Even if you stick with the traditional route, having a tiny initial advantage for your first job will have compounding results over your lifetime. This is significant enough that people who graduate college during a recession on average have a 9% lower salary during the first 10 years of working [0].

Many people can tell you about their "big break". That one success that seemed to cascade into other successes. Whether this is a real phenomenon or simply an illusion of memory, I don't know. It's quite possible that if that big event hadn't taken place, there'd have been a similar one just a little later, taking the person on a different, but equally pleasant path. I suggest you not trust individual narratives, only systematic analysis.

[0] http://www.nber.org/digest/nov06/w12159.html