Some career advice (2019)
I wish we as a culture&#x2F;society, acknowledged the luck and timing factor more as a factor in career development.<p>Idolizing people like Musk, Bezos and Gates, brilliant though they certainly are, only serves to put &quot;just work hard&#x2F;smart&quot; blinkers on young career professionals, when sometimes, you really just need to introduce some chaos, roll the dice again, or divert effort into opening new pathways for yourself via networking or some such activity, instead of spending those extra hours on polishing technical skills.<p>Case in point, I&#x27;ve had several internships as a student. My first one, I landed in a team that effectively did product management of a backend system, whilst my coursemate landed into a role assisting a high-up VP on innovation projects.<p>Later, as a consultant, my first project was on some dying database system that needed to be kept alive a short while longer. In this case, I&#x27;d learned already, that you don&#x27;t have to always accept your circumstances as they are. I politely complained to management that this is not what I was hired for and did not match my skills, and was transferred to a way more interesting and career rewarding project.<p>I think the cornerstone of luck in career comes down to a few things:<p>1) Always Ask &#x2F; Register interest - good things can&#x27;t come your way if no one knows that you&#x27;re looking<p>2) Keep an ear to the ground - so much information spreads via word of mouth. Being in chatrooms&#x2F;groups or just having friendly relationships with various people in a company or sector, is like having sensors planted all around, alerting you to new opportunities<p>3) (polite) STUBBORNNESS - I can&#x27;t emphasize this enough. Rejections, or unanswered job applications don&#x27;t have to mean anything. After looking objectively at yourself and your attempt, to see if anything could have been improved, it pays you to then be stubborn and just keep trying. I recently got a brilliant job because my application was rejected from the 10th job posting of my favourite company, but a recruiter saw my application and forwarded it to another internal position that was based in another location and offered remotely. Everything clicked from there and I eventually got an offer. This happened because after the 9th rejection and I said &quot;F*k it&quot; and sent out another CV.