pull (or drag) yourself up by your own bootstraps improve your position by your own efforts.

☞ A bootstrap is sometimes sewn into the back of boots to help with pulling them on. This idiom has given rise to the computing term bootstrapping, meaning the process of loading a program into a computer by means of a few initial instructions which enable the introduction of the rest of the program from an input device. We now refer to the process of starting a computer as booting or booting up.