One of the most uncomfortable things to accept about financial success is how much luck plays a part. Which country you were born in, which decade you entered the workforce, which family raised you — these are things you had zero control over, yet they shape your starting position completely. Bill Gates attended one of the only schools in the US in 1968 with a computer terminal. That is luck. It does not mean he is not brilliant — he clearly is. But the timing of his access to computers was an accident of birth. The same principle works in reverse. People who fail financially are not always less disciplined or intelligent. They may simply have faced more headwinds.