I disagree that exceptional people will be exceptional people no matter what. I am pretty sure most will agree that if we keep a baby in a dark closet, supplying only enough nutrition to stay alive, that baby will not likely turn into anyone typically considered exceptional. What environment one grows up in does affect the odds of whether a person will someday be considered exceptional or not, and not always in the ways people might think. For example, many would think having living, middle-class parents would be a help on the path to eminence, and yet, not necessarily so...Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book "Creativity" notes that about three out of ten men and two out of ten women in his sample of eminently creative Americans (he calls them "exceptional") were orphaned before they reached their teens (and this study was conducted long after it was common for young people to lose their parents). One theory is that this allows the young person to feel a great sense of liberation to be and do anything and at the same time, perhaps feel a tremendous burden to live up to the expectations attributed to a missing parent (having a parent just leave rather than die also seems to help give one an edge here). Now it was also true that there were many example of a warm and stimulating family environment to conclude that hardship or conflict was necessary to give someone a creative urge, but what was noticed was that exceptional individuals either had the warm and stimulating environment or a very deprived and challenging one...what appeared to be missing was the common middle ground.

Social class is a similar scenario. Only about 10% of the eminent people came from a middle-class childhood (which in America, is represented by way more than 10%, often I think more like 50% of the population). About 30% of the eminent people in M.H.'s study had parents who were farmers, poor immigrants, or blue collar workers, but the parents didn't identify with their lower-class position and had high aspirations for their children to move up in the world. Then about 34% had fathers who held an intellectual occupation (professor, writer, orchestra conductor, or research scientist). The remaining quarter were brought up with parents who were lawyers, physicians, or wealthy businessmen (and the general population has way fewer such people, as people here likely realize). A quote on page 172 in the book reads:

"Clearly it helps to be born in a family where intellectual behavior is practiced, or in a family that values education as an avenue of mobility - but not in a family that is comfortably middle-class."

Here is seems the author has concluded that there can be no intellectual behavior practiced or value of education as an avenue of mobility in a family that is comfortably middle-class, for which I would disagree. But I do believe having the contacts that the upper class tend to have and the drive to have more than one has grown up with or to better the world or such are factors that contribute to how exceptional one becomes or is noticed as having become.

Another quote, this time from page 173:

"It is quite strange how little effect school-even high school-seems to have had on the lives of creative people. Often one senses that, if anything, school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls."

Choose your walls wisely. Or choose to stay outside of walls.