I got insanely lucky once I decided I wanted to be a professor. And that was a necessary catalyst on top of my existing long-term plan that I was executing to the letter.

Most likely, your view of the Hustle Economy involves something flexible, adept-to-adapt. With consumer interest rapidly fluctuating, rapidly peaking, and rapidly sinking, heroes of the Hustle Economy are prepared for anything and everything. This certainly is true.

But this perspective misses the fact that in order to have achieved that status as someone who can be flexible and survive, you had to develop and grow and keep overcoming a somewhat delineated series of barriers before you could be at an Optimal Stage of succeeding and hustling. If you step back far enough, you can see you were jumping past barrier after barrier dating all the way back to your very beginning.

There’s a series of stages that you have to pass through in our increasingly structured and regimented world, where some minimal expectation of learning is required before you’re allowed to move to the next stage.

First, you get about five years in Baby Stage, when you only have to learn how to become self-aware and how to form memories.

Then, six years in Adolescent Stage, when you only have to learn some basic skills and relatively rudimentary knowledge.

Then, seven years in Preparatory Stage, when you only have to learn what field you want to learn more about.

Then, four years in Specialist Stage, when you only have to learn what aspect of the field you want to achieve.

Then, X years in Second Preparatory Stage, when you only have to learn how to jump through the series of hoops required to get to the goal you may have decided upon in the Specialist Stage.

Then, X years in Optimal Stage, when you’ve finally reached the position you started working toward seventeen + X years ago.

Finally, X years in Retirement Stage, when you only have to learn what the hell else you can do with your life.

And then you die.

Meanwhile, there’s a leap in between each stage. In science, we would refer to this barrier as activation energy—the concept in chemistry that, when two reactants have the potential to react, there’s a minimum amount of energy that needs to be put into the system in order for the reaction to be achieved. Without that much energy, you get no reaction. Plotted out in terms of energy versus reaction path, activation energy is literally represented as the hump you need to get over to get to the final products.

It’s an obvious metaphor (or obvious, at least, if you’re obsessed with chemistry) to real-life situations. There’s the potential in every system, every group, every person for a grand achievement to be seized, to be realized, but you need to get over that hump for that potential to be synthesized, to be reacted upon, to be produced. Sometimes this activation energy is minimal, to the extent that simply aging will boost you to the next Stage; other times, the barrier is utterly daunting.

Chemically speaking, we can reduce this activation energy by introducing a catalyst into the system. The catalyst acts to modify the transition state between reactants and product, providing a middle ground with a simpler hump to get over, with less energy needed for potential to become outcome. So, while we still have a barrier to progress at each Stage, through catalysis we can get a boost in order to achieve our desired potential.

In order to succeed and out-hustle the Hustle Economy, you’re reliant on two major factors: a plan and luck. You may not have clearly planned it all out from the beginning, but you certainly kept developing plans or pieces of plans along the way to get there. And even then, you’re going to need some beneficial catalysts.

Back to my attempt to become a professor: When I made the decision, realizing what my Optimal Stage would be, I’d certainly put in time, effort, and energy to that point, and would certainly put in more time, energy, and effort while continuing on before achieving my dream position. But when I was twenty and decided I wanted to be a professor, I only had X + two more years ahead of me before I could reach my Optimal Stage. And I had a relatively firm idea of what that X would look like:

After two more years to graduate college, I’d then need to spend five or six or seven or eight years in graduate school getting a doctorate (all depending on how successful I was with the research), meaning I’d have the acceptable paper document to be allowed potential eventual access to professorship. Then I’d spend two or three or four or five years working as post-doctoral researcher, meaning I’d have the expected service in an intermediate role that would allow the professorial gatekeepers to deem me potentially acceptable.

And then I’d have to actually get the job.

But I was incredibly fortunate to have made that realization of what my Optimal Stage looked like at the relatively young age of twenty. Certainly there are incredibly deep and interesting and wonderful people who don’t realize until much later what their Optimal Stage might actually be, and they spend years in a tangential Wandering Stage exploring and experiencing, only to have some unknown X once they began to settle into a final goal. If they’re lucky, their Wandering will have doubled as their dose of Preparatory, but too often they end up needing to double back to some previous stage and try working forward again.

