Career luck matters to your career success because the ones who get ahead got there through things beyond the person’s control. No one ever became successful by being 100% responsible for their successes. They had someone look out for them.
Take, for example, Tim Cook. Tim Cook did not even want to work at Apple. However, Steve Jobs came to him with a job opportunity offering ~$900,000 in first year compensation to make it happen. Tim Cook declined Apple numerous times before Apple finally got to hire Tim Cook.
That success wasn’t because of Tim Cook. That success was because Steve Jobs reached out to him. Then Tim Cook had to prove himself in the interview and took the ball to the finish line. We don’t build our careers by ourselves. We have to get lucky at times like this through things beyond our control.
Career luck matters, no matter what. I didn’t join my current company because I knew about the opportunity before anyone else. I joined my current company because they reached out to me for an opportunity. That was luck right there. Now I’m at a spot that I could only dream of.
I don’t think it’s because I deserve it. I personally believe that it’s because I got lucky. It doesn’t happen to many people. Many people have to go through the grueling process of recruiting. First, the application, then the interviewing, then the case interview, and the like.
What is Career Luck?
Career luck is luck that benefits your career through factors that were beyond and outside of your control. It can come in many forms. Maybe someone reached out to you on LinkedIn when you weren’t even looking for a job.
Or maybe you avoided five rounds of layoffs all because your boss and yourself share a common mutual interest.
Whatever it is, as much as we would like to say our career success is due to our own choices, in order to be really successful, you need career luck. Sure, you can do as much as you can in order to avoid layoffs. Maybe you’ll attend that sporting outing that your boss invited you to.
Then your boss fights for you when it comes time to figure out who should get the ax. Whatever it is, factors beyond your control influence your success much more than anything else. In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell brilliantly argues that your environment contributes to your success in ways you don’t even imagine.
It is completely true. There’s a reason why NHL players are generally born in the same months. It favors players born earlier in the year. We don’t choose when we get born. Yet it’s a contributing factor in being a successful hockey player. Environmental factors play to your career success more than you know.
In my first career, I got lucky in that my boss’ boss, for some odd reason, saw something in me. He looked after me. When I had another offer, he didn’t hesitate once to pull strings in order to offer me a 25% increase in compensation. In just four hours.
I didn’t have control over how he felt about me.
Why Career Luck Matters to Your Success
One reason why career luck matters to your success is that you can SMASH that social share button and post to your favorite social media! Your friends might not be aware just how crucial environmental factors are to their success. This one article just may help them realize the benefits.
So with that said, let’s go over the reasons why career luck matters to your career success!
1) Birth Lottery
It is much harder to achieve career success in the United States if you first came to the US on a student VISA for university. It’s possible but just not as realistic as someone who was naturally born in the United States. It’s the cruel birth lottery effect at play here.
It controls your life more than you know. I was fortunate enough to have been born to parents who were loving and who were financially stable enough to send me to college. Not only that, I was born in a first world country. A developed/developing country. I had no say or choice in the matter.
Career luck is just like the birth lottery in that someone else who’s looking out for you helps you. For reasons that you might not even understand. Maybe they liked you for some reason. Or maybe you guys just have instant chemistry. Whatever it is, environmental factors make a huge difference.
2) Luck Favors the Prepared but You Still Need Career Luck
Opportunity is where preparation meets luck, as they say. However, some people prepare for their whole lives without having the luck come to them at all. You can be the best employee the world has ever seen but if a higher up doesn’t recognize that, then it doesn’t matter.
You can’t sell your accomplishments if no one else notices or thinks about them. There’s no point in being the best product down in the basement where no one knows it exists. That’s why you have to do as much as you can with effort, the factor that you control.
However, you still need luck to connect at the end of the day to propel you to unspeakable heights.
Career luck depends on outside factors such as these. The worst part is, you never know when or where you are just about to hit it big. It just happens when you least expect it. Career success means impressing higher ups and hope that the champion acts in your interest when it counts the most.
3) Career Success is Based on Factors You Don’t Control
The best thing that you can do to achieve career success is to influence others. That’s the most that you can do. You don’t control what your bosses, coworkers, or friends think about you. You don’t control whether your coworkers are going to give you a good evaluation down the road.
All you can control is your effort and for you to do your best on getting them to like you. Think what your coworkers think of you don’t matter? Whether you are the best employee in the world, if your coworkers just can’t stand working alongside you, they won’t hesitate to let your boss know.
When it comes time to give the boot to someone, then that just becomes infinitely easier. No matter how much of a high performer you are, if you permeate negative energy around you, they are losing more than the salary they pay you. They are losing team morale they worked so hard to build.
