Love you and what you're doing, but disagree about luck. Character is the choices you make, but the choices you GET to make is luck. You were lucky to be born into a family that could afford a personal computer. You were lucky that your college application profile happened to fit what the college you were accepted into was looking for. You were lucky that the person who interviewed you for your awesome job was someone who related to you. Luck plays an enormous role in what we typically call success. Success is character and luck.
Completely acknowledge the huge amount of luck and privilege in my life. But for me at least, over-attributing everything I've achieved professionally to luck or accident has been a defense mechanism. I would think not only of the opportunities as lucky, but also everything I did with them as lucky.
Attributing my entire professional life to "happy accidents" meant that I could treat wrong choices, missed opportunities, and failures as unlucky events that I had no control over. That means skipping past real learning and growth.
Yes there's a lot of luck. But there's also intent and agency. Under-acknowledging either one is no good.
Love you and what you're doing, but disagree about luck. Character is the choices you make, but the choices you GET to make is luck. You were lucky to be born into a family that could afford a personal computer. You were lucky that your college application profile happened to fit what the college you were accepted into was looking for. You were lucky that the person who interviewed you for your awesome job was someone who related to you. Luck plays an enormous role in what we typically call success. Success is character and luck.
Completely acknowledge the huge amount of luck and privilege in my life. But for me at least, over-attributing everything I've achieved professionally to luck or accident has been a defense mechanism. I would think not only of the opportunities as lucky, but also everything I did with them as lucky.
Attributing my entire professional life to "happy accidents" meant that I could treat wrong choices, missed opportunities, and failures as unlucky events that I had no control over. That means skipping past real learning and growth.
Yes there's a lot of luck. But there's also intent and agency. Under-acknowledging either one is no good.
I get that.
Great read, Jake!
Thanks, Mike. It's taken me a while to get past the hangups of being intentional in my career.