I found myself nodding along the whole article.<p>First, let me say that I am happy where I ended up. I&#x27;m successful, enjoy my work, and when I compare my personal income with our family income when I was growing up, it is an absurd multiple.<p>We were a very poor family in a poor part of the South. I went to a top-10 small private university on a full ride, felt completely alienated and never quite figured out how to function in that environment. I dropped out and moved to San Francisco at what turned out to be a very good time (early 90&#x27;s), and once Netscape dropped, discovered nobody else knew what they were doing with this web thing either, and more or less faked it until I made it.<p>At the same time, I have had and do have ideas that others have executed on, that I know I could have made a go at, if only…<p>The if only list is long, and most of it comes back to self-imposed limitations that I can trace back to how I grew up. Frequently it relates to economic security, but there are other habits of thought that stop me from even getting to worrying about that.<p>One big one is that I never learned to think about entrepreneurship. A big lesson hammered into me growing up was the importance of &quot;finding a good job&quot;, not figuring out how to make my own.<p>I did start a company in my mid-30s, and we did OK, until we didn&#x27;t. And that failure (I think) had nothing to do with the habits of thought of a poor kid. But failing in a similar way in my 20s would have left me in a position to learn from that and try again, something I&#x27;m unlikely to make a go at 10 years later. I do little things for side income, but those are hobbies.<p>So it ends up being this thing that doesn&#x27;t really bother me at this point, but does leave me to wonder what would have happened if I had picked parents from a very different walk of life.<p>And I am quietly amused when people tell me how they built everything themselves &quot;after a seed from Dad&quot;, or &quot;with a great connection I made through a family friend&quot; or similar. Those are impossible blockers for a lot of people, even if they get over some of the habits of mind better than I did.