I spent some time at a work event in Las Vegas last week, and during my time there I managed to hit a small jackpot on a slot machine while I was playing alongside some of my co-workers. Nearly the second the machine hit the jackpot, one of them said, “Of course it would happen to you! You have to be the luckiest person alive.” Now, I don’t deny that I have an incredibly fortunate life. In fact, I wouldn’t trade places with a single person that I’ve ever met. That being said, however, I’m not sure that the life I have is based entirely on luck.
I love Las Vegas and go there multiple times a year. I truly enjoy gambling, and will play during almost every moment of downtime I get. It’s not that I expect to win, because I'm a realist. I simply view the money spent on gambling as entertainment cost, just as I would a concert ticket or dinner out. One of the basic concepts of gambling, which is based on odds, is that if you play long enough, you’ll lose. However, if you play long enough, you will also undoubtedly hit a jackpot or two along the way. It’s just the odds at work. So the truth is, when I hit that jackpot (which just happened to be in front of other people), I wasn’t so much lucky as I was living up to the odds I had created for myself.
The reaction that this coworker had, assuming I was "the luckiest person alive," got me thinking about how often we ascribe luck to the actions of successful people in the workplace as well. When we see someone make it big, move up quickly or even strike it rich in the corporate world, one of our first instincts is to call them “lucky." Just like in gambling, I've found that achieving such results is more about taking advantage of the odds, rather than leaving the results up to luck.
Is there some good fortune involved? Probably. Let me use another example from the world of gambling: the lottery. You can't win unless you buy a ticket, and you're very unlikely to win unless you buy a lot of them. Successful people look at life as a controlled lottery, and their objective is to buy as many tickets as possible at every opportunity they get. When we suggest that these successful people are merely “lucky,” we’re letting ourselves off the hook. We're chalking others' wins up to luck, rather than considering the things that we could be doing to appear as lucky as them.
Here are a few areas where you can buy tickets in your own career lottery to increase your odds of winning:
- Working Hard: Are you always going above and beyond your duties?
- Constantly Learning: What skills are you attaining, both on the job and off?
- Opening Up: Are you always meeting new people and opening yourself up to new experiences and viewpoints?
So, what career lottery tickets are you buying right now? Are you staying late to finish an important job when everyone else bails? There's a lottery ticket. Using a weekend to take a class that improves your skills? There's another. Networking at a non-work function? And another. The opportunities are endless.
If you really want to make more of your job, I suggest you start collecting those lottery tickets. Of course, it's sometimes necessary to be in the right place at the right time. But if you’re always using your time, always growing and pushing, it's only a matter of time before the odds you've created for yourself reward you. You’ll guarantee that you’ll be in the right place at the right time in the not-so-distant future. By always buying career lottery tickets, you will expose yourself to many more opportunities than you would if you just keep doing the bare minimum with your job or life. The more opportunities you expose yourself to, the better the likelihood you will have that you will find the right one.
Thinking back to what my coworker said, I now realize he's partially right. Some people can be very lucky, but it takes a lot of hard work to stay that way.
Comments