Luck and How it Affects your Career
August, 2019
Luck affects your career. But, luck is also an excuse. It gives you no agency or authority over your life. Luck can be used in the most desperate of times to excuse a shortcoming. Don’t give luck the credit for your hard work. Don’t allow it to excuse you from failure. Writing off the achievements of others as luck is an undesirable trait. Early on in my career I would dismiss the achievement of others, as a stroke of luck.. I could not see my life moving from one rung of the ladder to the other without some magical hand lifting me up there.
My career and my life took a turn when I decided that my shortcomings were my own fault. When I learned that I was not very good at any one aspect of my job I choose one thing to focus on and put the time in to become better at it. This focus helped me become recognized as a person of detail, which lead to further opportunities for growth. Those opportunities could be described as a lucky break, but then I would be giving up my hard work to some mythical department in the clouds.
The way I found an area to focus on was through an analysis of my weaknesses. Those weaknesses indicated where to look for career potential. To convert this weakness from a problem to an opportunity required an assessment of my abilities. I knew that I could do better at the chosen area because I was not even focusing on it before.
The opportunities experienced in your career will reflect the way you experience your failures and successes. My change in attitude only came to me, because of a healthy conversation I had with one of my managers. This conversation lead to me asking these three questions:
- What are the current limitations that could make my career vulnerable?
- Where am I not performing in my daily duties?
- What do I see as a weakness and how can I use it as an opportunity?
Action Item: Answer these three questions about your career. Seek feedback from a trusted advisor. Move closer to your best performance.