Especially to reach the level of success of Zuckerberg or Gates you need a ton of luck. The more luck you have the easier things will be for you. If you're born into the middle class you'll have a much easier time getting further in life than if you're born into a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood with bad schools. We have to acknowledge that.
We also have to acknowledge that you can still take two people who started in roughly the same circumstances and get dramatically different outcomes due to different drives to succeed. To say "most successes had been a combination of being born at the right place and time, etc." leaves out this part of it. I went to a top university and was incredibly privileged to be born both very intelligent and in the middle class to be able to get there. Yet, while all of my classmates are doing just fine in life, there's a huge difference between those that were passionate and hard working and those who weren't. There are tons of people I know who are very smart and came from privileged backgrounds, but who you knew would never do something big because they didn't have the fire inside to work 60-100 hrs/wk for 10 years straight or who valued the prestige and reduced risk of a big company more. Honestly, I don't entirely blame them as it's not always the most fun way to live. But some people are just driven as hell and while it's not enough to be that way without the luck of natural abilities and familial resources, you shouldn't leave it out of your list of factors for things that contribute to success because it makes a really big difference even if not necessarily sufficient by itself.
>If you're born into the middle class you'll have a much easier time getting further in life than if you're born into a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood with bad schools.
That's a caricature of the problem. You don't need to live in a bad neighborhood. You only need to live in a community where people don't talk about starting businesses, don't know how to start businesses, or never made friends with anybody who owned a successful business. No connections = low chance of success.
We also have to acknowledge that you can still take two people who started in roughly the same circumstances and get dramatically different outcomes due to different drives to succeed. To say "most successes had been a combination of being born at the right place and time, etc." leaves out this part of it. I went to a top university and was incredibly privileged to be born both very intelligent and in the middle class to be able to get there. Yet, while all of my classmates are doing just fine in life, there's a huge difference between those that were passionate and hard working and those who weren't. There are tons of people I know who are very smart and came from privileged backgrounds, but who you knew would never do something big because they didn't have the fire inside to work 60-100 hrs/wk for 10 years straight or who valued the prestige and reduced risk of a big company more. Honestly, I don't entirely blame them as it's not always the most fun way to live. But some people are just driven as hell and while it's not enough to be that way without the luck of natural abilities and familial resources, you shouldn't leave it out of your list of factors for things that contribute to success because it makes a really big difference even if not necessarily sufficient by itself.