How about, can we agree that when you spend years achieving great successes, you tend to form relationships of trust with high-performing colleagues who learn to value your drive and intelligence and to look forward to helping you or working with you again?

That still seems like a boundary value at one end of the personal merit vs. connections continuum of drivers of success, as contrasted with the other end of the continuum, which we might define as being a VP at JP Morgan because your dad is on the politburo standing committee of the PRC.

Knowing how to do business networking is a talent and a skill that can be trained, so I would say being well connected is a subset of this thing called meritocracy.