I was never going to be the guy—the one people rallied around, the golden child, the anointed one. I wasn’t the star quarterback of anyone’s career fantasy draft. More often than not, I was the last pick in the schoolyard pick’em. And it wasn’t because I lacked ability. Quite the opposite. I had the talent. What I lacked was the pedigree, the polish, the politics. The things narcissists and gatekeepers latch onto when they’re deciding who “belongs.”
I’ve written before—most recently in Full Circle—that in the law firm world, maybe half of the people who make partner actually deserve it. The other half? Beneficiaries of the right lunch buddies, the right mentor, or the right last name. It’s a club. And if you don’t have the right handshake, they’ll make damn sure you stay outside.
There were moments in my life when that weighed on me. Watching someone far less capable than me get the job, the praise, the platform. It eats at you, if you let it. Makes you question if talent really matters at all. But here’s the thing I learned: they can only keep you down for so long.
Real talent—paired with relentless hope—is a force. Maybe not the kind that storms the gates on day one. But it chips away. It endures. It makes itself undeniable over time.
It’s something I think about a lot, and not just professionally. Hope is hard-earned when you come from a family where love is conditional and success is never your own. My parents had their idea of who I should be—and spoiler alert, I didn’t fit their mold. I didn’t go to Harvard. I didn’t climb the ladder they imagined. I built my own. And I climbed that. And it worked out.
There’s a quote from The Shawshank Redemption—one of the few films that gets the long game of resilience right: “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
That’s the kind of hope I clung to. Not the naïve, starry-eyed version. The kind born of disappointment and grit. The kind that gets up after the fifth, sixth, or fifteenth rejection and says, “I’m not done yet.”
So no, I was never their guy. But I became my own guy. And eventually, I became the right guy—for the clients who valued what I did, for the readers who saw themselves in my story, and for the people who believed that merit still matters, even in a world that often forgets it.
They may overlook you. They may underestimate you. But they can’t stop you—if you’ve got talent. And if you’ve got hope.
