Regardless of country of residence, anyone who follows soccer, even casually, knows the names Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. They are two megastars of the sport. Over the past two decades, they have entertained fans around the world with their superlative playing skills.

Ronaldo, a Portuguese, has spent much of his career playing for storied European clubs such as England’s Manchester United, Spain’s Real Madrid, and Italy’s Juventus. He currently plays in Saudi Arabia for local club Al-Nassr. Messi, an Argentine, played entirely for Spanish giant Barcelona before joining U.S. Major League Soccer team Inter Miami two years ago.

Of the two, Messi is widely considered to be the naturally gifted player. Ronaldo’s coaches and teammates have always said that he achieved his stardom by dint of sheer effort. According to them, he consistently stayed on the practice field long after everyone had left, practicing free kicks and honing various skills. Those repetitive drills helped make him the best dead-ball specialist in the game, globally. He has scored over 950 goals for club and country, a mindboggling number. He is the all-time highest goalscorer in official games in the sport.

Michael Jordan needs no introduction. His global stature is such that one doesn’t have to be a follower of basketball to know who he is. In his sophomore year in high school, he was reportedly cut from the varsity basketball team because he was deemed too short and inconsistent in games. He used that setback as motivation. After switching to the junior varsity team, he worked intensely hard and his performances caught everyone’s eyes. In his junior year, he was readmitted to the varsity team and quickly became its best player. Jordan went on to star in college before being drafted by the Chicago Bulls in 1984. The rest is history.

Throughout his years in high school, college and the NBA, all of Jordan’s coaches and teammates constantly said that his innumerable skills were honed through relentless practicing. He stayed on the court long after practice to work on his shooting, and would arrive hours before games to go through his individual shooting routines. His work ethic is legendary.

There is a substantial body of research that shows a link between the amount that parents read to their children and the reading abilities of children as they age. In a report published in 2019, researchers at Ohio State University (OSU) found that by age five, children whose parents read to them every day hear 1.4 million more words than children who were rarely or never read to. The OSU researchers cited another study in which the authors estimate that in four years, an average child in a professional family is exposed to almost 45 million words. The equivalent numbers for an average child in a working-class family and a welfare family were 26 million and 13 million, respectively. That report’s authors found a correlation between word exposure and vocabulary acquisition in the subject children.

Whenever I read anything about the link between word exposure in childhood and adult literacy, it sends a shiver down my spine. I realize how much risk I faced as a child of not being able to read well. There were no books in the village where my family lived. Both of my parents were illiterate so they wouldn’t have been able to read anything to me even if books were available. Every child in the village was in the same boat since pretty much all parents there were illiterate. Communication was almost entirely oral, in the local dialect.

I had acquired a minimal level of reading and writing ability from attending the small elementary and middle school in the village. That would probably have been the extent of my literacy. But everything changed one day when I decided that I wanted to leave the village after middle school to attend secondary school. At the time, all Ghanaian secondary schools were boarding institutions that were located in a handful of cities and big towns.

My dream was to attend the most exclusive secondary school in the country, which was located in the capital, Accra. I learned about it purely by accident from a scrap of newspaper I picked up from the ground one morning. To have any hope of getting admitted to the school, I had to be highly proficient in English—in both written and oral forms. That meant I had to do a ton of reading.

It was then that I made the painful decision to use my breakfast money to buy the national daily newspaper, which was sold at the village post office. It was the only reading material I could find in the village. Buying the paper every morning meant that I went to school hungry every day. There were no such things as free school breakfast and lunch in Ghana. I lost a lot of my body weight during that time.

I read intensely from then on. Because I had near-zero English vocabulary at the time, I didn’t know the meanings of most of the words I was reading. I had to find a way to overcome that problem. I managed to save a bit of money to buy a dictionary and a notebook. With the help of the dictionary, I began to write down every unfamiliar word and its meaning. Within a short period of time, the notebook was full. I purchased additional notebooks and over time, accumulated a large amount of vocabulary.

Because of my long list of daily chores, I mostly did my reading at night. There was no electricity in the village so I relied on kerosene lamps for lighting. My eyes burned constantly from the plumes of smoke the lanterns emitted.

In those days, I used to carry the notebooks with me everywhere I went. I constantly practiced the spellings of the recorded words and tried to form sentences with them in my mind. Those drills were extremely helpful in honing my writing and speaking skills to a fairly good level by the village standards.

That disciplined approach to reading and word recording paid huge dividends in ways that surprised me. My English improved well enough to earn me admission to that exclusive secondary school. Reading became a lifelong habit, and I cannot even begin to count the benefits I have derived from it.

Because of that personal history and the barren environment in which I learned to read, I am utterly dismayed by the frequent reports about abysmal reading skills in America. According to the National Literacy Institute, 54 percent of U.S. adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, while 64 percent of the nation’s fourth graders are unable to read proficiently. Those are shockingly high levels of poor literacy for such an advanced society. National University data show that 21 percent of U.S. adults are classified as functionally illiterate, meaning they are unable to complete basic reading tasks. The National Literacy Institute says that there is a direct link between illiteracy and poverty.

The problem is not lack of reading materials and resources, as was the case for me in my Ghanaian village. America is awash in books. In his Washington Post column two weeks ago, George Will wrote about a program in Ohio that sends a book to every child in the state at birth. Thereafter, one book per month is sent until a child reaches age five. That means every child will have access to 60 books by the time they reach kindergarten. In another recent article, Fareed Zakaria described public schools in New York City as mediocre, despite the district spending more than $36,000 per pupil last year.

Dyslexia and some environmental factors may explain why some people are unable to read appropriately. However, for the overwhelming majority of children in this country, quite often, the problem is simply a lack of application. As a nation, we tend to put too much of the onus on teachers to remedy the ills in our education system. Educators certainly have important roles to play. But if children are not independently working hard because they are distracted by gazillions of gadgets, social media and a variety of screens, even the best teachers cannot magically transform them into stellar students.

Success in anything in life requires hard work and discipline. As parents, adults and educators, we all have a duty to constantly deliver that fundamental message to children. Michael Jordan was in a distant part of the world when I was growing up in Ghana. Cristiano Ronaldo wasn’t even born yet. I therefore couldn’t have known anything about either of them. But somehow, I accidentally stumbled upon their secret sauce.