>Absolutely. But some of us have a lot more chances to walk through a door. I've written about this as it applies to my own life: https://medium.com/@TamarEGranor/from-patterns-and-puzzles-to-programming-60ac6ae46c73#.w04zrojlz. But that essay leaves out lots of other "doors" that came my way. For example, my first non-babysitting summer job came through a friend of my parents. Edited out of that essay was the pull-out program in 4th grade where the HS Math teacher father of a friend taught us some set theory. Etc., etc., etc. Because I was born who I was, when I was, where I was, my life has included a lot more of those doors than other people's lives have.
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>So, are you saying that your success cannot be attributed to your own hard work? Do you believe that other people's actions and luck were a more important contributing factor to your success than your own actions?

I'm saying that my success cannot be solely attributed to my hard work. If you include the genetic lottery (including not just to whom, but where and when I was born) under luck, then I'm sure that my actions have been less important than my luck. If I'd been born 100 years earlier, or in the 3rd world, odds are I'd have been lucky to learn to get much of an education, let alone college and grad school. Even one generation earlier, had I gotten pregnant in grad school as I did, I might have been out on my butt. So many people and so many things contributed to my opportunity to do the thing I love.

Tamar