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You’ll find plenty of experts and freelance writers explaining what it takes to become wealthy. The usual story is that you have be dedicated, focused, and work hard. And it is true that self-made millionaires have all these traits. They don’t win lotteries and they don’t inherit their fortunes. Well, some of them inherit fortunes. When you read about people like Bill Gates building their companies from the ground up, remember that Gates came from a well-to-do family with the connections he needed to get his start,

A lot of millionaires go to college, choose a good career, and save their money for decades, sometimes making wise investments in stocks and real estate. These people deserve credit for their wise choices because their life achievements can be replicated by anyone with enough income to set aside some savings every month. I guarantee you it is much, much harder for the guy making $19,000 a year to become a millionaire than someone earning $100,000.

Don’t get me wrong. A janitor can become a millionaire just like the guys with the high-paying jobs. But more millionaires come from that class of people with high-paying jobs in the upper middle class than from the low-wage labor pool. I take nothing away from those folks because they outsave their peers by a wide margin. A lot of poor people are better at saving money than the average $100K wage earner because poor people have no choice but to live a frugal lifestyle. So anyone who becomes a millionaire through frugal living has earned my respect regardless of how much he earns.

But there are a lot of millionaires and billionaires who became wealthy because they had help, and for some of them it was unexpected or rare help. I won’t call it sheer dumb luck because you don’t know what doors they beat on behind the scenes to get to their powerful beneficiaries. It’s just that being able to write Harry Potter is not enough. You have to find the right publisher. Otherwise your books rot on the shelf and you’re just another writer. J.K. Rowling picked the right publisher and the right publisher picked her.

Here are three people whose hard work paid off but they became rich because of their connections as much as because of their genius.

Sara Blakely

Sara Blakely founded Spanx and became a billionaire by age 30. She had sold fax machines door-to-door and also worked as a greeter at Disneyland. I doubt she made powerful connections in those jobs but she probably learned how to put up with a lot of crap and overcome adversity. Sara took $5000, her life savings, and used it to come up with the first undergarment that became Spanx. But what made her company shoot to the top was an endorsement by Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey makes millionaires almost by just mentioning their names. When she had a daily talk show Winfrey could create New York Times bestsellers overnight just by endorsing books once on her show.

I give Sara all the credit for her hard work and how she came to Oprah Winfrey’s attention doesn’t matter because she could have squandered that opportunity. Instead she rode that tsunami of attention to success. But without Oprah or someone like Oprah to help her jump into the spotlight would she have been as successful? I don’t think so. When you see an opportunity for a powerful endorsement, take it. Earn it.

Nicholas Bredimus

Nick Bredimus was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth but he got a great education and went into the airline and hospitality industries in the 1960s. He rose up through the ranks of IT services departments to become President of AMR Travel Services, a subsidiary of American Airlines. Along the way Bredimus helped Ramada Inns install PCs in their hotels and oversee the development of some massive computer operations in the airline industry. He was even involved in a massive if unsuccessful attempt by four major companies to develop a joint reservation system in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Bredimus retired and started his own software firm that launched a system called QuikTix. Intended for travel agencies and airlines around the world, QuikTix revolutionized reservation systems, reducing costs and wait times for travelers across the world. He was able to leverage his experience in travel and hospitality software systems management and development to create a new streamlined system everyone could use, but Mister Bredimus no doubt benefited from his rolodex of industry executives. Unlike some average guy on the street who had a great idea, Nick Bredimus would have been able to get meetings with key decision-makers with far less effort.

I take nothing away from the guy. He saw an opportunity to fulfill a need that the industries he knew best had failed to fulfill and he seized the moment. His insider status helped him in ways that most people could not have matched no matter how hard they worked.

Michael Klein

Michael Klein was the grandson of the guy who invented “Paint By Numbers” so he had an advantage from childhood on up. His grandfather taught him about business and achievement. But Michael Klein was also a genius who graduated from college by age 17, so give him credit where that is due. He started two companies in the 1990s, including Transoft which was bought by Hewlett-Packard. But where Klein really made millions and millions of dollars was from the sale of a company he started called eGroups. Yahoo bought eGroups and turned it into Yahoo Groups.

Klein unfortunately died along with his 13-year-old daughter and another passenger in an airplane accident in Panama in 2007. Who knows what else he might have accomplished had he lived? His tragic death does not diminish his accomplishments. But he had help moving up in the world, make no mistake about that. There is always more to the story than the glamorous details you read in news articles about “self-made” super-millionaires. Someone has to know someone.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin would probably be teaching computer science now if they had not been introduced to Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Andy cut them a $100,000 check as soon as he heard about their search engine (Google) but without that kind of financial help many of Silicon Valley’s “self-made” super-rich bad boys and girls would not be so famous and wealthy.

There are some good articles with tips on how to become multimillionaires. Notice that they mention relationships in passing. It’s not just what you know but who you know that helps make you successful in business. You can “pick the right industry”, as some gurus suggest, but without the right connections you are working all alone in a highly competitive world where other people have help.

Being “self-made” is not as simple as people make it sound.