When You Can’t Have Something, You Get Good at What Can Replace It

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.

The Great Lie of Self-Help: They Teach You How to Run, But Not Who Starts Ahead

For decades, someone has been telling us how to become successful.

The names change. The books change. The motivational gurus come and go. But the promise remains essentially the same:

If you work hard enough on yourself, you can change your life.

Dale Carnegie taught us how to win friends and influence people. Napoleon Hill taught us to think and grow rich. Then came the modern motivational industry: personal development programs, life coaches, seminars, neuro-linguistic programming, visualization, manifestation, positive thinking, and an entire economy built around the idea that our destiny is, at least to a large extent, in our own hands.

So we learned to set goals.

Wake up at five in the morning.

Take cold showers.

Write down our goals every day.

Stand in front of the mirror and tell ourselves that we are destined for success.

Raise our standards.

Coach ourselves.

Eliminate negative people.

Visualize the life we want.

Believe in the law of attraction.

The problem is that this may be only half the story.

Because there is a question the self-help industry rarely puts front and center:

What happens when someone works relentlessly on themselves but starts from a completely different position than the people already at the top?

Not Everyone Starts at the Same Starting Line

Imagine two people.

They have the same talent, the same ambition, and the same discipline.

One is born into a financially secure family. If they lose their job, their parents can help. If they want to start a business, the family might be able to provide seed money. If an investment goes wrong, someone can help them recover. If they want to enter a particular professional circle, they may already know someone who can introduce them to the right people.

The other person has none of that.

If they lose their job, they may not be able to pay the rent.

If they start a business and fail, they may end up deeply in debt.

If they decide to change careers at forty, there may be no family willing to finance two years of transition.

If they make the wrong decision, there may be nobody behind them to catch them.

And yet both people are given exactly the same advice:

"You need to be more courageous."

Really?

Maybe the problem isn't always a lack of courage.

Sometimes it's the amount of protection available while you're taking the risk.

The Real Privilege May Be the Ability to Take Risks

This is one of the things the self-help industry doesn't talk about nearly enough.

Taking risks is much easier when you can afford to lose.

Someone from a wealthy family can take an unpaid internship, move to another city, attend an expensive graduate program, launch a company, invest in a risky project, or walk away from a mediocre job.

Why?

Because if things go badly, there may be a safety net.

Not necessarily a conspiracy.

Not necessarily anything illegal.

Sometimes it's simply a family.

A house.

A trust fund.

A loan.

A connection.

A piece of advice.

An introduction.

An opportunity.

A second chance.

The difference can be enormous.

For someone without that network, the same mistake can have far more serious consequences.

And suddenly, the famous advice to "get out of your comfort zone" takes on a very different meaning.

For some people, leaving their comfort zone means giving up convenience.

For others, it means risking financial ruin.

The Invisible Network

The difference becomes even more significant when we look across generations.

A family that has spent decades inside the same professional or social environment accumulates something that doesn't necessarily appear on a balance sheet.

Social knowledge.

They know how certain institutions work.

They know whom to call.

They know who matters.

They understand the language of particular professional circles.

They know the unwritten rules.

They know which opportunities exist before they become widely visible.

They know which mistakes to avoid.

And, most importantly, they pass that knowledge on to their children.

This is a form of capital that doesn't necessarily get transferred through a will.

It is transferred through conversations at the dinner table.

Through the friends of one's parents.

Through the schools one attends.

Through the environments one grows up in.

Through familiarity with worlds that outsiders may not even know exist.

Call it social capital.

It can be extraordinarily powerful.

Professional Dynasties and Revolving Doors

We can see versions of this phenomenon everywhere.

Families of academics.

Families of lawyers.

Families of doctors.

Families involved in politics.

Families deeply embedded in government.

Business dynasties.

Families that seem, generation after generation, to produce people who somehow find their way into the same influential institutions and professional circles.

Of course, we shouldn't turn this observation into the simplistic claim that every child of a successful professional got their position through corruption or nepotism.

That would be both unfair and intellectually lazy.

Family advantages are real in much more ordinary ways.

Children inherit knowledge.

They inherit expectations.

They inherit cultural habits.

They grow up knowing which doors exist and how to approach them.

They learn the rules of the game long before someone else even discovers that the game is being played.

But that is precisely what makes the issue so interesting.

