One of the few people who are actually competent.

Although most likely she’s well compensated, and doesn’t have to waste time on useless efforts at work, this level of discipline and striving towards a goal is just very rare in general.

Possibly also no family, limited social life and no other hobbies.

For myself, when I lived on a different continent to my family, had limited social life and job with strictly set hours, it was much easier to have the time needed to make significant progress on a hobby.

However, discipline is an enormous factor too, actually using that extra available time on something “productive” is no easy feat.

Now I have kids and live in the same area as my parents and siblings again, entirely happy, but less free time.

One of the unspoken benefits of being young, you're unlikely to have grown into a management position and can focus on not-management stuff.

This is what managers tell themselves to feel better about their idleness, but in the end it’s just another excuse.

Every person is different of course, there might be this one brilliant engineer forced to manage against his will somewhere.

Forced by financial concerns, a decent bunch I'd say.

Fair, fair. I’d take a salary bump, because it affords an illusion of being able to escape the Cage faster.

2021 and 2022 was also when many places were only just coming out of COVID lockdowns. I remember how much dead time I had back then. I used it to watch lots of series and youtube videos. I wish I had the discipline and motivation to work like she did during that area with all that free time.

Yeah same. I made a dent in my gaming backlog and TV shows and built a gaming computer that has only ever been used to play Factorio (notably, a game that can probably be played without a GPU).

Half of me kinda wants another lockdown so I can do more discipline-y stuff but the other half is like, dude you're just gonna waste it playing more games. I just gotta face the music - I'm just not disciplined and I just don't have the drive.

She does a bunch of social media stuff with her girlfriend on top of that, so “limited social life and no other hobbies” may not be a good description.

Many people are competent. She's exceptional.

Ignorant comment. I'll happily be incompetent if it means I have those things

Sounds like one of those mythical 10x engineers!

Perhaps, "Deep Work" by Cal Newport can explain that.