Luck Needs a Verb - MAC162

Five words. Hey, I like your podcast.

That's what a man said to a stranger at a free kids' gymnastics class in Brooklyn. A few years later those five words were worth, in his own estimate, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And when people hear that story, almost all of them reach for the same explanation: he got lucky.

This week on Managing A Career I want to fix something I've been saying on the show for years. The line wasn't wrong. It was missing a piece, and the missing piece turns out to be the one that does the work.

The Line I Keep Coming Back To

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. I built one of the earliest episodes of this show around it, A Little Bit of Luck (MAC-013). I came back to it in Riding the Coattails of Others (MAC-117), then Manufacturing Serendipity (MAC-147), and most recently Intelligent Failure (MAC-158), where the opportunity was the ambiguous project everyone else was avoiding.

Every one of those episodes is about one of the two ingredients. Get prepared. Then find the opportunity, or build it, or notice it's already in front of you. And every one of them quietly assumed that once you had both, the rest would take care of itself.

It doesn't.

Terry's Version

The missing piece came from an episode of Help Wanted, the podcast Jason Feifer hosts with Nicole Lapin. Jason is the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine, and if his name sounds familiar, it's because I've referenced him before. His posts and podcasts have sparked several episodes of this show, including Owning Your Mistakes (MAC-055), Taking Action (MAC-098), A Keg of Ketchup Will Make You Rethink Your Career (MAC-126), and Are You Asking the Right Questions? (MAC-150).

On that episode he sat down with Terry Rice, a business development consultant who writes for the magazine. Jason raises the obvious objection, the same one I just put in your mouth: wasn't that just luck? And Terry answers with a version of my line, with one ingredient added. Luck is when preparation and opportunity are met with action.

Then he maps his own story onto all three, and it is much less magical than "he got lucky."

The preparation was about a year of following Jason's work. Terry listened to the podcast. He read the posts. He commented on as many of them as he could, with real comments. That year is the only reason he recognized the man across the room at a gymnastics class.