Catalysts kept boosting me forward from that point, fortunately. My second day in a laboratory in graduate school, I obtained scientific results that were better than everything my laboratory predecessor had spent his five years reporting. Instead of having to spend an undetermined length of time working toward grand results, I just needed to fill in the time figuring out how I had done what I had done. A jump up to the right next level, just because I happened to pour the right mixture of chemicals onto a 1cm x 1cm slab.

Catalysts kept boosting me. I went to a conference during my second year of graduate school and ended up spending several nights drinking with a seemingly random conference attendee who had intense eyes that held a kind of crazy eye gleam about them—the kind of guy who could hold court when telling a story. He started regaling me with these unbelievable yarns, telling me how he blew up a bridge when he was seven years old, how when he was in college, some guys went into his room to haze him while he was asleep and he put two of them in the hospital WHILE HE WAS STILL ASLEEP. There was even stories about all the research he did with fire (because of course a guy like that did research with fire).

Every night that followed, for the rest of the conference, I drank with him and got him to retell those stories. Three years later when I needed a postdoctoral position, I happened to run into him at another conference. I remembered his crazy eyes, not his credentials, but when I reintroduced myself, I learned he was a major scientist at a government research institute. He quickly set me up with the right connections and helped guide me into a research fellowship at a top-notch government laboratory. A jump up to the right next Stage, just because I drank with a guy and didn’t run away when he let his eyes get wild and crazy. That’s a catalyst.

Catalysts kept boosting me. When nearing the end of my postdoctoral position, I was in the muck and mire of applying for professorships and getting rejected left and right (and getting rejected by many more without ever being told I was rejected). My applications certainly had strong teaching credentials, but were likely being pulled down by the lack of cumulative research achievements. Then, I came across a position with a confusing title, and while several people didn’t think it was worth my time (including my boss), I was at that moment suffering from stress-related sleep deprivation.

To illustrate, I was so sleep deprived I began talking to the chair I would collapse into each night. Even worse, I was pretty sure the chair was responding to me. At which point, because it seemed like a good idea to me (who was actively hallucinating), I asked the chair what I should do. I believe it responded, “I cannot talk to you. I am a chair. You should probably seek medical attention. Again, I am a chair. But you may as well submit your application.”

So, I submitted the Hail Mary application. Literally the next day I was asked to set up a phone interview, and two days later I got a call from the acting chair of the department, who just happened to work at the same research institution I was currently working at, and I just happened to know the same people he had been affiliated with. I got invited to the only interview opportunity I would receive and was offered the position. A jump up to the right Optimal level, just because I happened to throw a Hail Mary when the person reviewing the applications had the right connections.

As if that weren’t enough, my luck seemed magnified in other ways, looking back.

I decided I wanted to be a teaching professor, a relatively rare position in an academic industry driven by laboratory research. Achieving relatively significant success in my minimal research achievements certainly boosted my potential and helped disguise the areas in which I was dramatically lacking.

I made the mistake of telling my advisor that I didn’t really care about research when I was two years into graduate school. The graduate advisor basically has you in his indentured servitude as he sees fit for as long as he sees fit. Getting propelled forward by him anyway was utterly fortunate, just on the face of it.

Just wanting to be a professor and then actually getting to be one requires a tremendous amount of luck. There are potential candidates who file applications to over eighty colleges during the annual announcements of open positions, figuring that any professor position is better than none at all. I ended up applying to sixteen colleges and had to deal with institutions that either completely lacked my passion for teaching (“Well, you clearly know how to demonstrate enthusiasm for research, so clearly you’ll be a great teacher”) or lacked social graces (one rejection letter left incomplete but mailed anyway literally read “Thank you for your recent application for the position of {customtext100121}”) or lacked any real interest in me at all. Chancing into a position when far-more-qualified candidates are left to return to their postdoctoral work for another few years feels like finding a rabbit’s foot sprouting a four-leaf clover.

