Do you feel lucky?

As a child, I was taught that hard work was the key to success. Using your innate talents and having a bit of luck helped, but nothing replaced hard work. So, I worked hard and had my share of success. However, looking back at my 40-year career, I see that hard work and talent only enabled me to take advantage of my lucky breaks. Yes, I put in the effort, but really, I’ve been quite fortunate.

Current research shows that luck plays an outsized role in our lives. (Search for “The role of luck in life,” and you’ll bring up many reports.) For those of us who’ve enjoyed some success, these findings should make us feel humbled and grateful. For those of you in the beginning or middle of your careers, you should be wondering how to deal with the fact that so much of your success is pure luck: luck in your gender, race, family wealth, place of birth, height, attractiveness, name, innate abilities, and innate preferences. Luck in your job searches, managers, and opportunities.

How do you optimize your success in a world where so much depends on chance? Certainly, you want to work hard and take full advantage of any good fortune that comes your way. But that’s just the start. You need to brace yourself psychologically for the dice rolls of life. You need to take steps to increase your odds of catching a break. And you need to view people and situations in the stark reality of our unpredictable world. Let’s get started.

You can handle the truth

Yes, you want to work hard and use your innate talents, but that’s insufficient. You need some lucky breaks. There’s substantial luck in aspects of your birth and genetic makeup; however, you can’t control that. Getting mad or being jealous of other people’s good fortune also gets you nowhere beyond a moment of catharsis. So, let go of your bad feelings about your own luck or the luck of others. It doesn’t help—so let it go.

Movies glorify the “one chance” and “big break.” However, in real life, if you miss out on one opportunity, there’s always another. Some big opportunities turn out to be meaningless, and some small ones change everything. Life is full of chances. So, let go of rejections, failures, and other missed opportunities. Learn what you can from them, and then seek out your next prospect. I know it’s tough—especially for job searches, where rejection is commonplace—but eventually, your luck will change.

Sometimes, you catch a break due to pure chance. You get hired, in part, because you are part of an underrepresented group. You land a key assignment by simply being in the right place at the right time. You get picked for a role because of personal relationships, even though others might be better suited. You might feel guilty, and coworkers may resent your good fortune. However, they were no less lucky to get their positions due to their genetics, family, and other breaks. Life is hard and unfair. If fortune happens to smile upon you this time, drop the guilt and take full advantage. Use your hard work and talents to make the most of the situation. Let others’ jealously ruin their lives, not yours.

You make your own luck

How do you win a game of chance? You increase your odds each turn, and you take lots of turns.

• For a job search, you can increase your odds with each application by choosing roles for which you are highly differentiated (background, interest, and personal connection). You can be among the first candidates considered by using your contacts to engage targeted teams before they post a position. You can learn about the team and role in advance, showing your passion and interest in what they do. And finally, you can network and apply nonstop, taking lots of turns, until you land the right role. Remember, you may get rejected many times, but you only need one acceptable offer to win.
• For a key assignment, you can increase your odds for each opportunity by letting your manager, your PM, and your tech lead know the kinds of assignments you want. You can take online training to pick up the necessary skills. You can be the backup or mentee of someone who currently does that work. And you can “keep your head on a swivel” to watch for emerging trends and new opportunities, grabbing them before others notice.
• If your manager isn’t giving you desirable assignments and supporting your career, he or she is lowering your odds of success. Instead of staying and trying to prove yourself worthy, you should switch to a team that has a better manager. You’re already worthy—your current manager is just wasting your talents. You probably can’t change the person your manager is, but you can change the person who is your manager. Switch and improve your chances.
• In general, you can use your personal network to learn about pending job openings, growing areas of the business, disruptive changes, and other opportunities. You may bemoan how relationships are often more important than skills or talent, but that’s the way the world works, so use your network to make your own luck.

Bad luck, I guess

Once you realize that much of success is due to chance, how you look at people and situations changes. Yes, some people are incompetent, lazy, and/or abrasive, causing their own problems. However, the rest of us work hard and do our best, and yet bad things can still happen. When you encounter a difficult situation or someone with gaps in their skillset and track record, the cause is likely to be poor luck (a bad manager or a bad break) rather than a lack of competence or effort. As a decision maker, you can improve the resilience of your choices by focusing on aspects that don’t rely on luck.

People should not be judged based on their good fortune. They should be judged based on their values, work ethic, ability to learn and improve, collaboration, and passion for their calling. Passing on a great candidate because they aren’t familiar with your current technology is insane. People can learn new technologies in the few months everyone needs to acclimate to a new team. What matters is how well that person will fill team gaps and enhance the success of the whole team.

Situations should not be judged based on fortuitous events. They should be judged based on the associated expectations, resilience, incentives, transparency, and history of care. Blaming individuals for a bad system that failed is insane. Systems can avoid failure (and bad luck) when leaders properly set expectations of resilience and provide incentives around care and transparency. That’s why thorough root cause analysis is so important—it tells us how to improve our luck.

There’s no certainty, only opportunity

We like to think successful people achieved their success through hard work, talent, and grit. We like to think that way because it means we have control over our lives. However, luck (good and bad) plays an enormous role in our success. You can respond to this fact by becoming cynical or apathetic, or you can accept the world as it is and work to improve your chances of happiness and fulfillment.

Start with letting go of your jealousy and bitterness about others’ good fortune—those feelings don’t help. Learn from failures and missed opportunities because you always get more chances. If you benefit from some luck, use your hard work, talent, and grit to take full advantage. Feelings of guilt about good luck are misplaced since everyone experiences a mix of luck over their lifetime. To increase your chances of success, apply for jobs for which you are highly differentiated, network to learn about potential openings, tell managers and mentors about your goals, look for new opportunities, and switch managers if your current manager isn’t expanding your chances. Finally, improve the resilience of your choices by focusing on aspects of people and situations that don’t rely on luck—things like core values, ability, and attitude.

It would be wonderful if the world were fair and just. Unfortunately, it isn’t. You don’t need to be an expert in quantum mechanics or chaos theory to know that chance plays an outsized role in our lives. That’s okay. For all its downsides, luck does make life more interesting and unpredictable. Let go of bad experiences and embrace the good ones. That’s the key to having a good life.