Humility leads to understanding and unusual opportunities.
Always encouraged to be self-reliant. Repairing radios, lawnmowers, and cars since age ten, this person was destined to become an engineer. And after some difficulties in school and the divorce of his parents, he went to college and got his master's degree, and he did become an engineer, but that was just the beginning. He then got a PhD from Stanford University and cofounded an electronics company in Silicon Valley.
A life, in many ways, that started the same as any American born in the 1950s and who grew up in the suburbs. This average life ended up above average because of a series of opportunities to learn and to grow. He met and learned from a former president, US senators, and a WWII Japanese pilot instructor who had become a pacifist, and lots of great teachers and professors and colleagues. All along the way and while visiting many countries around the world, he learned a lot more than just engineering.
But the outcome was not obvious. There were setbacks. It was not clear what direction his life would take, or if he would even become an engineer, until he met the man with no one to talk to.