Wasn't it you who said that luck was when opportunity meets preparation?

This is true, though somebody else said it long before me; I was afraid of sounding repetitive.

But I doubt that you would've found the job you found if you didn't go around asking everywhere, having great interviews, improving your job-finding skills.

This is also true, and you could (possibly effectively) argue that attributing the job to luck is just a variant on Imposter Syndrome, i.e., a refusal to take accountability for just how stinkin' awesome I am all the time.

I try to avoid [excessive] ego and it is also inconceivable to me that someone who hadn't even finished her undergrad degree and had no experience in the financial sector deserved in any way a job at a level where most people end their career in banking. In my job I was and continue to be surrounded by people who have worked their way up into this position and are my parents' age or even older. My current salary is almost equal to my mother's, and she is capped out in earnings, i.e., she won't make any more at her job, ever.

I think it can be damaging for people to think that they are wholly in control of, and also always deserve, what they receive. That's why I'm willing to attribute some of my success to luck, to just happening to apply for that job at the right time, etc. For instance, do you know what made me good at interviewing? Ultimately? Do you know what made me a good candidate? I spoke well, carried myself well, was articulate, was impressive. My parents made me that way. More importantly my background made me that way and it's not pretty but it's true: being a white middle-class American with parents who cared about my grammar helped spring me my first job. Because of the family I was born into I was able to go to college. I was able to present myself well according to social norms, well or even better than average. And what I cannot control, and what no one can control, is what class they are born into, and the bottom of that line is that I feel, and should feel, insanely lucky to have been born into the class and family into which I was born.