Survivor bias. Successful people who tell you to work hard and believe in yourself are right, but most successful people also had breaks: One or more chance events that secured their success, the most common of which is that they ran into the right person at the right time.
https://snabeltann.no/media/Zi3cu4Z22HE3-K21rh0
There are things you can do to increase your chances of meeting the right person, though. If you network aggressively in many different circles, you increase the likelihood of "freak encounters". That depressed accountant you met 2 years ago in a hotel bar ended up doing the accounts of an important executive in New York, landing you your dream job. The single mom you met 3 months ago goes to yoga class and is friends with the wife of a potential investor for your business.
In my case: A guy I met at a political meeting suddenly decided to start a BitCoin related business, and did everything he could to get me to join his new startup. It turns out that he's very good at networking and negotiating deals, and that his brother and co-founder is quite a visionary. We haven't "made it" yet, but we have investors, revenue sources and our own offices now.
How did I get involved in that political party? Well, I wasn't planning on becoming an active member, but I watched one of their live streamed meetings and the quality was so terrible you could hardly make out what was going on. Having experience with that sort of thing, I offered to step up and help them the next day, and hey, suddenly I knew tons of new people.
@thor I don't link to XKCD anymore, but I'm told there is a recent relevant strip about buying lottery tickets.
@thor one of the themes that I hear coming up again and again. Is that the value may not be in the hard work itself, but the habit of showing up.
No guarantees that you'll get that chance meeting, but you're increasing the odds greatly.
I think Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) wrote it in his book. "How to fail at almost everything and still in big"