Im a white son of a migrant and an immigrant who grew up in an unhappy single parent household in East London. I went to a fairly good school but got kicked out for being a (quite funny) punk before my GCSEs, and as a consequence, every single step of the past decade has been a up hill battle.

Once had a life defining moment when I had an open goal to get knee deep in the drugs game but said no. Stuck to spreadsheets and Oyster cards.

For a good 5 years my life was skipping holidays while my mates went raving around the world, working weekends, on the first and last train for weeks on end etc just to make up the ground lost because I messed up a key part of my education. I subscribe to the belief that if I work twice as many hours as the next guy, in 10 years, they will have 10 years experience and I'll have 20.

After years on the grind at work I eventually won a full scholarship to do a masters and things got better gradually afterwards, but in hindsight the struggle did me good. Everything I have now, has been the result of a non stop daily grind. This song still hypes me up and reminds me of the early mornings on the central line.

I spent a lot of the early part my early 20's feeling trapped in my own head in a cycle of self consciousness between being too posh for my own area but too 'urban' for the industry I was grinding hard to break into.

As I got older I realised that the world is not square pegs and round holes, and that I wasn't knocking on the wrong doors, but needed to change the way I knocked. I stopped being a pussy who suffered from underdog/victim mentality and started to take the initiative.

I've found myself in some cool formal situations due to my attributes, rather than my background, that had they occurred in my self conscious years would have been car crashes.

Think about it this way.

A couple of years ago, a young lad from West Africa, the global hub of financial fraud, managed to pull of a multi billion trading fraud at UBS in London, one of the worlds largest and most sophisticated financial institutions.

If he could climb to the top based on raw ability, despite prejudice and get to a position where he could operate for so long without scrutiny then the fact is that London is probably one of the most accepting societies where anybody can benefit from the meritocracy.

If you spend anytime working out who is who in the City, you'll realise that there was a working class take over in the 90s, but everything is based on results. I suspect other industries are like that too.

I am not saying that if you haven't got to where you want to be it's because your shit. It may be true, but it's more likely that you haven't worked out how to market yourself yet.