The 5 year plan to £50k - Accomplished.

[Richdog]

Things like this annoy me.

I've been utterly ****ing miserable in my job enduring all manner of abuse, harassment and shame whilst working my nuts off, yet I'm barely off of minimum wage.

Crock of ****.

Have you ever taken a long, hard look in the mirror and thought to yourself: "Maybe I am part of the problem"? You probably have a shed-load of bad habits or negative traits you're not even aware of.

I still think people are discounting the role of chance too much... especially when mentioning traits that successful people have etc.. those are often necessary conditions but not really sufficient. Risk taking inevitably means there will be some losers the other side of the distribution - it wouldn't be a 'risk' if there wasn't some exposure to chance. Obviously you do need to be prepared to take risks, work hard etc.. in the first place.

Nassim Taleb has written a lot on the subject and has spend most of his academic and professional career dealing with risk, uncertainty etc... would certainly recommend reading one of fooled by randomness, the black swan or antifragile.(He's a bit arrogant and is essentially trying to get the same points across in the books but they're worth a read)

And people like you overstate "chance"... it does not detract form the fact that if you have qualities, and work hard, that people will recognise it.

 

[Kenai]

What I see in this thread is the age old conflict between struggle and success where the struggling party has worked themselves into the mental position that they're just not lucky enough to get the right opportunity, versus the successful party having convinced themselves their success is primarily their own doing and was not down to getting lucky.

In reality I think many people would agree the balance sits in the middle, we all need that bit of luck somewhere along the line but you also have to do something with that break to get anywhere.

There are a great many average people who have worked hard with little luck, or who have been lucky but not made the most of it too, that fill the huge void between the strugglers and the success stories.

 

[dowie]

And people like you overstate "chance"... it does not detract form the fact that if you have qualities, and work hard, that people will recognise it.

I haven't overstated it at all, those are necessary conditions... you've either missed that part of don't understand the point. Plenty of people such as nix could work hard, there are things outside their control that could prevent sucess. They could take more risks too. It isn't sufficient to simply work hard - people such as the OP have done other things to push their career forward - but there have clearly been other events that have come about by chance - certain vacancies being available at the time, meeting with the particular manager who game him the recommendation etc..etc..

 

[Tefal]

Asset Manager, I plan maintenance and refurbishment of various plants and networks, based on cost, risk and required performance.

I go out to site and scope out what equipment needs replacing and then decide when. Now in the new role I got to manage people and the programme.

Christ I've spoken to some of the guys who plan our factory maintainence schedules during the shut downs it was mind boggling just how much info they had to go through and everything being related/planing when to do the electrical repairs cause it means the whole factory is dark so other work can't be done etc

Definitely a role where your personal ability to understand and plan the massive mess of systems will shine though.

 

[garak112]

I haven't overstated it at all, those are necessary conditions... you've either missed that part of don't understand the point. Plenty of people such as nix could work hard, there are things outside their control that could prevent sucess. They could take more risks too. It isn't sufficient to simply work hard - people such as the OP have done other things to push their career forward - but there have clearly been other events that have come about by chance - certain vacancies being available at the time, meeting with the particular manager who game him the recommendation etc..etc..

There is an element of creating your own chance through hard work or other actions, I.e. Networking, studying a field your employer has a lack of skills in etc.

I think chance plays more part where you are content to stay working for the same employer and are almost hoping an opportunity lands on your lap. If we're Nix I would be looking for a new job with a new employer.

I also agree that often people have negative traits they aren't aware of and it's these, rather than chance, that impact on things the most.

 

[D.P.]

I agreed with Housey, and although I do fantastically, currently, I have also changed career paths, been made redundant and gone from earning well 31k) at a fairly young age, to being on 15k. The whole make your own luck isn't the BS you think, it's the fact that you need to do the right things. Just working hard isn't necessarily that.
Being smart about where your efforts are best placed for the most chance of success. Yes, you can't control the people who receive your CV, or outside influences, but you can make sure you trailer that CV so it hits the mark, or grabs their attention, or call them to make sure they have seen your CV.
People give up too easily, or say it's not in their control, but you really do have to go out there and bust that but in the right way and the "luck" starts to unfold.

