Low success rate does not require low skill
I have a lot of niche hobbies and positions on various issues. There are many things that I try to achieve and communicate at which I fail almost every time. To a typical observer, this indicates that I'm not very good at doing or conveying the thing in question. However, a typical observer isn't qualified to make that judgment about many things they aren't familiar with. There are many skills for which a peak practitioner, even the best in the world, would not achieve total success with any regularity, but this concept seems alien to most people.
One example of this phenomenon is founding residential intentional communities. Almost all coliving and cohousing projects fail before ever leaving the formative stages, with their most tangible evidence being communications and documents. Almost all of the ones that actually achieve some practical form of organization with meetings and property visits fail before finding money or reaching any agreements about property selection. Almost all of the cohousing projects that make progress with financing and choose a property fail before breaking ground, and almost all coliving projects that choose a property and move in together break up by the end of the first year. The number of attempts that achieve even slightly more success than this is relatively quite small. I've started three coliving communities that lasted 3+ years, one of which is still going in year 8. Unless you're active in the intentional community organizing scene, I'm probably the most capable and successful such organizer that you know, and that would still be the case even if I failed another twenty times.
Another example is communication about the nature of intimate consent. There is no way to have a productive conversation about the most difficult parts of this topic without traumatically triggering some people and offending many others. Those outcomes don't indicate that the person in question is lacking any particular skill. I've seen professional mediators and therapists involved in those discussions and failing to thread that particular needle. To see those harms and conclude that the person did something poorly or wrong is an error. When people come up to me and tell me all the positive outcomes that came from me driving certain conversations, I know that I'm succeeding at a task that most other people won't even attempt. Their lack of failure is due to their lack of attempts, not their skill level.
A somewhat related concept is errors in solo competitive sports and other activities. There are many sports where a single significant error during competition will drop someone out of the running entirely, such as a bad entry in a diving competition or landing in gymnastics, and many sports fans are only familiar with this sort. There are, however, many others where major errors are an expected part of competition, and someone might still take home a gold medal after, e.g., dropping a yo yo repeatedly during their performance. If you don't know about that sort of competition, then you might be surprised to see that person described as extremely skillful. The underlying distinction is that they tried far more relatively difficult things than the competitors in sports where one error is a deal breaker, not that they have less skill.
I'd like to find a better way to convey this concept. Ideally I am looking for a concise enough form that it can be interjected into a meta discussion about the efforts and failures in question, without derailing that discussion. If you have suggestions on that front, or other examples to add, I'd love to hear them.