Success: is it luck or planning?
By Jim Bright | smh.com.au | 28 November
What has played the greater role in your career: choice or chance? The traditional view of career development is that we must set goals and formulate career plans.
The assumption behind this seemingly sensible approach is that it is better than entrusting your career to luck. We assume that the most successful among us have achieved their position through careful planning, clear and specific goal setting and generally being focused on their careers.
But is this what really happens? It turns out, once you start scratching the surface, many career paths appear to be littered with lucky or unlucky breaks.
Perhaps the first bit of luck is being born. Not only is the passage through the birth canal one of the most risky journeys we will ever take, where you end up at the end of that journey and also the timing of your arrival could already have some bearing on your career success.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell reviews some startling Canadian research that shows ice hockey players are more likely to make the top grade the closer their birthday is to January 1.
Age cut-offs for junior hockey programs mean those born early in the year get significantly more coached practice as they grow up compared with their counterparts born towards the end of the year.
Over time, this gap in practice could amount to enough to make the difference between making the grade or not. Indeed, there is evidence that those born in the first three months of the year are almost twice as likely to make the grade.
Similarly, being born in the right era can give you a tremendous boost in particular domains. Think of the computer entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates at Microsoft or Steve Jobs at Apple - both born in 1955, making them the right age to have time to play with the newfangled microprocessors in their teens.
Then Michael Dell was the right age to exploit the idea of making cheap clone copies of IBM PCs in the 1980s. Of course, the country and society you are born into may also have a profound influence on your career prospects.
If that was the only role that luck played, it would be easy to become fatalistic, to feel that we cannot make our own luck. However, it seems that we do have a lot of opportunity to influence luck in our careers.
In research I conducted with Robert Pryor and others, we found in a sample of more than 750 young Australians that about 80 per cent reported a chance event had significantly influenced their careers. Luck, it turns out, is the norm, not the exception.
Many in our sample reported that being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time had impacted their careers. Others said unintended experiences had led them into different opportunities. So if luck plays such a significant role, how can we make ourselves more lucky?
Well, Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire in Britain (and, by chance, an ex-colleague of mine) found that believing yourself to be lucky was associated with more lucky things happening to you. A careers researcher in Canada, Roberta Neault, coined the phrase "luck readiness" to capture the mindset required to capitalise on luck in careers.
In his book Luck is No Accident, Stanford University professor John Krumboltz identifies the elements that can assist in developing luck readiness. They are flexibility, optimism, risk taking, curiosity and persistence.
He argues that those who are flexible will be open to new ideas, will be more likely to take risks and are likely to be curious about the world around them. This means they are more likely to explore possibilities and their optimism ensures they are more likely to believe some good may come out of exploring and taking risks.
Acting and thinking in this way will not necessarily reap immediate rewards and, indeed, may well present you with significant challenges and setbacks. It is for this reason that persistence is such an important element.
It is also useful to be strategic in seeking out opportunities and to believe you are capable of influencing your situation as well as believing yourself to be lucky, as Wiseman suggests.
Thinking of your career in terms of choice versus chance may be not such a useful thing to do because it presumes you can tame chance through careful planning - it seems you cannot. It also fails to capture the modern career reality that chance might actually generate more choices.
So if you want to be lucky in your career, take your chances.
Jim Bright is professor of career education and development at ACU and a partner at Bright and Associates, a career management consultancy.
First published by Smh.com.au on November 28 2009
Visit smh.com.au for the latest news updated throughout the day
