I grew up in an upper-middle class household. While we had ups and downs, as I kid I was never worried about whether the power would stay on, or where our next meal would come from. My dad was an MIT alum, and I was accepted there, perhaps in part because of legacy. My parents paid for my education. My grandparents paid for my dad’s education, with the understanding that they’d pay for my education, etc.

When I was in college, my dad got a big financial windfall from work. My parents helped me buy a fixer-upper house in 2000 with a $200k loan, without which I wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of the initial work that was required to make the house habitable.

All of this made it possible for me to take some riskier jobs throughout my career, and have a safety net when I co-founded Self Aware Games. The degree from a prestigious (and $$$$$) school opened doors for me that would have been a lot harder (if not impossible) to open on my own. I didn’t have a massive, six-digit student loan debt to crawl out from under, and my bank account hit $0 multiple times after school even without that debt.

By some standards, I’d be considered “self-made” because of the success of Self Aware and some work I did afterwards. But there’s no honest way anyone could *actually* describe the arc of my life as self-made. I grew up with significant advantages at every step, and much of my life has been made hugely easier because of those advantages. Of course hard work and focus and dedication were involved. I worked comically long hours early in my career. But a LOT of people work comically long hours ALL THE TIME, and without a safety net to fall back on, or for a lot less $ than I made.

In the harder moments, it’s easy to feel like the privileges I had didn’t matter, but there’s no question that these made a huge difference. They were the difference between success and not success. No question.

I’m trying to “pay it forward” by helping folks who don’t have a lot of those built-in advantages. And one of the things that it highlights is just how much easier I had it than they do. I’m grateful for the privilege I had, and I try to not take it for granted. But most, I try to understand that someone without those privileges can work harder, be smarter, and never achieve the kind of success that I did.

Success isn’t a measure of merit. Our society is steeped in the idea that it is, but that’s a deeply insidious and misleading idea. I know a lot of folks are aware of it, but it’s also something we need to keep talking about, because the more we can dismantle the myth of meritocracy, the better.