Hey there. Orianna here from Fortune.

It’s no secret that Gen Z is struggling. They’re unemployed in the millions, feeling anxious about the future, and getting told that their shot at building a career is about to get bleaker thanks to AI. But few understand what it’s like to feel the odds are stacked against you quite like Sir Mo Farah.

The Olympic legend has a no-nonsense message for young people: Don’t let a bad hand stop you from playing the game. Life will knock you down, but your success is your responsibility.

“Even for myself, you would have said, as a young boy, ‘He’s not gonna make [it]; you don’t have a chance,’” Farah told me at Web Summit Qatar. “I was child-trafficked into the U.K. with my own story struggle. But I never gave up on myself.”

The former long-distance runner and 4x Olympic gold medalist was born as Hussein Abdi Kahin in what is now Somaliland. His father was killed in the civil war when he was 4, and he was separated from his family soon after. Around the age of 9, he was taken illegally to the U.K. by a woman he’d never met, given fake documents under the name “Mohamed Farah,” and then was forced to cook, clean, and change nappies while working as a family’s domestic servant in West London.

His lifeline came a few years later, when he confided in a PE teacher who nurtured Farah’s talent, alerted social services, and helped him gain British citizenship. By the time Farah was 14, he was competing for England, and today he is Britain’s most successful track athlete in Olympic Games history.

But despite his traumatic start, Farah said he “never saw it as I didn’t have a fair start.” Ultimately, you don’t get to choose the playing field. What matters more, he insists, is how hard you choose to play.

You can’t control the economy. You can’t control the job market. But you can control your efforts. And you can control your mindset. That, Farah said, is the powerful differentiator between those who remain stuck and those who keep inching forward. It won’t fix everything at once, but it’s enough to start turning your ship.

“I think a lot of us say, ‘Oh, I can’t do this job.’ Or ‘I cannot control that.’ But there’s a lot of stuff we can control. We might not control this amount,” Farah said, while opening his arms wide. “But you can control this small part. The bit that you can control, try to control it.”

—Orianna Rosa Royle
Success Associate Editor, Fortune

Got a career tip or dilemma? Get in touch: orianna.royle@fortune.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, TikTok, X, and Instagram.