Bootstraps in this sense live inside a saying: to pull yourself up by your bootstraps — to improve your place in life and get out of a hard situation by your own effort, with no help from other people. A bootstrap is the little loop or tab on a boot that you pull to get the boot on. The picture is vivid and a bit dishonest if you take it as physics: you cannot lift your whole body off the ground by yanking those tabs. Older English used the phrase as a joke about doing the impossible. Later it flipped, and teachers, politicians, and business people now say it with a straight face to mean self-help, grit, starting with nothing. You will also hear bootstrap as a verb in that same spirit (she bootstrapped the company). Computers borrowed the picture too: to boot a machine is to get it started from inside itself — but that is a later, technical stretch of the same loop-on-the-boot idea, not the meaning you need for ordinary talk about a person’s life.