What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20

by Tina Seelig

  After a short time, Teresa was transferred to the Deloitte national office in New York, where her leadership and management skills again allowed her to shine. Teresa was then asked to head up the Silicon Valley practice for the firm, where she had to learn new strategies and a brand-new vocabulary, this time for high technology. None of Teresa’s steps could have been predicted, and yet by her excelling in an organization that presented a continuous flow of new opportunities, many exciting roles and challenges materialized.

  It is also important to reassess your life and career relatively frequently. This self-assessment process forces you to come to terms with the fact that sometimes it’s time to move on to a new environment in order to excel. Most people don’t assess their roles frequently enough and so stay in positions for years longer than they should, settling for suboptimal situations. There isn’t a magic number for the amount of time you should stay in one role before evaluating whether it’s right or not. But it makes sense to think about how often you do so. Some people reassess and readjust their lives daily or weekly, constantly optimizing. Others wait years before noticing that they’ve ended up far from where they had hoped to be. The more frequently you assess your situation, looking for ways to fix problems, the more likely you are to find yourself in a position where things are going well. Also, it’s best to address small problems that crop up in your life early and often, as opposed to waiting for problems to get so big that they seem intractable. That can only happen when you pay attention and figure out what actually needs to change.

  Some situations literally force you to reevaluate your life. For instance, once you decide to start a family, the entire game changes. You’re suddenly faced with the need to figure out how to balance parenting with your profession. As everyone knows, caring for young children takes an enormous amount of time and focused energy. It’s both physically and emotionally demanding, and incredibly time consuming. Children keep you on your toes, and their needs change dramatically as they get older. Each year brings a brand-new set of responsibilities and a fresh set of challenges. As a result, parenting provides an ever-changing opportunity to be creative and helps build skills that are extremely valuable in any setting. It exercises your ability to multitask and to make decisions under pressure, and it certainly helps you master the art of negotiation.

  Women especially face the daunting puzzle of figuring out how to fit together career and family obligations. From my experience, this challenge really is a great opportunity in disguise. Instead of considering traditional jobs that have limited flexibility, being a parent forces you to be innovative. Additionally, as your children’s needs change, you can experiment with different jobs with different responsibilities. Although it is hard to see up close, one’s career is long, and children are small for only a few years, allowing you to accelerate your career as your children grow up. The following excerpt from a 1997 edition of Stanford Magazine snaps this idea into focus.

  A 1950 [Stanford] graduate earned her law degree here in ’52 and took five years out of the paid workforce after her second son was born, keeping herself busy and visible in volunteer work for the Phoenix Junior League and the Salvation Army. Later, when her youngest went off to school, she went back to work part-time in the state attorney general’s office.

  Staying home with her children during those years ultimately didn’t hamper her career. . . . She added that today’s young graduates could fare even better than she did. “One help is that nowadays women live longer,” she says. “We spend more years in employment and really have time for a couple of careers. So if a few years are taken out, all is not lost.” The woman, by the way, is Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

  From my experience, this is absolutely right. My only recommendation is that if you intend to stop working while your kids are young, consider finding a way to keep your career on a low simmer so that you stay up to date on skills and keep your résumé current. If you haven’t stepped all the way out for too long, it’s much easier to get back in. You can do this in an infinite variety of ways, from working part-time in traditional jobs to volunteering. Not only does it keep your skills sharpened, but also it provides you with the confidence that you can gear up again when you’re ready.

  Looking back, I see many things I wish I had known about crafting a career that were counter to the traditional advice I was given. Most important? The goal is to find a role in the world that doesn’t feel like work. This only happens when you identify the overlap between your skills, your passions, and the market. Not only is this the most fulfilling position, but by tapping into your passions in a constructive way, your work enriches your life. Finding the right opportunities requires experimenting along the way, trying lots of different alternatives, testing the messages you get both explicitly and implicitly from the world, and pushing back on those that just don’t feel right.

  As you move through your career, you will be well served by frequently reassessing where you are and where you want to go in the long run. Doing so allows you to make course corrections quickly, especially when things don’t turn out as planned or exceptional new opportunities arise. Don’t worry that the path ahead appears out of focus—squinting isn’t going to make it any clearer. This is true for everyone. Don’t be in a rush to get to your final destination—the side trips and unexpected detours quite often lead to the most interesting people, places, and opportunities. And, finally, be wary of all career advice, including mine, as you figure out what’s right for you.

  Chapter 8

  Turn Lemonade into Helicopters

  I called my son, Josh, during his first semester at college to wish him luck on his final exams. His response was “There’s no such thing as luck. It’s all hard work.” He’s a driven kid who throws himself at the things about which he is passionate, especially athletic competitions that require a tremendous amount of training and preparation. At first I thought his response was extreme. But on further reflection, I believe he had it right. Even when we think we’re lucky, we’ve usually worked remarkably hard to put ourselves in that position.

