How to become lucky?
A few years ago, I watched Will Smith’s masterpiece, The Pursuit of Happyness. At the end of the movie, I was impressed with Chris Gardner’s (Will Smith) persistence and insistence on success. This story was a real inspiration for many people, including myself; however, this success story always came to mind clouded with Survivorship bias or the tendency to consider famous success stories as the norm. It was like Chris fought hard to achieve his dream, and good for him, luck was on his side.
The Pursuit of Happyness motivation gradually faded as the years went by; moreover, the doubt that similar stories could happen in real life started to grow. However, two weeks ago, the inspiration was reignited when I first hand witnessed a real-life story similar to the story of the movie.
The story began when I received a call from someone preparing for an interview for a data scientist job. At first, I was under the impression that this person is at the beginning of his career, and he just needed a push forward. But later, I found this was not the case.
He is 38 years old gentleman who spent his entire career working on unfulfilling, not so well paid jobs. He was working long hours and getting physically tired; he was an unhappy person. Two years ago, he decided to challenge the status quo. He did not know where to start, so he prayed until it hit him; throughout the years, many people complimented his analytical skills, especially with numbers. He took it as a sign and started looking for jobs that would utilize his quantitative analytical skills. He got fascinated with data analytics. He consulted with people around him, but unfortunately, the feedback was mostly negative. The general advice was not to waste his time, data science is not an easy field, and at his age, his learning abilities would not help him. Being a human being, he was discouraged but eventually decided to fight his own fight. While remaining in his tiring job, he studied and earned a computer science degree. He then focused on the machine learning field and completed tens of online courses. When he felt ready, he started to apply for job openings. At the very beginning, he was consistently getting rejected by employers. However, he took the best out of the situation and completed all the interview assignments. The assignments were very beneficial because they opened his eyes to the requirements of the market. After many unsuccessful attempts, he doubted himself and decided to accept the first job offer he would get. Soon after, he got a request for an interview for entry-level desktop support. He was delighted and convinced that it was not meant for him to be a data scientist. He prepared for the interview and was praying to get this job. Once the interview started, the interviewer asked about his background, out of passion, he mentioned his data science studies first. And that was it; the interviewer informed him that they had a more urgent opening for a data scientist, and he would prefer to interview him for this job. He gratefully accepted. After the interview, he was informed that he did very well, and an assignment was given to him to evaluate his practical experience.
The remainder of the story is pretty predictable. He completed the assignment, had a second interview to discuss the deliverables, got the job offer, and became a data scientist. In other words, what was a dream is now a reality, and his hard work finally paid off.
You are no different from this person. No matter where you are in your career, if you are not happy, you can still pursue your happiness, it would not be easy, it would not be quick, and you would face many challenges. But, rest assured that luck will be on your side because “Luck is the residue of hard work and design,” as Branch Rickey once said.
