There is an element of chance in everything.
Every aspect of your education and career has been affected by quirks of fate. Great jobs are found or ignored depending on who read the classifieds that day. New opportunities are glimpsed or missed depending on who is paying attention.
Still, you have to embrace the uncertainty of outcomes and realize that chance can play for you or against you on any given day. But the more you try, the greater your opportunity to benefit from a lucky outcome.
When Stephen returned from a weeklong vacation, there were 660 e-mail messages waiting for him. On an average day, he can barely handle all the messages that come in. “Keeping up? I am approaching the saturation point. There are moments of fear, of ‘Good grief! How am I going to deal with all this?’”
He laments that e-mail has become the default communication tool for everybody, regardless of whether it makes any sense. “I get e-mail from people whose offices are three feet away.” He doesn’t like how it consumes time and affects the pace of his day. “You jump in and out of it like a conversation. It is incredibly damaging to productivity.”
But, he says, if he turns the e-mail off, “I’m out of the loop. And that could be disastrous.”
Instead Stephen has trained himself to sort through unimportant messages faster while ensuring that he doesn’t miss the crucial ones. “You learn to multitask. I can now answer e-mail and talk on the phone at the same time, which is mildly ridiculous, but it means I’ll see the one-in-a-thousand message I really need. It’s a game of chance, but I have to keep playing.”
Career analysts find that 83 percent of midcareer professionals believe chance played a significant role in their ultimate career path and that they highly value staying open for unexpected opportunities.
Williams, Soeprapto, Like, Touradji, Hess, and Hill 1998