Fuck! No, I fucked that one up too and accidentally picked a crazy Haight-Ashbury 1967 hippie together with a seriously damaged Vietnam vet, the two of them getting involved in weird cultish shit long before I was born.
It was a poor decision on my part. No one to blame but myself.
Underrated answer. Meritocracy is a lie, folks, even within the West. If you do everything perfectly you will climb a little bit, and only on average. All the counterexamples you're thinking of are people who won a lottery of some kind. And of course, birth is also a lottery.