Mechanical success vs nepotism and luck

People will often say something along the lines of:

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

This advice will be doled out across any context, but it’s most enthusiastically delivered to people looking for jobs. “Don’t bother applying for jobs, you need to network”. Something like this.

I think, largely, this is true. Nepotism is a very greasy grease, and you will move much faster the more of it is applied to you. But I want to talk about some under-rated alternatives.

¶A story of luck

I’m going to make a point shortly that luck isn’t usually really luck, so much as it’s some kind of preparedness. But before I do that, I should make clear that there is such a thing as true luck, and people who disagree aren’t thinking very seriously. Coincidence plays a role, and the most irritatingly difficult to quantify is what I guess we should call privilege. In plenty of cases, though uncomfortable to observe, this kind of luck is the main reason someone is successful or not. Like, there’s very little in this article that’s going to be relevant to all the people trying to escape all these war-torn regions all over the place. Similarly, we’re never surprised to learn that most of the rich people fussing about in the news started out rich. But, whenever I write these kinds of things, I never know how much I’m supposed to weigh the value of, you know, the body I was born into or whatever. To the extent it matters, that’s true luck, and plenty of that, I’m sure, went into the story I’m about to tell.

But, that kind of luck we can do little about in the moment. But the other kind of luck is more tractable. I want to give you an example of my own. Please, suffer some personal anecdote to make the point more compelling.

This year, primarily, I have been on a forced holiday. A sabbatical, I suppose you could call it. I finished my PhD and decided that, while I managed to stave off homelessness with some highly intermittent consulting and teaching, I might try to choose a job that wasn’t just the next best option.

You see, the job market for post-docs is not very exciting. You are only allowed to select between any number of immense sacrifices. Either you’re working in a country that is not good, or for pay that is not good, or for a contract that is too short to be useful for future-planning, or some combination of these. Usually, the pay thing is a mandatory sacrifice. And all this alongside far too many role responsibilities, the most egregious of which is that you also usually have to find your own money to do the things that will actually progress your career. Plus, I barely even like research (a PhD will do that to you). It’s the teaching I’ve come to prefer.

Attractive, it is not.

I had other jobs available to me. Consulting comes to mind. But if you’ve read around here long enough, you’ll know I’m somewhat skeptical of its value for a well-lived life.

So I waited. For several months. Staring down the day I’d run out of cash and have to just take whatever I could get, until I found precisely one job that looked interesting.

Not just interesting, but perfect. A lecturing position at a prestigious military academy. A very unusual combination of my psychology background and my military background. Like it was made for me. So I applied. I interviewed. And I got the job.

This is an unusual story. Mostly, people will apply for very many jobs, interview at some small proportion of those, and maybe—just maybe—manage to catch one or two. Not very often will people apply for one, interview for it, and then get it.

I was very lucky.

¶Is luck, luck?

But the luck that went into this little anecdote is an oddly specific kind of luck. I mean, is it that lucky that a Cambridge PhD in brain science, with a long history of teaching and clinical experience in psychology, and a six-year military career to boot got a job teaching psychology to military personnel? It’d be pretty weird if I didn’t get the job, really.

So maybe the luck was in the fact that the job came at the perfect time? Maybe, but then, I waited months until I came across this job. It’s not like I just looked up from my PhD, and there it was.

So maybe the luck was the fact that I’d saved enough cash, and made enough connections to supplement with ad-hoc work to get me through the intervening period? And now we’re starting to see that maybe this isn’t quite luck at all. Maybe this is more of a fake coincidence:

The reason people think otherwise is because we only notice when the toast falls butter side down. If it falls butter side up, you put it back on your plate and forget the incident happened at all … Probably, most unusual coincidences are this. Simply a matter of not having the counterfactuals to hand to compare the relative likelihood. You never notice all the times the weird thing could have happened, but didn’t.

I can’t remember anything about all the unappetising opportunities that came along in my time of waiting. This one, perfect job seems like a coincidence, but measured against all the things I might have looked at as I waited, it might be exactly as likely that anyone else would have found their one, perfect job if they waited as long too.

