You're welcome to dismiss my argument as a series of platitudes, but you should also agree to allow me to dismiss your story as a platitude, about how you were

You're welcome to dismiss my argument as a series of platitudes, but you should also agree to allow me to dismiss your story as a platitude, about how you were so determined not to be poor that it drove you to succeed. I'm not actually dismissing your story -- I am in no position to judge fairly -- but I'm trying to point out that the fundamental attribution bias and the closely related actor-observer bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_bias) are both powerful. What if your personality type made it such that you had a high likelihood of success whether you were rich or poor? Finally, with all this talk about "choice", let me go ahead and throw out a controversial statement: we have a lot less free will than we want to believe we do.