You also don't have to work for the best companies or the best leaders to learn.

You can learn so much from seeing what doesn't work and unpacking it.

Often you may work in a business that is moderately successful and realize that if only they did this or that a little differently it would work so much better.

Eventually you can take that research and do it better yourself. But as you mentioned if you tried to learn all of that from scratch it would take much longer.