My dad has a version of this story. He was born in a village in Bangladesh and while he's not a VP at a "top 5" consulting company, he raised us upper middle class in an expensive DC suburb. He notes he was smart, but never the smartest person; hard working, but not the hardest working person; in addition to both, he was also very lucky.
There's an additional dimension too. Ambition and extroversion I guess. The smartest, hardest working people I know from undergrad are engineering PhD's toiling away on the tenure track. Failure according to the author.
