We Don't Teach Enough About Luck

Today is May 30th, which means it’s now been 12 years since Northeastern hired me as a teaching professor.

I don’t bring this up to celebrate. I mean, my being faculty at Northeastern has certainly worked out very well for both parties involved, but really, focusing on the date itself would be trying to find some residual meaning for a personal moment that pales in comparison to years and years of getting to see students succeed.

I bring this up mainly because it reminds me of something that we don’t teach our students enough - an unfortunate truth, but a real one - which is that planning and hard work only amount to two-thirds of what is needed for success. Planning and hard work are what we celebrate at graduations, planning and hard work are the main elements of every challenge given in commencement speeches, planning and hard work are the main features of every profile piece describing some major figure and their success.

Planning and hard work are critical, and we should make sure students develop skills to implement them into the efforts they are passionate about.

But they’re only two-thirds of the whole picture. Because the other third is luck.

We don’t want to acknowledge this, because luck is out of our hands. It’s chance, it’s the right series of events happening to occur, it’s a chaos butterly flapping its wings somewhere on the other side of the planet. And we have no power over it. But it’s critical.

And yes, many are privileged enough to have a greater likelihood of luck to benefit them, but they still need that luck to hit.

I applied in April and was hired in late May. If you know anything about the college faculty hiring process, that’s incredibly off the standard schedule. Most full-time positions are part of a process to review applications in October and November, conduct preliminary interviews in December, conduct on-site interviews as soon as they can after that, and have finalized offers as soon as possible in the spring semester. All my other applications followed that process - they just didn’t get anywhere.

There was a lot of luck that just happened to align.

I needed the Northeastern to just happen to hire a new department chair, so that he could argue for a new teaching professor position as part of his hiring package.

I needed the position to happen to open up in April when all my other applications were completely failing to gain any traction.

I needed the interim chair who happened to have done work at NIST, where I was doing my post-doc, to happen to notice my application.

And that’s before we even get into the fact that I only happened to apply to Northeastern in the first place because I was sleep-deprived hallucinating and the furniture started talking to me and told me to apply. (This is entirely true.) And that’s not even taking into account that I happened to get the previous position at NIST just because I happened to spend a week listening to a guy tell me stories about how he blew up a bridge when he was a kid, and then crossed paths with him at a time when I was desperately looking for a job. (This is also entirely true.)

The application and the interview were all my hard work and planning, to be fair - but luck is such a huge incredible component of what we are able to achieve.

And we should make sure students are aware, so they can take advantage of those opportunities where luck does fall their way, too.

There are always catalysts that we come across that can increase our likelihood of success, and we never know when we will come across them. Catalysts that will boost all the planning and hard work. And we should make sure to teach students that they should be paying attention for when those catalysts happen into their lives, that they should be paying attention for the chances that luck happens to provide - so that they do take advantage.

Yes, I was hired by Northeastern because of the ideas I had and because of the years and years of hard work that I’d put in, and I was certainly a good candidate for the position. But I also got very lucky to have the opportunity and to try for the opportunity.

My lucky break culminated 12 years ago today.

We should teach our students to be ready for their lucky breaks as well.