This reminds me a lot of the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. It seemed that, at least with respect to successful people, a large part of his thesis was that

This reminds me a lot of the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. It seemed that, at least with respect to successful people, a large part of his thesis was that they were only successful because of their circumstance. However, the only unifying theme between all the successful individuals was that they put forth an extraordinary effort to master their fields for an extended period of time. Gates sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night and taking a bus to work on an unused computer at a local college is a bad example of someone that was lucky with circumstance. It's an example of someone willing to do whatever it takes to create circumstances for himself. The same could be said for this chef.