Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think

Responding to an article The Atlantic, Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think:

First, I am not a major success, but I am looked on others in my family as successful, partially because they know how troubled I was in my youth. Fortune, for me, is a mixture of good and bad, a series of events that changed my life, and along with my intelligence and newfound drive, enabled me to succeed. The complexity of my story, or at least how I tell it, exemplifies the complexity of success.

Immediate events, when I was 26

• Deciding to quit in series, two horrible, low-end jobs, and the realization that I needed to change my life
• A struggle to deal with insomnia, which lead to me finding fitness, then vegetarianism, and deciding to go back to school
• Fitness helped phenomenally me with my horrible insomnia and dysphoria, leaving me mood-free for over 2 years, and to this day has kept me emotionally stable
• My grandmother dying, leaving me a small amount of money, enough to finish school and work part-time for most of it

Historical events that allowed me to benefit from my intelligence

• My father dying, but the government that provided benefits, since my father was a veteran of the Korean War, via Social Security and the VA, that kept us in a middle-class neighborhood, with its good schools and safe environment
• A mother that worked like a dog, and although she was abusive, we never wanted for the necessities
• Growing up in an era of general equality, before Reagan
• A father that worked in technology since the 50's, and although I hated him for a while - he deserted us and died shortly thereafter - it pushed people to push me toward the same professional domain
• A friend's father, who saw in me someone he wanted to support and develop, who allowed me to upgrade his business network, and twice lent me a few thousand dollar to make ends meet