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.
1. Cultivate a Broad Professional Network
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.
2. Learn Interdisciplinary Skills
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.
If you spend the next 10 years continuing to double down and deepen your marketing skills, maybe you can increase your skill a bit, but you’ll be hitting diminishing returns. Maybe you can get to 1.3X.
But let’s say that you decide to pivot and spend the next 10 years learning something else entirely - say corporate accounting. At the end of that time, you will be able to identify and resolve a whole new set of problems. We can denote all of these problems as “Y.”
It’s natural to assume that in the latter case, your skill at identifying and resolving problems can be expressed as X + Y. But multidisciplinary perspectives are at least multiplicative. You’ll be able to identify and fix X * Y problems, perhaps even XY or YX. That means you’ll be massively better-equipped to deliver real-world results to the business you work for.
3. Regularly Seek Out New Problems to Solve
If you want to get lucky, you need to optimize for breadth. Not just in your network and skills, but in the problems you choose to tackle. That means regularly seeking out new challenges to work on.
This doesn’t have to mean switching companies. It could mean switching roles within a company. It could just mean switching your projects within a team. And don’t let formal career definitions constrain your search for interesting problems. You could learn to build something with wood in your free time, or volunteer with a nonprofit, or become a career mentor to someone else.
If you are constantly seeking out new problems to solve, you’ll get better at learning itself. That should enable you to more quickly identify and fix critical issues that come up in your career.
What’s Next?
If you want to reach the extreme heights of success in your career, it’s not enough to be very skilled and very hard working. You also have to be very lucky. There are always counter-examples of extreme specialists hitting it big. With that said, I think the dominant way to become very lucky is to maximize your exposure to random opportunities.
Remember that there isn’t a causal relationship between behavior and extreme success. There are only strong correlations. You can best correlate your behaviors with extreme success by thinking about the size and quality of your network, the breadth of your skills, and your exposure to new challenges. Then, maximize your long term gains by investing in each like an index fund.
Few key one's are missing...