One thing that is evident in life is that some people, for whatever reason, have fortune smiling on them. They are born in the right circumstances and things over which they have no control just break the right way. Then, if you add the willingness of that person to add hard work to the equation, you would expect that person to be highly successful in his or her endeavors. Of course, such a person can run into roadblocks and disappointments, but with intelligence and perseverance, they usually win out in the end.
If you were attempting to try to find a person who embodied this combination of fortune and dedication, you would be hard pressed to find a better exemplar than Dwayne Jeffery Anderson, nicknamed Jeff because he never liked Dwayne. He was born into a wealthy and stable family - his father the senior partner in a highly prestigious law firm in Miami and his parents celebrated their 35th anniversary not long ago. No crises, no trauma. He has a twin brother, Don, but they are fraternal twins and don't really look alike or have the same interests. Still, they were very close and there was no sibling rivalry. Don followed their father into law while Jeff ultimately became a software engineer.
He floated through high school with ease, playing tennis and basketball - moderate success as a 6"1" and 175 pound guard. He was reasonably good looking and with this, combined with athletics and excellent grades, one would have expected him to cut a wide swath through impressed girls, but, to their collective dismay, he really wasn't particularly interested. He certainly wasn't immune to their appeal, but his real fascination was everything connected to understanding and working with computers! Inevitably, he entered college with a major in computer science.
One of the best things about enrolling in a selective and specialized major is the people you deal and work with. The classes are small and intense and you really get to know the others. At his university, there was great emphasis on joint problem solving and students just gravitated to others who thought as they did and with whom they were comfortable. Groups were self-selected and tended to become relatively permanent and competed with other groups to find the best solutions to the assigned problems. Consequently, in Jeff's case, every time a new problem was presented, there were four other individuals that he automatically looked to: Janice Sunderland, Rob Simpkins, Chris Edwards and Norm Watson.
I guess that you could call them nerds or geeks although those terms are frequently used in a derogatory way. People think of geeks as being wispy little people, frequently with round glasses with thick lenses, and no interest in anything but computers, software, etc. This group actually would spend Saturday night working on software or an algorithm that fascinated them instead of partying, so I guess that they met the criteria for being geeks! On the other hand, Jeff played intermural basketball and tennis. Norm and Chris spent hours developing extremely complicated practical jokes, while Jan was trying the almost impossible task of minoring in English Literature despite the stiff requirements of a computer major. The only one of them who was a real geek was Rob who just delighted in the most minute details of software writing.
A word about Jan in this basically masculine group. While Jeff became the unofficial leader of the group, it was Jan who, in some ways, was the glue that held them together - or maybe the oil that helped them work as a unit. She was at least as intelligent and productive as any of the rest and had no hesitation in getting her points across in arguments, but she was the one who defused the tension when the inevitable disputes arose. She was only 5' 2" and about 110 pounds but when she spoke, the others listened. She was pretty and cute, not beautiful, and with a very nice figure. She was slim with decent sized breasts, but her personality was her principle asset - people just liked her!
It's funny, but the other three rarely thought of her as a woman and, when they did, it was as if she were a sister, a brilliant sister. Jeff's view of her was different. He was well aware of her as a woman and certainly was attracted to her. In addition, it was clear that she saw him as more than just one of the group. The closest that anything came of that was a few kisses and a little groping at a party. They quickly pulled back from that temptation, both suddenly fearing that it was the wrong path for them. They felt that would be wrong to risk a sincere, deeply felt friendship for the momentary pleasure of a sexual hookup and the inevitable problems that would bring. However, while Jeff became as close to the three men as he was to his brother, he never saw Jan as a sister!
In any case, the five of them became a very cohesive group and when graduation approached, they jointly decided to continue for master's degrees. The impetus was that the university had a program stressing innovation and entrepreneurship, even providing seed money. They had been working on a software project in their senior year which they completed and which was moderately successful when put on the market. With the good fortune that seemed to follow Jeff, the program filled a small hole in a new Microsoft project. To their utter shock, Microsoft purchased it from them for twelve million dollars!
Now, twelve million dollars for Microsoft is equivalent to the change you'll find under a couch cushion and their program disappeared into its maw without a ripple. However it was the start of a very successful career for the five of them. They took a million apiece, returned the university's seed money twice over and invested the rest into their own software company. Three years later it was a growing concern in their own modern building (bought cheaply during Florida's building crisis) with five fulltime employees. They were good at solving software problems for other companies as well as developing several well received projects of their own. By most people's standards they were already rich - that original one million dollar payout ensured that - and more was flowing in. They were good at what they did and their client list, and income, continued to grow.
So, at the age of 25-26, they were well on their way to real wealth, but they were still geeks or nerds in terms of their actual interests. No wild parties, no flamboyant display of their riches. Rob, the least likely of all, had married and he and his wife had a child, but the others remained single and immersed themselves in their work. There were two exceptions to this. One was Jan, a young and pretty woman with more diverse interests (as shown by her undergraduate English minor) who had a more diverse social life - dating but with no serious involvement.
The other exception was Jeff. As their business grew, they had moved from a simple partnership to a LLC, in which they had to name officers and he became the president - a title no one else coveted - and, thus, the public representative of their company. His name and picture appeared a few times in the local financial pages and, of necessity, he attended a number of social events. These were basically boring occasions during which he met people whose names he usually promptly forgot, but there was one such situation in which fortune seemed to be still smiling at him!
