Creating Your Own Luck: 12 Steps for Advancing Your Career

Written by Andrea Murad


With St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner, many job seekers are hoping the luck of the Irish will rub off on their careers. However, career professionals say unemployed workers can stop searching for four-leaf clovers and planting money trees and create their own luck. After all, luck is the intersection of preparation and preparation.

“Luck knocks on your door every day, and it’s a question of whether you’re ready to answer it,” says Alex Douzet, COO and co-founder of job search site TheLadders.com. “People that focus on succeeding seem to be more aware of their environment. They figure out a way to leverage the opportunities that come their way.”

In a recent LinkedIn survey, the U.S. was ranked the seventh luckiest country in the world behind Japan, South Korea, Austria, Germany, France and Switzerland. Of the survey respondents, 49% of professionals felt luckier than their peers. They attributed their luck to having strong communication skills, being flexible, acting on opportunities, compiling a strong network, and, most importantly, having a strong work ethic.

“The person who’s lucky is able to take an opportunity to the next level,” says Nicole Williams, connection director at LinkedIn. “Real luck happens when you’re prepared to take advantage of an opportunity.”

Improving labor market conditions have knocked the unemployment rate to 8.3% last month, making job seekers feel luckier about their prospects. “It’s very self-determined and a self-fulfilling prophecy. People weren’t feeling lucky a few years ago, but they are now and this influx of luck is going to turn the job market,” she adds.

So here are expert tips for employees on how to make their luck and take their career to the next level.

Have a strong work ethic. The harder you work, the luckier you become. “Do the best job to get yourself noticed, even if it’s not your career choice,” says Williams. “Be excellent, get a reputation for excellence, and luck is going to find you.”

Be passionate. “Don’t follow the money, follow the passion,” Douzet says. “If you follow the passion, the money will follow you.” Being passionate about what you do will make you want to do a better job and bring more advancement. “Success isn’t measured by a six-figure check but how you compare to your peers, your community, and your industry. Ask yourself, ‘what makes me happy and what am I passionate about?’”

Develop a career plan. Evaluate your career path and what you want to accomplish. “It’s important to have goals and to marry those goals with time periods,” says Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, chief career writer and partner at Career Trend. “You can continually adjust your plan, but, once you have one, you’ll start to believe that you’re there and people will really believe in you.”

Have a good attitude. “Luck is all attitude,” says Williams. Having a positive and genuine demeanor and being optimistic at your job goes far.

Read Steps 5 -12 and more

Steve Jobs and The Bobby Knight School of Leadership

by David Aaker


I believe that Steve Jobs was among the best CEOs of this generation because he created entirely new categories six times in a decade, and built the largest company market cap ever. Yet two recent and excellent books (Inside Apple, by Adam Lashinsky and Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson) describe a management style that was disturbingly harsh.

To understand Jobs's success, I find it helpful to look at the success of Bobby Knight, the fabled basketball coach at Indiana. Knight was one of two coaches to win over 900 games, won the NCAA championship three times, and was the national coach of the year four times yet had a management style similar to Jobs (described in detail by John Feinstein's book A Season on the Brink). What are the common success characteristics shared by these two? Before answering that question, it is useful to elaborate the two management styles.

Jobs's treatment of employees and partners has been described as brutal and even cruel. He routinely denigrated the ideas and accomplishments of employees, expected a commitment to work but seldom appreciated loyalty, arbitrarily fired people, disregarded the feelings of others, excluded people from "secret" projects, routinely took credit for the accomplishments of others, and did not allow others to have a public face. It is the very opposite of the supportive and nurturing Theory Y management pioneered by MIT's Douglas McGregor over a half century ago.

Knight's treatment of players has been termed abusive. He shouted, pushed, denigrated, humiliated, threatened, and harped on faults. Other coaches were loud and negative but Knight took it to a whole new level. He was so cruel that a key job of assistant coaches was to council distraught players to ignore what he said. Among his many examples of loutish behavior was throwing a chair across the basketball floor during a game. After many warnings, he was ultimately fired from Indiana 28 years after being accused of choking a player.

Knight and Jobs shared four common success traits that seem more obvious when looking at the two together.

1. They were incredibly knowledgeable and insightful. Read the rest of the HBR article