When family advantages become systematic, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate individual merit from the environment in which that merit was developed.

And suddenly, meritocracy becomes much more complicated than the motivational books suggest.

But That's Still Only the First Level

And here we reach the more uncomfortable part.

The family network is only the most visible layer.

Some people can rely on their parents.

Others inherit professional networks.

Others inherit wealth.

And then there are levels of access, influence, and connectivity that most people never encounter directly.

We don't need to imagine a secret room where a handful of powerful people sit around deciding everything.

Reality can be much more ordinary—and precisely because of that, much harder to see.

People who occupy the same circles tend to recognize one another, recommend one another, finance one another's ventures, exchange information, and create opportunities for one another.

Networks create more networks.

Capital creates more capital.

Prestige creates more prestige.

Connections create more connections.

And someone standing completely outside those networks can be extremely intelligent, disciplined, talented, and motivated—and still have access to a completely different set of opportunities.

The Perfect Hamster

This is where self-help becomes almost paradoxical.

It teaches individuals to become increasingly efficient competitors inside the existing system.

Work on yourself.

Become more productive.

Wake up earlier.

Work harder.

Improve your skills.

Build your personal brand.

Be resilient.

Stay positive.

Don't complain.

Don't blame others.

Keep moving.

And millions of people become incredibly good at running.

But hardly anyone stops to ask:

Where are we running?

More importantly:

Who built the track?

And perhaps the most important question of all:

Who started fifty yards ahead of us?

The danger is that personal development can become a gigantic training program in which individuals are taught to compete more effectively against one another without ever seriously examining the structure in which that competition takes place.

The hamster doesn't necessarily need to be happy.

It just needs to keep running.

The Missing Half

None of this means that self-help books are useless.

Discipline matters.

Communication skills matter.

Setting goals can be valuable.

Improving your abilities matters enormously.

Building confidence can genuinely transform a person's life.

The problem begins when these things are presented as sufficient conditions for success.

They aren't.

They are part of the equation.

The other part includes your starting conditions, wealth, education, family background, geography, relationships, institutions, opportunities, and the social networks to which you have access.

Perhaps we should start teaching that too.

Not only:

"Work on yourself."

But also:

"Build your network."

Not only:

"Raise your standards."

But also:

"Learn to recognize the structures in which you're playing."

Not only:

"Have the courage to take risks."

But also:

"Ask yourself who will catch you if you fall."

Because the greatest privilege may not simply be having more money.

It may be having the ability to fail without being destroyed by failure.

And no cold shower at five in the morning can give you that.

You can work to become the best version of yourself.

You can become more disciplined, more intelligent, more skilled, and more determined.

But intellectual honesty requires us to acknowledge something:

Personal development can make you a better player. It doesn't necessarily change the rules of the game.

And above all, not every player enters the field from the same starting point.

Maybe it's time to stop talking only about how to run faster.

And start talking about who owns the track, who controls the entrances, and who has someone waiting to pick them up when they fall.

Life Is a Game of Cards: Those Who Remember the Cards Already Played See Further

Life is a little like a game of cards. Some people play relying mostly on luck. Others look only at the cards in their own hand. And then there are those who pay close attention to the cards that have already been played.

More often than not, those are the players with an advantage.

Not because they know some secret trick, or because they are necessarily smarter than everyone else. They simply remember. They remember which cards have already appeared, which ones have been played, and which ones can no longer be in the opponents' hands. Little by little, they begin to form a picture of what the others might be holding.

The difference may seem small, but it isn't.

Someone who forgets every previous hand has to start from scratch every time. Someone who remembers what has already happened no longer looks only at the present. They look at the present in the light of everything that came before it.

That is how life works, too.

History is full of people who succeeded not necessarily because they had greater resources, but because they were better at understanding how those resources had already been used. In war, for instance, knowing an opponent's previous movements allows you to narrow down the range of moves they are likely to make next. Napoleon built much of his military strength on his ability to read the battlefield quickly, gather information, and adapt to what he saw.

During the Second World War, the battle for information became almost as important as the fighting itself. Intercepting communications, tracking movements and recognizing recurring patterns could make it possible to anticipate an enemy's next move before it became obvious.

The principle is always the same: you don't necessarily need to know which card your opponent is holding. Sometimes it is enough to know which cards have already been played.

