I hate it when people say to work hard in high school, and then they later say hard work doesn’t matter

I worked hard in high school. I went to every class and did all of my homework. For extracurricular, I tried to work out everyday to hopefully pass tryouts. Guess what? Nothing worked. I still got poor grades despite working hard. I got cut from every team despite working hard. People sell me the snake oil of “work smart, not hard”, and when I work smart, I still fail. Maybe I am just born with bad genetics, but no one gives the advice of “maybe you are too dumb so you should die and try to reroll your genes”.