Last week, Jennifer and I ate at a tiny sushi restaurant here in Sonoma County. It’s tucked behind another restaurant, and you have to know where the hidden door is to get in. Basically, a sushi speakeasy that seats eight guests at a time. They serve a traditional "omakase" menu, where the chef chooses the best products of the day and serves them one piece at a time.

The food blew us away, to say the least. So naturally, we became curious about the chef, and we struck up a conversation with him.

He told us he’s from Venezuela, and we talked about how he became a chef. His story about growing up in Venezuela wasn’t easy. But around age 12, he ate a California roll for the first time.

"My friends thought it was gross," he told me. "But to me it was the most interesting thing I'd ever tasted. I'd never had anything like it."

Something clicked for him, and he fell in love with sushi.

He eventually moved to Los Angeles with a dream of working at a sushi restaurant in the United States. He walked into 15 different places looking for work, dropping his resume and asking if they needed some help. And fourteen of them never got back to him.

But he connected with one chef, and that chef saw something worth betting on. So he offered him a chance to start at the bottom. Over the next few years, he learned everything he could and worked his way up to apprenticing under that chef for years.

Fast forward to today, and this guy who grew up in Venezuela runs his own kitchen, serving some of the best sushi we’ve ever had.

As Jennifer and I walked home, we wondered about how different his life could have been if he hadn't eaten that California roll. Or what he'd be doing now if he hadn't met his mentor at that restaurant in Los Angeles.

That one person who made a world of difference.

The distance between here and there

The sushi chef didn't find his mentor by having the perfect resume or knowing the right people. He walked into 15 restaurants in a city he barely knew (probably nervous as could be), and he was ignored.

But he kept showing up, and eventually someone saw something in him worth betting on. And that's how these things tend to work, if you ask me.

You can't manufacture the moment someone decides to take a chance on you. You can't engineer it or “deserve” your way into it. All you can do is keep putting yourself in the rooms and the situations where it might happen.

I'm not a "woo-woo" kind of guy, and I don't believe in fate. But I do believe the distance between the person you are now and the person you want to be might just be one conversation away, with one person who sees something in you before you even see it in yourself.

I believe this because it happened to me too.