So what is the lesson in all this? To succeed in the Hustle Economy, the truth is that you need both luck and to execute a plan. You need to know what your Optimal Stage is. You need to know what you have to do to get there. Yes, luck will be able to push you over those activation energy barriers and provide boosts, but you need to do the work to put yourself in those positions to be able to benefit from that luck.

You have to meet the ever-growing list of prerequisites in terms of knowledge and previous experience and references in order to be eligible. That means determination to accumulate the expected minimal knowledge and expertise, then going beyond that and accumulating more knowledge and more experience in order to be desirable. This means maintaining and using all those years of school to keep building upon your level of knowledge and level of understanding, specializing and further specializing as appropriate while maintaining a degree of breadth.

You have to be willing to run the gauntlet, to know that there are years of work and effort and intermediacy. There are obstacles to pass, flaming hoops to jump through, needles to thread, and fingers to cross. Meanwhile, you’ll feel frustration, depression, loss of purpose, loss of motivation, fear of failure, boredom, physical inertia, mental inertia, and a gamut of other emotions that will readily mix and combust at any moment’s notice, potentially forcing you back to the start and having to begin your launch all over again.

You have to enter the labyrinth of emotions and education, probably feeling lost and getting lost on more than one occasion, even if you’re given the map to guide you out to your Optimal Stage.

If a catalyst happens to cross your path when you’re more interested in lying aimlessly around and slacking off, you might be granted the good fortune of discovering one more leftover frozen burrito at the back of the freezer instead of the good fortune of being offered your dream job. Not that the frozen burrito won’t be delicious and rewarding in itself, but it may not be worth the grand trade you’ve inadvertently made.

And truthfully, there’s a third element necessary beyond luck and planning. You need an outlet.

You have to discover other passions you can use to counteract the emotional distress of being so far from experiencing your Optimal passion. I ended up taking pictures of myself standing in front of a blackboard while dressed in a baseball cap and a lab coat, writing jokes and fake wisdom on the board and posing next to the words in chalk, then posting the photocomics on the Internet. It was all a means to produce a creative outlet to distract myself from how long I had to wait to be a professor, yet it somehow gained an audience. It became a way to interact with people and prevent professional depression from setting in.

This is largely how I’m recognized. On my first day as a professor, the first class of students recognized me from my creative passion, which helped me cement a stronger bond with them and helped me become a better teacher and a better professor.

Luck, again. But you’ve got to strive and work before luck will strive and work for you.

I think about this all the time. If you think of activation energy, the barriers that I had to overcome to land in this perfect position were not only one after another, but they had dramatically high peaks to overcome. If a couple of perfect, miraculous catalysts hadn’t landed in my lap, I would never have been able to achieve what was necessary, despite all the personal energy and work I put in to try to produce something from my potential. This leads to the obvious question: If it’s always luck serving to catalyze personal success, what is the point of putting in the effort? Which is, of course, misleading and ignores the many Stages you overcame and the plan you put in place and the outlet you relied on.

So, here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of contemplation on the matter. Yes, you can set up the right reaction. You and your credentials and your interests and your potential may be the right ingredients, and maybe you will be able to overcome that activation energy and produce something great based entirely off the energy from your own hard work. But every so often there will be a catalyst thrown your way, some stroke of luck, and it may lead you to your dream job, based on how hard you were working at getting there, or it may just lead you to find an extra frozen burrito in the freezer because you are hungry. These catalytic moments come, and appear lucky, bizarre, and completely non-scientific, but they really do appear for you to take full advantage of. You just have to be ready and focused so you can make something of that potential, and so that your hard work will be enough.

You want to succeed in this Hustle Economy? Plan. Find an outlet. Be ready for luck. Maybe you’ll find yourself reacting to your potential, activation barriers far behind you.

Give social serendipity room to happen.

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Do this by putting yourself (physically or digitally)
into a situation (at least once a week, forever) where you can meet, help, or observe someone who does the
type of work that you want to do.