Sorry but I have a degree in nuclear physics, working a full time job and can't even afford a car. Something tells me those people just had a lot of luck!
I'm going to sound brash, arrogant, and a bit racist when I ask this, but let me guess: you're probably not the child of immigrant parents.
While there definitely is a "white" advantage in this world, and many people on these lists may have been born into privilege, your attitude towards it is pretty bullshit. My point about not being the child of immigrant parents was to highlight this attitude. Immigrant children tend to look at the world differently. They usually have to work harder to get their opportunities, and they'll do what it takes to get them. They have hustle.
It's true, a lot of your success depends on who you know, not what you know. You can either mope around and accept that you'll never be "successful," or you can get your ass in gear and make your own luck.
This is the old story of "if you work hard enough you will be just as successful" and it is of course bullshit. There is an easy proof for this: Income distribution.
The income distribution would be a Gaussian distribution like intelligence, body height and all other kinds of human traits, if it were truly determined by accomplishement.
But since the income distribution has a rather exponential shape the underlying events must be independent and poissonian distributed, similar to a series of small lottery games or to put it simply: luck!
The first of those lottery games in your life is the question of: are your parents rich or not.
If you were born in a first world country, then yes, your parents were rich. We are the global 1%.
Your income distribution analysis is flawed in a few ways though. You can't have negative height or negative intelligence, but you can have negative income. Likewise, there is an upper bound on human traits, but no functional upper bound on income. Moreover, money grows logarithmically but human traits inherit very slowly.
Anyway, that's not the point. You sound unhappy. You should fix that. Start by realizing that money won't fix it.
Actually, the upper-half of the IQ distribution is log-normal when ratio IQs are measured. Adult deviation IQs are percentile rankings coerced into a Gaussian distribution (which is why measuring adult IQs above 145 is hard: small samples). This suggests that the "true" IQ is the log-normal distribution, which has support only on (0, infinity).
Your entire comment sounds as something like this "if you're not noteworthy because of something it's your fault". Quite rude.
I know plenty of immigrant's children in the US that are not "successful" and they tried hard to find a spot under the Sun and failed, they're not poor but are not much better than their parents, who are not rich either, things happened, sometimes that were under their direct control, some of them now basically blame themselves for that and not being rich, although this is something that affects the vast majority of middle class Americans that I knew.