  I’ve watched Josh with admiration as he has strived to meet goals others might think impossible. At nineteen, he decided to try his hand at competitive powerlifting. This wasn’t a natural choice for a former cyclist and track sprinter, but he was determined to break the national record for dead lifts. Josh identified the best trainers in Northern California and drove two hours each way, several times a week, to learn from them. He read everything he could about the sport, carefully crafted a diet to build more muscle, and spent hours training at the gym.

  After several years of weight training, followed by months of focused effort, he entered a competition to see how he stacked up against others. We arose at 5:00 a.m. and drove three hours to Fresno for a formal meet. The gym was filled with weight lifters who’d been competing for years. I was worried he would be disappointed with his performance. But Josh, weighing in at 190 pounds, blew away both the state and national records of the federation by lifting 589.7 pounds (267.5 kilograms), 8 percent more than the previous record holder. Was he lucky? Of course he was lucky. All the cards aligned for him that day. But he would never have succeeded unless he had put tremendous effort behind his goals.

  Josh’s comment on luck echoed the message I frequently heard from my father when I was a child: the harder you work, the luckier you get. His mantra was a stark reminder that you need to put yourself in a position to be lucky. Even if there’s a low probability of success and a tremendous amount of competition, you can maximize your chances by being well prepared physically, intellectually, and emotionally.

  We often hear inspiring stories about people who start with nothing and by virtue of incredibly hard work are able to draw luck their way. I heard the following story from Quincy Jones III, aka QD3, which illustrates how this works.

  As the son of the music legend Quincy Jones, you might think that QD3 had an easy life. He didn’t. His parents divorced when
he was young, and his mother brought him to Sweden, her native country, where they lived in near poverty. His mother had an alternative lifestyle and struggled with drug addiction. She didn’t particularly care if QD3 went to school, and she often didn’t come home from partying until four in the morning. He was essentially raising himself.

  Spending lots of time on the streets, QD3 was exposed to break dancing, which was often performed on street corners. From the time he was exposed to it, he was hooked. He practiced hours each day, perfecting his moves, and soon started performing on the streets in Stockholm, putting out a hat to collect donations from passersby. One day a scout from Levi’s saw him dancing on the street and asked if he would be interested in going on a performance tour. QD3 jumped at the chance!

  Once he had his foot in the door, QD3 continued to work as hard as he could. Besides dancing, he started developing music beats for rap artists. A big break came when he was asked to write the soundtrack for a movie about the rap scene in Stockholm. One of his songs, “Next Time,” written when he was sixteen, became his first gold record and sold more than 50,000 copies. QD3 went on to produce a triple-platinum documentary about Tupac Shakur, which sold more than 300,000 copies.

  QD3 was driven to pull himself out of poverty, to be self-sufficient and, ultimately, the best in the world. He says that he “taps the fire in his heart” to motivate himself, and once the flame spreads, he charges ahead with incredible commitment and effort. He threw everything he had—physically, intellectually, and emotionally—at the problems confronting him, demonstrating that hard work and dedication are key to tempting luck your way.

  I’ve learned that hard work is just one lever at your disposal when it comes to making your own luck. There are many other tools in your toolbox that can serve as luck magnets. And I’m confident that QD3 used these as well.

  Luck is defined as “success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions.”1 Apparently—that is the operative word. In fact, each of us has a long list of levers at our disposal for unleashing good luck. However, luck appears to be brought on by chance because other people rarely see all those levers in action.

  After years of observing what makes people successful, it is clear to me that good luck results from a definable list of tiny choices, micro behaviors, that allow people to squeeze just a little more juice out of every day, ultimately amplifying their long-term chances of success. Unfortunately, we usually look at others who have achieved remarkable things and point to a few very visible moments that unlocked opportunities for them.

  Consider this example from Michael Lewis, the author of many very successful books, including Liar’s Poker and Moneyball. During his commencement address at Princeton, he traced much of his success to luck.

  One night I was invited to a dinner, where I sat next to the wife of a big shot of a big Wall Street investment bank, Salomon Brothers. She more or less forced her husband to give me a job. I knew next to nothing about Salomon Brothers. But Salomon Brothers happened to be where Wall Street was being reinvented—into the Wall Street we’ve come to know and love today. When I got there I was assigned, almost arbitrarily, to the very best job in the place to observe the growing madness: they turned me into the house derivatives expert.