The same thing happens in business.

An entrepreneur who looks only at today's market risks constantly being one step behind. An entrepreneur who remembers past failures, crises, consumer reactions, competitors' moves and mistakes made over the years has something far more valuable: strategic memory.

A product that failed teaches you something. A price that caused sales to collapse teaches you something. A failed advertising campaign teaches you something. A competitor abandoning a particular market leaves an important card on the table.

The biggest companies have turned this principle into a science. Amazon, Netflix and many others collect enormous amounts of information about past consumer behavior and use it to make predictions about what might happen next.

Every purchase, every search, every abandoned basket, every preference becomes, metaphorically speaking, another card that has left the deck.

The more cards you remember, the more readable the deck becomes.

But there is something even more important: remembering is not enough. You have to know how to connect what you remember.

A person can have an extraordinary memory and still understand nothing about the game. They may remember exactly what happened without understanding what it means.

True strategic ability begins when memory becomes interpretation.

We see this in human relationships, too. If someone has made the same promise three times and broken it three times, we can still choose to believe them a fourth time. But we can no longer behave as though we have no information.

The cards have already been played.

If a politician has repeatedly changed positions according to circumstances, that history is part of the game. If a company has always responded to a crisis in the same way, that behavior becomes a clue. If a person has repeatedly chosen the same path whenever faced with difficulties, it is reasonable to consider that possibility when trying to anticipate what they may do next.

That does not mean the future is already written.

It means that the past narrows the range of possibilities.

And perhaps that is the most interesting part of the metaphor.

We often think luck is everything. Some people seem to be born with the right cards, while others are dealt a terrible hand. To some extent, that is true. None of us gets to choose our entire deck. We do not choose the family we are born into, the historical period, the country, the opportunities that come our way or the unexpected events that will shape our lives.

But once the game begins, we can decide how to play.

We can forget the cards that have already been played and approach every day as if it were the first. Or we can observe, remember and learn.

We can ask ourselves why someone made a particular decision, why a company failed, why a government changed course, why a relationship ended, why a project did not work.

And, above all, we can try not to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Because true experience is not simply having lived through many things. It is remembering what we have lived through and using it to understand what is happening now.

In the end, remembering the cards that have already been played does not guarantee victory.

You can still lose.

But you enter the game with something almost as valuable as luck: a clearer understanding of the possibilities that remain.

Luck determines some of the cards we are dealt.

Memory, experience and the ability to observe determine how we choose to play them.

And perhaps that is one of the few things we can truly learn from the long game of life: we cannot always choose the cards we are dealt, but we can make sure we never forget the ones that have already been played.

Knowledge Is Power — But When Does Knowledge Actually Become Power?

“Knowledge is power” is one of the most familiar ideas we have inherited from Western culture. We repeat it so often that we rarely stop to ask what it actually means.

Knowledge means power.

But does it?

We live in an age in which we can know almost anything. A smartphone gives us access, within seconds, to more information than any human being in previous generations could have gathered in a lifetime. We can read books, study psychology, economics, strategy, medicine, communication, history, philosophy. We can learn how markets work, how relationships work, how persuasion works, how fear works, how people behave.

And yet knowledge does not automatically make us more capable.

That is a distinction I only began to understand after reading a great deal.

For years, I thought that accumulating knowledge meant accumulating power. Every book added something to my library and, at least in my mind, something to my ability to understand the world.

Then I realized something rather uncomfortable: we can know perfectly well what we should do and still fail to do it.

We can know that we should talk to people and still choose isolation.

We can understand how fear works and still avoid the things that frighten us.

We can know that asking for help could make our lives easier and still insist on doing everything alone.

We can study success for years and continue to behave like people who are afraid of failure.

We can understand ourselves remarkably well and, when faced with the same trigger, continue to react in exactly the same way.

So what do we actually possess at that point?

Knowledge, certainly.

But can we still call it power?

Perhaps not.

Perhaps we have simply accumulated information about things we still haven't learned how to do.

And this is where “Knowledge is power” takes on a different meaning.

The power of knowledge should not be measured by how many things we know, but by how many things we become capable of doing because of what we know.

Understanding communication becomes power when it helps us communicate better.

Understanding fear becomes power when it enables us to move through fear instead of allowing fear to control us.

Understanding risk becomes power when it helps us take responsibility without being reckless.

