I'm a marine biologist, often when we fish it is in some difficult circumstances due to species or habitat of interest. A quote passed down from one of my academic great grandparents (that was probably in a discussion about the futility of it all) is that you definitely aren't going to catch any fucking fish if you aren't fishing.
The concept that made this click for me is increasing your “luck surface area”.
Unfortunately I don’t remember who to attribute it to.
I think one of the keys here is that you can manufacture a certain amount of luck. Perhaps you've heard of the micromort[0] a fascinating statistical tool many countries use to determine how they spend money in healthcare. The general idea is to measure all activities in their chance to add/remove the probability of death even by very tiny amounts, this is applicable to luck.
When you go to a some event that's a networking opportunity, chances are nothing will come of it. You might go to a dozen with no good outcome but your lifetime chances of a good outcome go up once you decide to try to network, it's conceptually useful to think of these events as giving you a few points of "microluck", attending while following the author's advice even more.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort