Everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all.

Admiration for people who built themselves is really admiration for the building, not the boast. Whatever you were handed, something in you had to take it up and make a person out of it. Plenty of people never do that work and drift into middle age unformed, still waiting to be given a shape.

Ask what you have actually made of yourself in the last few years, not what happened to you. Pick one part of your character you would rather have been given, and start giving it to yourself. Small, dull practice is how that gets done.