Your upbringing? Genetics? Your job? Your kids? Your friends and associates? Your thoughts alone? Time and circumstance? If you're free to make choices are you also free to determine what influences those choices?

Nature vs nurture? If you were taken from your parents and raised by another family with radically different circumstances would you be a radically different person? If you were raised in radical Islam would you be a terrorist? If you were raised by Hitler would you have been a passionate Nazi?

What makes you you--and who and what decides? Are we all just victims of society and circumstance in the final analysis?

Good looks, intelligence, attitude, low tolerance for bullshit (accompanied by an inherent disdain for opposing opinion) and an indefatigable belief that right will always triumph in the end.

Jack

Actually its a combination of everything you wrote.

Yes if you were raised by someone radically different from your parents during the first 10 or so years of life you would be a radically different person. Or actually you would be the same physical person only with diffrerent beliefs and attitudes.

In the final analysis however, we are what we are able to make of ourselves inspite of or because of our upbringing