  He used this experience to inspire and inform his 1989 bestseller Liar’s Poker. He went on in his talk to attribute that success to luck:

  All of a sudden people were telling me I was a born writer. This was absurd. Even I could see that there was another, more true narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm to write the story of the age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business?2

  Not so fast. Don’t be fooled by this simple version of the story. There were countless things that Michael Lewis needed to do before, during, and after the conversation with the woman at the dinner party that set him up for success. Focusing just on that chance meeting distracts us from what really happened. Yes, he was fortunate to sit next to someone who was influential in helping him get a job at Salomon Brothers. But hundreds of people sat next to that woman over the years, and she didn’t convince her husband to hire them. And thousands of people worked at Salomon Brothers, and none of them wrote a bestseller about their experience.

  What set up Michael Lewis to see and seize this opportunity? A well-known quote from the famous scientist Louis Pasteur states, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” This is absolutely true. But what exactly is a prepared mind? What makes us receptive to chance events and able to capitalize on them?

  There is “physics” to luck, since all of life is a matter of cause and effect. This can be compared to the relationship between our genetics and our environment in determining who we become. As we now know, both are instrumental in shaping us, and they are deeply intertwined—our genetics influences how we engage with our environment, and our environment influences which traits are expressed. The same is true with luck and our behavior. Luck captures the things that happen to us, and our behavior encapsulates the things over which we have control. We can debate which comes first, but in the end, they are inexorably connected.

  We are locked in a continuous dance with the world in which we trade off who is leading and who is following. Once the dance begins, we have immense control over our luck because it is a direct result of our behavior. We certainly can’t control everything that happens to us, but we can control our responses. Luck results when we know how and when to lead in our dance with life. For example, in Michael Lewis’s story, he randomly sat next to the woman at dinner and took advantage of that opportunity to impress her enough that she introduced him to her husband. He was a follower when he sat down and became a leader when he engaged the woman in conversation, resulting in future opportunities to lead and to follow. And we can be sure that during the process of writing his books, and his involvement in the movies based on them, that there were hundreds of times when he shifted from follower to leader as surprising events occurred along the way.

  The dance we do in life includes several partners—the world, other people, and ourselves. We are, therefore, doing several dances at once. This is complicated because the dances also influence one another. By understanding the underlying physics of these relationships, we are much better prepared to unleash luck.

  Don’t be distracted by the way the word “luck” is used in everyday jargon. Often it is deployed as an excuse. For example, people frequently attribute their successes to luck, saying they’re “lucky” to modestly mask the skills they’ve mobilized. And we give others and ourselves a break by blaming poor performance on bad luck. A careful observer will look behind the curtain to see what actually happened and whether it was fortune, chance, or luck.

  It is important to define these terms, which are often used interchangeably. They are actually quite different, especially as they relate to “agency”—or the amount of personal control we have over each one.

  FORTUNE is something that happens to you. It is good fortune to be born into a kind family and bad fortune to be struck by lightning.

  CHANCE requires an action on your part. You need to take a chance, such as rolling dice, buying a lottery ticket, or asking someone out on a date, to benefit from a chance event.

  LUCK is made by finding and creating opportunities. It is a direct consequence of your behavior. For example, you’re lucky that you were offered a great job. There was a lot of agency, even though there was uncertainty. You had to do the work to build the skills to be prepared and to actively apply for that role.

  The fact that we conflate the terms “fortune,” “chance,” and “luck” speaks to the fact that most people aren’t fully aware of how much control they have over their fate. They attribute events to randomness—bad or good luck—when really they have much more influence than they acknowledge. If you look closely, you will see lots of tiny choices that add
up over time. Each one sets the stage for the things that occur in the future. Consider the following conversation between colleagues, with four different trajectories:

  Conversation 1

  Sarah: Hello, how are you?

  Joe: Great, how are you?

  Sarah: I’m way too busy, and really stressed.

  Joe: You work too hard.

  Conversation 2

  Sarah: Hello, how are you?

  Joe: Great, how are you?

  Sarah: I’m way too busy, and really stressed.

  Joe: So sorry to hear that.

  Conversation 3

  Sarah: Hello, how are you?

  Joe: Great, how are you?

  Sarah: I’m way too busy, and really stressed.

  Joe: Is there anything I can do to be helpful?

  Conversation 4

  Sarah: Hello, how are you?

  Joe: Great, how are you?

  Sarah: I’m way too busy, and really stressed.

  Joe: Would it be helpful if I take care of X for you?

  These may seem like similar conversations, but they aren’t. Sarah will have a completely different attitude and relationship with Joe after each of these scenarios. As you move from the first to the last interaction, Joe has more empathy and is ultimately offering to solve Sarah’s problem in a very specific way. If Sarah is really stressed, having Joe offer to help significantly shifts their relationship, and she is much more likely to help Joe in the future if he helps her now.