In all the years of doing this, I’m absolutely certain that luck plays a role in the difference between finding a job, a really good job and finding just a job. Problem is that I can’t tell you what percentage of each job search is luck and how much of it is skill. It is certainly not luck, for instance, when you work real hard to get an interview with a particular company, but when the person doing the interviewing went to the same college you did and you have some people in common, that’s lucky. It certainly isn’t just luck when you get laid off and then decide to take a trip to visit your family and on the airplane sit next to an executive with the company who agrees to interview you for an opening that just came up for someone with exactly your skills.
Going to work for a company right before it hits its stride and moves up into the big time is just plain lucky. Working with people who move on in their career and call you three or four years later to join them is a bit of luck. I mentioned in the Ted talk that I gave about how people who really love their jobs reframe stories of the things that happened to them during their lives with stories of good luck. And most often those things that don’t begin to look like good fortune turned out to be just that.
I’m really not sure if I’ll ever quite understand. It may not be understandable. I’m well aware of the clichés that are written about luck… “The harder you work the luckier you get”…”When it comes to luck, you make your own”…”Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause-and-effect.” Well, these can go on and on. But the truth is there are happenings in all of our lives, especially our job searches, that are just plain lucky.
The overall important thing is to be prepared for “luck.” We need to be ready to execute at our best when we get “lucky.” Luck, more often than not, becomes a disaster if we aren’t prepared when the lucky time comes. So, being prepared, being ready to perform, is absolute.
The second thing I noticed about luck is that the opportunity for it has to be repeated more and more and more and more often. An individual simply has to show up more often than other people do in order to get lucky. If they are prepared, they’ll know what to do when they get there. Lucky people show up a lot, work their butts off and totally ignore “striking out.” They just keep trying again.
Lucky people act and expect to be lucky and they are.
