For years, I thought my mother was doing it wrong.
She would go to church, kneel down, and pray the Rosary before the evening Mass. I used to tease her about it. In my mind, she was spending too much time in church and not enough time in the sacristy.
Because I had already convinced myself that I understood how the world worked.
I had watched people get ahead because they knew the right person. I had seen opportunities go to people who weren't necessarily the most talented or deserving, but who had a connection, a recommendation, someone willing to make a call on their behalf.
So I started paying attention to the people behind the doors.
I used to quote a line attributed to Giulio Andreotti: “God doesn't vote. Priests do.”
To me, it captured something essential about life. God might listen to your prayers, but people make decisions. People vote. People choose. People recommend. People open doors.
And there are certainly people who spend more time in sacristies than in churches—not because they are looking for God, but because they are looking for people. They understand that relationships can become opportunities, that information travels through networks, and that knowing the right person can sometimes take you farther than being the right person.
I didn't think I was being cynical.
I thought I was being realistic.
For a while, I believed that getting anywhere in life meant knowing somebody. And if you didn't know anybody, you were already behind.
Today, I think I was only half right.
My mother prayed. Perhaps God really did answer her prayers. The answer simply didn't arrive in the form she expected.
And, in the end, neither did mine.
Over the years, I began to look at luck differently. Richard Wiseman's The Luck Factor made me think about something I had never really considered: the difference between chance and serendipity.
Chance puts something in your path.
Serendipity is recognizing what it is when it gets there.
That distinction has mattered in my own life.
Some of the people who helped me appeared far away from the networks I once thought were so important. There was no powerful introduction, no carefully arranged recommendation, no influential person waiting behind a door.
Sometimes I simply found the right person.
Or perhaps, without realizing it, I had put myself in a position where the right person could find me.
That changed the way I think about opportunity.
Because there is a lesson hidden inside many of the things we don't get.
When you can't have something, you become strong at its alternatives.
If you can't rely on a recommendation, you learn how to create opportunities.
If nobody can open a door for you, you learn how to knock.
If you don't inherit a powerful network, you learn how to build relationships.
If you don't have someone to introduce you to the right person, you learn how to recognize that person when you meet them.
This doesn't mean disadvantages are secretly blessings. They aren't. Some people begin life with advantages that others simply don't have. Connections matter. Money matters. Social capital matters. Pretending otherwise is just another form of naivety.
But there is another truth that is easier to miss.
What you lack can force you to develop what you otherwise might never have learned.
The person who is always introduced may never learn how to introduce themselves.
The person who always has a door opened for them may never learn how to knock.
The person who has always had a network may never discover how resourceful they can become without one.
This is not a celebration of deprivation.
It is a recognition of human adaptability.
We tend to look at what other people have and ask why we don't have it.
The more useful question is different:
What can I become precisely because I don't have it?
That question changes everything.
It turns envy into curiosity.
It turns disadvantage into a challenge.
It turns waiting into movement.
And it turns the absence of an opportunity into the search for another one.
For a long time, I was looking for a hand to pull me forward.
A recommendation.
A connection.
An important person.
Someone who knew someone.
Then life taught me something much simpler.
The hand I found most often was the one at the end of my own arm.
That doesn't mean we don't need other people. We do. Nobody builds a meaningful life entirely alone. Other people matter. Relationships matter. Chance matters. Luck matters.
But there is a profound difference between accepting help and waiting to be rescued.
The first is part of being human.
The second can become a way of life.
So if there is one thing I would tell someone who feels disadvantaged because they don't have the connections, the money, the opportunities, or the people that others seem to have, it would be this:
Don't spend your life staring at the door someone else was given a key to.
Learn to knock.
Learn to build.
Learn to move.
Learn to meet people.
Learn to recognize opportunities that don't look like opportunities at first.
And learn to use whatever you already have.
Because you may not be able to choose the cards you were dealt. But you can decide how well you play them.
Looking back, I can finally see the irony in the way I used to tease my mother.
She went to church and prayed the Rosary.
I looked toward the sacristies.
She was looking for an answer through prayer.
I was looking for one through people.
Perhaps we were both searching for a helping hand.
The difference is that I was looking for someone else's.
Life eventually taught me to look at my own.
And perhaps that is the deeper lesson.
Sometimes life doesn't give you the thing you wanted because it is trying to make you capable of something else.
Not something better.
Not something easier.
Just something that becomes yours.
When you can't have something, you get good at what can replace it.
And sometimes, after years of looking for someone else's hand, you discover that the one you needed most had been there all along—
at the end of your own arm.