Understanding people becomes power when it helps us make better choices about whom we allow into our lives.

Understanding ourselves becomes power when we are finally able, at least sometimes, to break an old pattern.

Knowledge, then, is not the destination.

It is a tool.

And a tool that is never used remains just a tool.

Perhaps this is why someone can read hundreds of books and change very little about their life, while someone else can read very little and use what they have learned to make decisions that transform everything.

It is not necessarily a question of intelligence.

It is a question of conversion.

Turning what we know into what we do.

And this is where another word enters the conversation, one that is often forgotten when we talk about knowledge: responsibility.

If knowledge gives us power, then knowledge also gives us greater responsibility for what we do with it.

Someone who can recognize their own fear but continues to let that fear dictate their choices is not necessarily freer than someone who has never studied psychology.

Someone who understands exactly how relationships work but cannot build any meaningful relationships does not necessarily possess greater relational power.

Someone who knows every strategy for starting a project but never starts one has a library of possibilities, not a real possibility.

This is also where the expression can be misunderstood.

“Knowledge is power” does not mean that knowledge makes us omnipotent.

It does not mean that we can control reality simply by understanding it.

We cannot predict every consequence of our choices. We cannot control other people. We cannot eliminate chance. We cannot know which encounter will change our lives.

But we can become better equipped to move through uncertainty.

And perhaps that is a much more practical form of power.

Knowing that we cannot control luck does not make us powerless. It means understanding that we can increase the number of situations in which something unexpected might happen.

Knowing that we cannot eliminate risk does not mean giving up on action. It means learning which risks are worth taking.

Knowing that we cannot predict the future does not mean abandoning plans. It means refusing to mistake a plan for a guarantee.

Knowledge does not give us control over reality.

It can make us more capable of engaging with it.

And perhaps this is the difference between an informed person and a genuinely empowered one.

The first person knows.

The second person knows and can turn what they know into action.

But there is one final step, perhaps the hardest one of all.

Even knowledge that has been turned into action does not guarantee success.

We can do everything right and still fail.

We can make a perfectly reasonable decision and get a disappointing result.

We can prepare thoroughly and encounter something we could never have anticipated.

We can be in the right place and still arrive at the wrong moment.

And that is where knowledge meets reality.

Not to dominate it, but to navigate it more intelligently.

Perhaps, then, the phrase needs to be completed:

Knowledge is power — when it becomes the ability to act.

Knowledge that remains in our heads is a possibility.

Knowledge that changes our behavior becomes a capability.

A capability tested by reality can become experience.

And experience, in turn, can create new knowledge.

The cycle never really ends.

So perhaps we should stop asking how many books we have read, how much information we possess, or how many things we can explain.

A more interesting question is this:

What are you capable of doing today that you were not capable of doing before, because of what you have learned?

If the answer is something concrete, then that knowledge has become power.

If there is no answer, perhaps that is not a failure.

It is simply a reminder.

The book isn't finished yet.

But this time, perhaps the next page should not be read.

It should be lived.

I’ve Read Thousands of Books. Today I Saved Just One: Maybe My Father Was Right

Today I filled a suitcase and a duffel bag with books.

I had to clear them out of my daughter’s bookcase because the space needs to be freed up. As I picked them up one by one, I found myself looking at them, recognizing some, remembering when I bought them. Others surprised me because I had completely forgotten I even owned them.

And the books I moved today are only a fraction of what I’ve accumulated over the years. There are still boxes and boxes of them at my mother’s house. I don’t even know exactly how many. I only know there are a lot.

At some point, I stopped and thought about something.

How do so many people go through their entire lives having known, for the most part, only the books they had to read at school?

I’m not saying that as a criticism. I’m genuinely curious. For me, books have always been almost a natural part of life. I can hardly imagine my life without all those years of reading.

And yet, right after that thought came another one, much harder to sit with:

What have all these books really given me?

I’ve spent thousands of euros on books. I don’t even know how many hours I’ve spent reading them. Psychology, philosophy, history, economics, politics, human behavior, success, relationships, spirituality. I’ve looked for answers almost everywhere.

And then I look around at other people’s lives.

I see people who have probably read very little and yet have things I don’t have. Large houses, swimming pools, expensive cars, businesses, money. Not necessarily because they’re smarter or more capable. Their lives simply took a different direction.

