How to Get Lucky In Your Career - by George Saines
As I’ve written previously, getting to L6 is skill, but getting to L9 is luck. If you want to get to L9 and beyond, it might seem like there’s nothing you can do. Luck is, by definition, something that happens to you, not something you can do for yourself. But you can learn behaviors that increase your odds of getting lucky in your career. It just boils down to optimizing for exposure to random good events. Here are 3 behaviors you can use to increase your professional luck.
After the first 5-10 years of your career, most opportunities will come through your network, not recruiters or job postings. You are much more likely to get a really good opportunity from your network if your network is large.
If you’ve only ever worked with 5 people, even if they all thought the world of you, they probably won’t have a lot of opportunities to hire you later in your career. And even if they do offer you excellent opportunities, there are a hundred small details that might not work out. Maybe your friend wants you to co-found a startup, but you just bought a house and can’t afford the financial instability. Maybe you get an offer to lead a large and innovative business group in China, but you don’t want to live abroad right now. On and on. Finding truly excellent career opportunities is a numbers game: the more chances you have to play, the more likely you’ll be successful.
If you have spent 10 years becoming an experienced marketer, you’ll be able to see and resolve some kinds of marketing problems. Let’s just use the variable X to stand in for all the marketing problems you can identify and resolve.
