There wasn't much effort on my part to be born to highly-educated parents who valued educating their children well. I didn't work especially hard for my mother,

There wasn't much effort on my part to be born to highly-educated parents who valued educating their children well. I didn't work especially hard for my mother, a maths PhD, stay at home so that my father's career, which required frequent moves, could advance. Wasn't my work ethic that ensured his career advanced to the extent that he could afford to send me abroad for post-graduate studies (I turned out not to need the financial help in the end, but still). It's not just about parents or upbringing either. Mark Zuckerberg's roommates - Hughes, Moskovitz, and Saverin - were his roommates by luck. What if they'd gone to Yale or Brown or Stanford? Or not been assigned to those rooms? You might say "But they worked hard to get into Harvard and be exposed to those opportunities!" - but so did (almost) everyone else who got into Harvard. Most of the other people from that class aren't billionaires now - they're merely highly successful professionals.