>So precisely what is your point?

Congratulations on your success. You certainly have earned it.

I think Tamar's point is that - to make John Donne's phrase gender neutral - no person is an island.

Other people create situations that make opportunities for us.

I'm a walking example of that.
I went through a small liberal arts commuter college on the GI Bill (I couldn't possibly have done it otherwise) and a couple of years after graduation I was managing a group of graduates from schools like Yale, Princeton, Wellsely, and Radcliffe.
Yes, I was hungry and I out-hustled all of them.
However, it all started when I learned to program an IBM 705 and found out that this was work that I loved.
The IBM 705 would probably never have come into being had it not been for initiatives taken by the military during WWII.
Clearly the GI Bill and the work done by the government with computers opened a lot of doors for me.

Sure.. those same doors were open for lots of other people who never walked through them.

But someone opened them for me and that's something I'll never forget.