the most useful ways of communicating things like this to my S1. It would be great to have a repository of fiction that shows characters practicing skills, mastering them, and becoming awesome, to help this really sink in.
However, in fiction the following tropes are a lot more common:
Example of exactly the wrong thing:
The Hunger Games - Katniss is explicitly up against the Pledges who have trained their whole lives for this one thing, but she has … something special that causes her to win. Also archery is her greatest skill, and she's already awesome at it from the beginning of the story and never spends time practicing.
Close-but-not-perfect examples of the right thing:
The Pillars of the Earth - Jack pretty explicitly has to travel around Europe to acquire the skills he needs to become great. Much of the practice is off-screen, but it's at least a pretty significant part of the journey.
The Honor Harrington series: the books depict Honor, as well as the people around her, rising through the ranks of the military and gradually levelling up, with emphasis on dedication to training, and that training is often depicted onscreen – but the skills she's training in herself and her subordinates aren't nearly as relevant as the "tactical genius" that she seems to have been born with.
I'd like to put out a request for fiction that has this quality. I'll also take examples of fiction that fails badly at this quality, to add to the list of examples, or of TVTropes keywords that would be useful to mine. Internet hivemind, help?