But there’s also something else at play here. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, a great deal of luck appears to be about:

preparation … removing the barriers to serendipity, both mental (your mindset) and physical (the spaces you live and interact in), such as: overloaded schedules; senseless meetings; and the inefficiencies throughout your day that rob you of time, curiosity and a sense of joy … creating an environment that enables the use of your skills and available resources to act on the moment. An unprepared mind often discards unusual encounters, thereby missing the opportunities for smart luck. But this is a learned behaviour. Preparation is about developing the capacity to accelerate and harness the positive coincidences that show up in life.

That author is connected to an academic society that publishes exclusively on this idea. But if you’d prefer it in more poetic terms, Albert Camus once wrote:

perhaps there is no other peace for the artist than what he finds in the heat of combat. “Every wall is a door,” Emerson correctly said. Let us not look for the door, and the way out, anywhere but in the wall against which we are living. Instead, let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of the battle.

Luck, as many quotes will tell you in some form or other, is often just the art of being prepared.

¶Preparing for luck, or ‘mechanical success’

There are a lot of ways to ‘prepare’ for luck. The academic society I linked earlier would be a good starting point. But one way of succeeding in this regard, I think, is one of the least valued. And as I reflect, it has had the most impact.

I’m going to call it ‘mechanical success’, for lack of a better term. See, many of the systems we’re trying to progress through have mechanics. Often, these mechanics are the things we complain about when they thwart us. Your mortgage requires a certain credit score. Your University application requires a certain test score. Your access to some kind of benefit requires some arbitrary criterion.

But this same thing actually permits a form of success that can be rather powerful. So, to use myself as an example:

regarding grade point averages, it’s almost always possible to take one or two more courses to bump yourself up. I did this twice. Once, when I wanted to do the Psychology Honours course, back when I thought clinical psychology was going to be my future, I took one more online course while I worked full time and got the average grade I needed to get in to the program. Then, to be honest, I annihilated that Honours year, which brought my total average grade up to what it needed to be for Cambridge … As an aside … At least in Australian Universities, it doesn’t matter so much what you come in doing, but what you did while you were doing it. Come in doing a Bachelor of Arts, but take the subjects required for a Bachelor of Science and you get a Bachelor of Science. I think I started with a Bachelor of Arts with a Diploma of Education. Halfway through I dropped the DipEd and took on what I needed for a Bachelor of Psychology.

This is a classic example of mechanical success. Three times, through my University degrees, I faced crucial hingepoints that would either see me through, or stop me. The first, though I didn’t know it, could be completely obviated—I didn’t need the high-school grades I needed to do what I wanted. I just needed to get in, then take whatever courses would get me the degree I wanted. Similarly, I needed a certain grade to get into my Honours year, but I could just take more courses until I got it. Then, I needed a certain grade to get into Cambridge, but again, I had taken enough courses to push me through.

With some effort, and though it was essentially accidental on my part, simply making the correct choices, I was mechanically moved from a state of definite failure to a state of success.

These kinds of mechanical dynamics are actually very common. To illustrate let’ s look at a completely different thing: influencer success. As I comment here on this working paper (pdf) :

Influencer career progression is determined by consistent effort. Not virality. [Influencer] Rob Henderson talks about this quite revealingly and I’ve noticed a distinct uptick since moving from monthly to weekly writing. People want to see you, perhaps. More than your content?

Henderson also talks about mechanics—the discipline he deploys to publish regularly. But these mechanics also deliver on the other side—the mechanics of content consumption. We are sort of led to believe that the media we consume is successful when it’s striking or especially interesting—‘newsworthy’ implies an event that is distinctive. But in an important way, this is not true. We seem to much prefer familiarity. So, though virality (i.e. luck) is touted as the means to succeed in influencing, it’s really mechanical production that’s the more reliable lever to move from a state of failure to a state of success.

¶Outro

There are an enormous number of systems that govern the world around us. In fact, I write about this constantly in a state of amazement. And to be honest, many of these require some combination of the true luck I talked about earlier to recognise or even come into contact with.

But many are just sitting there, waiting to be noticed. Or waiting to be revealed by someone who already noticed them. And once noticed, their mechanics can be examined. Exploited.

It’s not a replacement for nepotism or luck or effort. It’s an adjunct that multiplies the effect of all three. Indeed, sometimes it is identical to the three, and we have just mislabelled it. And it’s basically never spoken about, except to complain that the mechanics obstructed us. So here’s hoping this helps some people notice the same kind of opportunities I happened to stumble across to find my one, perfect job.