^^^^I agree that talent and drive accounts for much of a person's success, not supernatural beings. But opportunity, luck and circumstance plays a big role as well. If you had been born with one arm or had been raised a devout JW, or were developmentally delayed, your chances of becoming a Marine would have been nil, no matter how much drive you had.
During the Great Depression millions of people worked very hard and still lost everything and fell into desperate poverty. It was not because of a lack of personal drive, and they could not solve their problems without a huge change in the external circumstances of their lives. Individuals could not pull themselves out of poverty during the Depression; it took massive federal government intervention, extensive safety net programs, WWII, etc.
Consider a kid growing up on welfare in a housing project run by gangs, or on the rez with alcoholic parents, or who becomes a mom at 16 and has to prostitute to support herself. Those kids are unlikely to graduate with an MBA from Harvard and become a Fortune 500 CEO. It sometimes happens, and it makes news because it is so difficult and so rare.
A child born with brain damage in a refugee camp in war-ravaged South Sudan will probably not get the chance to become a pro golfer or a corporate attorney. It is not impossible, just very, very unlikely because the connections and skills that those positions require are far less available. Sometimes it takes more than personal drive.
I think of what I have been able to do in my life compared to previous generations of black women. My great-grandmother was a slave. My grandmother cleaned houses for a living. I am a college professor. Is it just that I made all the right choices and they didn't, or is it that the larger circumstances of my life were so much better and I had more choices available? Hmmm. Maybe civil rights, women's rights, affirmative action, racial integration, college loans, government assistance had a little bit to do with it.....
So I think we have to be careful of looking at people and assuming that all they need is personal drive to succeed. Or that if someone does not achieve a high degree of success in life, it is because they somehow screwed up along the way, made the wrong choices, and it is therefore their own damn fault. That is getting pretty close to blaming the human condition on original sin-- if only Adam and Eve had made better choices!
