Opportunities are Manufactured
Don’t wait for opportunities to present themselves.
I can’t count the number of times someone has told me how lucky I am in my career. According to many, I am lucky to be working with Ev, lucky to have worked at Twitter, lucky to be working on Medium, lucky to be able to work in San Francisco, lucky to work with leading edge technology, etc.
This isn’t where I say “It’s not luck, it’s all skill”, because that’s not true. Attributing career or personal achievements to only luck or skill is a short-sighted perspective on past successes. Luck and skill play a big part, but so does timing, people, intelligence, past experience, trends, and a multitude of other factors.
This Fast Company article explains some of the science behind the concept of luck. People that consider themselves lucky are more open to new experiences, which often result in new opportunities. Also, maybe not surprising, lucky people often reflect on and learn from past experiences whereas unlucky people attribute past events to being a victim of chance.
As it turns out, there’s truth to notion that you can make your own luck, science says so!
My career is littered with failures, but also has had a few pivotal moments that resulted in big wins. In hindsight, almost all of those moments were initiated by an action I took. In every case, the action didn’t produce the win, it produced an opportunity to win. I capitalized on some of those opportunities, but failed to meet many others.
The story of how I ended up living in California and working at Medium starts with an email I sent to Odeo in 2007. I was living in Texas had launched a product that allowed companies to programmatically send text messages before SMS was a ubiquitous technology. My email was a sales pitch for an Odeo integration with my product, which was a horrible idea. It didn’t make sense for Odeo, but the CEO, Evan Williams, took notice and replied with some questions about who I was and what I was up to. That conversation resulted in an opportunity to prove myself, via contracting, to land a job with Obvious and Twitter.
That was a big win for my career, but there’s another part to that story that I don’t usually tell. After contracting with Ev and Obvious for a while, I had earned the opportunity to become a very early full-time employee at Twitter. I didn’t take it. I left Obvious. I created an opportunity for myself, and then failed to capitalize on it. It was the right decision at that time for my family, but it was a missed career opportunity.
Fortunately, my previous work for Obvious earned me another chance to join Twitter a year later, which I accepted. It all started with an action, an idea sent in an email.
It was a bad idea, a stupid action, but it was action.
I now have the opportunity to help make Medium amazing. I also have the opportunity to advise awesome companies and mentor entrepreneurs. The number one piece of advice I always give is…
Don’t wait for opportunities to present themselves. Do something. Do something today. Do something now.
Opportunities are manufactured.