4) You Can Do Everything Right and Still Lose
There are good people who got laid off. Even in the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve seen someone’s job title go from “Principal” at Blackstone to “Senior Vice President”. This was when we were on the rise from the coronavirus pandemic. Even then they got demoted because of bad economic factors.
I’ve seen “Head” job titles get cut to “Senior Vice President” because of an acquisition that led to layoffs. You can do everything right and still lose, that’s why career luck matters so much. You don’t control when the company you’re working for is going to get acquired.
Additionally, you don’t control whether you’ll have a job in the end.
Layoffs can happen at ANY time. Even in good economic times, where business is on fire and profits are on the rise. The company could always get acquired at any point. At which point, you’ll be left wondering if you’ll be on the chopping block.
You just can never see how the story will unfold until it unfolds.
How You Can Still Make Your Own Career Luck
This doesn’t mean everything is doom and gloom and you can’t do anything about it. There’s many things you can do and control so that you end up on the right side of career luck. Plenty of people got there and so can you!
1) Put in the Work Every Day
Do your best almost every day. Maybe some days, you get sick so you can’t get around to it as much. However, you have to be present and be ready to make your boss’ life easier every day. If you don’t make your boss’ life easier every day then your boss has no incentive to fight for you.
One Investment Banking Associate I interviewed with negotiated a business deal for his boss the day he proposed to his girlfriend. His boss was shocked and told him he didn’t need to do that. Then he countered that if he can do things to make his life easier, then he’ll do it, no question.
He became Senior Vice President very quickly. In just 3 years. Career luck can be managed by putting in the effort. The easiest effort that you can control is making your boss’ life easier. Although he will never hold all of the cards all the time, for the time being, he or she has leverage over your career.
2) Treat People Nicely
Your coworkers can be the last deciding factor whether you should get the boot or not. If your coworkers constantly complain to your boss about how they can’t get along with you, it will make a difference in the end. Are you going to garner support? Are your coworkers willing to go to bat for you?
It makes a difference. Treating people nicely for business reasons shouldn’t be your end goal. It’s basic human decency that you should always employ. When it comes to career luck, it’s a necessity. What others think of you will matter when it comes time to decide which negative energy to get rid of in the end.
People don’t remember how good your work is. But people will be sure to remember how good or bad you made them feel. Recommendations matter in the business world, more than people know. AIG hired Peter Hancock due to recommendations from PwC and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
This is the extra support that people miss.
3) Do Good Work
Showing up is half the battle. The other half is actually doing good work while you showed up. You can’t go through the motions and hope that something sticks. Career luck means intentionally doing good work that makes other people comfortable enough to trust your work and judgement.
Do good work in order to get ahead and keep your job. That way when it comes time for layoffs, the company thinks that you are an indispensable asset. Someone who they can’t let go of because it would disrupt their business so much to the point that it will bring headaches.
That’s how to keep your job. Your performance becomes much easier to measure when you are in a revenue generating area. However, if you are a cost center, then it becomes much harder to justify keeping people if your team is not bringing in the money.
Then all you can do is do good work and hope your boss notices.
4) Find Out What Your Organization Values
Don’t do extra work for the sake of doing extra work. Your boss is not going to care that you were in the office until 10pm at night on a Saturday. Your boss is going to care if you give him or her what she wants and values. This is what makes the difference between the super achievers and the regular folks.
Being a grinder helps to a good degree. However, grinders rarely makes it to the top. The ones who understand what their company values are the ones who make it to the top. That’s what makes companies happy. You don’t make the company happy by giving them the most hours of work.
You make them happy by giving them what they want. That’s the ultimate career luck you can build. Whether it’s mending relations between two departments or whether it’s landing a high profile client, that’s what makes the difference.
This is what separates from the fast career risers versus the slow ones.
Career Luck Propels You to Success
Whether people admit it or not, career luck matters to your success more than anything else that you know of. We won’t get there on our own. We depend on other people in order to get to where we want or need to be.
No matter how much we want to be able to stand on our own two feet, it doesn’t work that way.
Whether we like it or not, we are dependent on other people’s successes in order to be successful ourselves. Americans can’t be successful if America as a nation isn’t successful first and foremost. We can’t have a successful career unless we join a successful company, ourselves.
Many of our rise to success depends on factors that we outright just do not control. The most we can do is recognize when we are put in a fortuitous situation and take advantage of it as much as we can if we are offered the opportunity to do so.
There are many software engineers who took advantage of the ridiculous salaries that FAANG companies are offering software engineers. Taking advantage of where the trends are going is not a bad career plan to position yourself for long term success.
Career luck is what’s going to separate the big winners 20 years from now. The spread between the superstars and the stars becomes apparent after the years pass. It’s only a matter of time before everyone gets to see who was actually destined for success and who wasn’t.
