Context is definitely relevant. In 1832, Georgia held a lottery to allocate all of its unclaimed land. Almost everyone in the state participated. The value of each parcel of land was immense, life-changing for most of the people in the lottery.
Families who won the lottery reverted to the mean in a generation or two: http://home.uchicago.edu/~bleakley/Bleakley_Ferrie_Intergen....
(To be fair, educational attainment and lifetime earnings of offspring are a different measure of success though, so that probably accounts for some of the discrepancy in the results as well.)