And that leads to a question that isn’t easy to admit:

Maybe reading a lot doesn’t necessarily get you very far.

My father used to tell me that.

He said that by reading so many books, I was only making myself more mentally confused.

Back then, I didn’t like hearing it. I thought he didn’t understand what reading meant to me, that he saw only the time I spent with my nose in a book and not everything those books left inside me.

Today, as I pack books into a suitcase without even knowing where I’m going to put them next, his words come back to me differently.

Because maybe my father had noticed something I couldn’t see.

Every book adds something.

A theory. An explanation. A different way of looking at a situation. Then you read another and find someone arguing the exact opposite. Then another, and you discover that perhaps both are right, but only under certain circumstances.

At first, it feels like wealth.

After a while, it can become noise.

And the more you read, the harder it can become to tell the difference between what you actually think and everything you’ve absorbed from other people.

You can read a book about discipline and feel ready to change your life. Then you read one about motivation. Then habits. Then psychology. Then fear.

And after fifty books, you may be able to explain perfectly why you aren’t doing what you know you should be doing.

Yet you still don’t do it.

That is what interests me most today: reading can become a very sophisticated form of inaction.

While you’re reading, you feel as if you’re moving forward.

You’re learning.

You’re thinking.

You’re growing.

And sometimes you really are.

But sometimes you’re simply postponing the moment when you’ll have to put what you’ve learned to the test.

And that’s when I picked up one particular book today, one I decided to entrust to my daughter.

I told her, “Don’t sell this one.”

She can sell the others, give them away, get rid of them.

But not this one.

It’s The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman, in the 2003 Italian edition published by Sonzogno. I’ve always liked the cover: green, with four four-leaf clovers.

Why this book?

Because after everything I’ve read, I’ve come to believe that there is something many theories about success tend to overlook:

we don’t all start from the same place, and we don’t have the same degree of control over the outcome.

We like to tell ourselves that life is a kind of equation.

Study hard, and you’ll succeed.

Work hard, and you’ll succeed.

Be intelligent, and you’ll succeed.

Try hard enough, and eventually you’ll make it.

But life isn’t that simple.

There’s the family you’re born into. The place where you grow up. The historical moment. The people you meet. The opportunities that come your way. The ones you miss. Chance encounters. Coincidences.

And then there’s what we call luck.

That doesn’t mean everything is luck. That would be just as wrong.

It means that luck exists, and it plays a much bigger role in our lives than we like to admit.

That’s what makes Wiseman’s book so interesting to me. It doesn’t simply say that some people are lucky and others aren’t. It looks at what people who consider themselves lucky actually do, and whether certain behaviors make them more likely to encounter opportunities.

In the end, it feels very practical to me.

I can’t decide when luck will arrive.

But I can decide whether I leave the house.

I can decide how many people I meet.

I can decide whether to try something new.

I can decide whether, when an unexpected possibility appears, I immediately close the door or at least take a look at where it might lead.

Maybe we can’t control luck.

But we can put ourselves in places where luck has a chance to find us.

And that idea feels much more useful to me today than most theories about success.

Because it also forces us to be a little more honest with ourselves.

Not everything we have achieved is necessarily entirely due to our own merit.

And not everything we have failed to achieve is necessarily entirely our fault.

That’s a difficult thing to accept, especially in a society that keeps telling us that we can become anything we want if we want it badly enough.

I don’t think that’s true.

We can do a great deal.

We can prepare, study, work, improve, keep trying.

But we can’t control everything.

And perhaps that is one of the things it took me far too long to understand.

For years, I tried to understand life.

Why some people make it and others don’t.

Why some people find love and others remain alone.

Why some people become wealthy while others work their entire lives without ever building much wealth.

Why some people seem to stumble into opportunity after opportunity while others always seem to arrive at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I looked for answers in books.

Maybe my father understood that not every question has an answer in a book.

And maybe some answers simply don’t exist.

Or rather, they don’t exist in the form we would like them to.

Today, as I packed those books away, I didn’t think they had been useless.

That would be unfair.

Those books have been part of my life. They kept me company. They taught me things. They changed the way I thought. Some helped me through difficult moments. Others I have completely forgotten.

But today I realized something:

I don’t want to confuse what I know with what I have actually done.

They are two very different things.

