I grew up poor, now I'm 26 and making 6 figures. Yes, being smart and working hard is part of the success story, but it's not the whole picture. The reality of

I grew up poor, now I'm 26 and making 6 figures. Yes, being smart and working hard is part of the success story, but it's not the whole picture. The reality of the situation, is that I got lucky at a young age with math and logic skills, got lucky to have some decent teachers who helped me develop those skills, then got lucky to adopt video games and computers as my main interest. I was lucky that software engineering just so happens to be a lucrative job. Everything else that has happened since I was a child has been an extension of that foundation. Most people's success trajectories are not largely defined in their 20s, it just feels that way because that's the point in which you start really having agency and independence. Your 20s don't really determine if you are going to be successful or not, but rather how successful are you going to be. Pitfalls exist, you can definitely be on the right track until the age of 22 and then screw up so badly that you never recover, it happens. You got lucky, now go help other people get lucky, because the system isn't robust enough to perfectly equate success with hard work and/or intelligence. You got lucky, and that's ok, but there's no reason to look down on people, even if it seems that they are the ones screwing up their own life. You may have more wisdom than them that brought you to your current situation, but the idea is that you got to your level of wisdom through a series of lesser and lesser wisdoms at earlier and earlier points in time. You are not living the same life as that person, so you can't expect that person to do a full 180 overnight. Success takes a long time, you just didn't realize it at the time.