I can know a great deal and still have done very little.

Someone else can know relatively little and build a great deal.

And perhaps life doesn’t keep score based on how many books we’ve read.

This realization doesn’t make me regret the books.

It simply makes me want to stop accumulating them.

Not necessarily stop reading, but stop believing that the next answer is always inside the next book.

Maybe now I need to step outside the pages for a while.

To try.

To fail.

To act.

To see what happens.

That’s why I told my daughter to keep The Luck Factor.

Not because I think that book contains the definitive explanation of life. No book does.

I want her to keep those four white four-leaf clovers as a small reminder.

You can prepare as much as you want. You can study. You can work hard. You can be intelligent, determined, capable.

And something can still happen that you never saw coming.

You can meet someone by chance.

An opportunity can appear.

A door can open.

You can simply find yourself in the right place at the right time.

Or you can find yourself in the wrong place.

And not all of that will necessarily be your fault or your achievement.

The important thing is not to turn that awareness into an excuse for doing nothing.

Quite the opposite.

If I can’t control luck, at least I want to be there when it comes along.

And as I closed that suitcase full of books, I realized that maybe this is where I’ve finally arrived.

I’ve spent a huge part of my life looking for ways to understand the world through books.

Today I find myself moving those books from one house to another and wondering what to do with them.

There are still so many at my mother’s house.

Maybe one day I’ll sell them. Maybe I’ll give them away. Maybe I’ll keep a few.

But I no longer think the fundamental question is, “How much did all that reading do for me?”

Maybe the real question is:

“Now that I’ve read all this, what am I willing to do with it?”

Because at some point, you have to close the book.

And start living what’s written outside it.

My father used to say that reading so much only made me more mentally confused.

Today, as I carried away a suitcase and a duffel bag full of books, for the first time I thought that maybe he was right.

Not because reading was useless.

But because perhaps I didn’t need to understand more. I needed to do more.

Sleep and Have Luck

My father often used to say a phrase that, when I was young, sounded almost like a provocation: “Sleep and have luck.”

As the years passed, however, my experiences, the books I have read, and above all the many human stories I have encountered led me to recognize that behind that simple saying there was a profound truth.

Hard work, education, talent, and perseverance are certainly important elements, but they do not always fully explain the destiny of individuals. Life contains a silent and unpredictable factor, one that is often ignored in the stories of success: luck.

We only need to observe many unexpected careers, many social rises that began in poor neighborhoods, and many transformations of ordinary people into successful entrepreneurs, influential figures, or public personalities. Behind some of these stories there are certainly ability and sacrifice, but there is often something else as well: a chance encounter with the right person at the right moment; an opportunity that appears unexpectedly; someone else’s mistake that opens a door; a favorable circumstance that completely changes the course of a life.

Yet society often tends to describe success as if it were always the exclusive result of individual merit. It is a comforting narrative because it suggests that those who reach the top did so only because they worked harder than everyone else. Reality, however, is usually far more complex. Two people with similar abilities can experience completely different destinies simply because fortune placed them in different circumstances.

Even the biblical tradition does not seem to deny this mysterious dimension of human existence. In Psalm 127, we read:

"Unless the Lord builds the house,

the builders labor in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city,

the guards stand watch in vain.

In vain you rise early

and stay up late,

toiling for food to eat—

for He grants sleep to those He loves."

The meaning of the Psalm is not an invitation to laziness. It does not say that human beings should abandon effort or responsibility. Rather, it expresses something deeper: human effort alone cannot explain everything. There is a dimension beyond our control, called by faith grace, by philosophy chance, and by everyday language simply luck.

Perhaps my father, with a simple phrase, had understood a truth that economists, sociologists, and psychologists have later examined: human beings create their own opportunities, but they do not completely control the circumstances in which those opportunities become reality.

Therefore, “sleep and have luck” is not a celebration of passivity. It is a lesson in humility. It reminds those who reach great heights not to attribute everything to themselves, and it reminds those who remain behind that failure is not always the result of personal inadequacy.

Because in life we certainly need our hands to build, but sometimes we also need something that does not depend on our hands.

Perhaps this is why the wisdom of an old popular saying still survives: we must work, prepare ourselves, and strive — but we must also recognize that every human journey contains an unpredictable element.

The builders need their tools.

But sometimes, they also need a favorable wind.