A couple of good points here. It is not just working hard, it is working smartly. You need to put the effort in in the right way, focused in the right directions. This is why some people sometimes think luck is very important because despite working hard they don't suceeed at things while other people who seemingly out in less effort do suceeed.


People do five up too easily. As you say, call up the company and make sure they have seen your CV. If you get a rejection then call up the company and find out why and try to convince that they made a mistake because you could add significant value to their operations. In fact, don't even wait for a job to be advertised, many companies are always willing to hire someone even without explicit advertising. Try to are age meetings with HR or a manager to demonstrate your abilities and value add.

The company I am currently working for weren't advertising at the time but I saw an old advert from a year before. I sent a customized CV and covering letter to the CEO and asked to arrange a brief phone interview which quickly turn into a fly out and full interview.


Many big companies just don't bother advertising for certain jobs, they wait for good candidates to apply for them.

I still think people are discounting the role of chance too much... especially when mentioning traits that successful people have etc.. those are often necessary conditions but not really sufficient. Risk taking inevitably means there will be some losers the other side of the distribution - it wouldn't be a 'risk' if there wasn't some exposure to chance. Obviously you do need to be prepared to take risks, work hard etc.. in the first place.

Nassim Taleb has written a lot on the subject and has spend most of his academic and professional career dealing with risk, uncertainty etc... would certainly recommend reading one of fooled by randomness, the black swan or antifragile.(He's a bit arrogant and is essentially trying to get the same points across in the books but they're worth a read)

Of course risk means you sometime loose, the difference is how you handle that loss and the fact you were willing to take risks in the first place. If your quickly brush yourself off after a fall and move on to the next project you are more liekly to suceeed. I know a couple of self-made millionaires with sucefful star tips under their belt. They all had multiple failures and lost huge amounts of money on previous ventures. Most people would have likely given up after 1 or 2 failures. It persistence and arrogance ensure eventual success.


The way I see it is a game like Bridge where there is a mix of luck and skill. On average skilled players win more often.

 

[Nix]

I agreed with Housey, and although I do fantastically, currently, I have also changed career paths, been made redundant and gone from earning well 31k) at a fairly young age, to being on 15k. The whole make your own luck isn't the BS you think, it's the fact that you need to do the right things. Just working hard isn't necessarily that.
Being smart about where your efforts are best placed for the most chance of success. Yes, you can't control the people who receive your CV, or outside influences, but you can make sure you trailer that CV so it hits the mark, or grabs their attention, or call them to make sure they have seen your CV.
People give up too easily, or say it's not in their control, but you really do have to go out there and bust that but in the right way and the "luck" starts to unfold.

I'm not sure what you're trying to explain to me here. I've been saying exactly the same thing for pages now.

I agree you make your own luck. However -- and this is where my contention stems from -- it isn't all in our control. All we can do is steer the ship when the winds are right. If there's no wind, sometimes we can row. Rowing however, isn't always enough especially when the land is too far away.

My point all along is how dismissive people are when it comes to acknowledging chance/luck in their endeavours. For the most part, I'd say people are hitting the money now.

It's not "Look how much I earn, I'm awesome. I worked hard and I deserve this. All you have to do is work hard. Why are you poor? You don't work hard enough!"

But now "Actually, yeah, there was a little luck involved but I still had to work bloody hard!"

Have you ever taken a long, hard look in the mirror and thought to yourself: "Maybe I am part of the problem"? You probably have a shed-load of bad habits or negative traits you're not even aware of.

Sorry, this makes me chuckle. If only you knew how deep this rabbit hole goes.

To put it bluntly, yes. I have looked at myself very long and very hard.

How dare I speak out of turn, right?

What I see in this thread is the age old conflict between struggle and success where the struggling party has worked themselves into the mental position that they're just not lucky enough to get the right opportunity, versus the successful party having convinced themselves their success is primarily their own doing and was not down to getting lucky.

In reality I think many people would agree the balance sits in the middle, we all need that bit of luck somewhere along the line but you also have to do something with that break to get anywhere.

There are a great many average people who have worked hard with little luck, or who have been lucky but not made the most of it too, that fill the huge void between the strugglers and the success stories.

Bingo!

That was my point all along, yet for some reason people are hedging me into the former camp.

Yes, that's where I am circumstantially right now. But that doesn't mean I'm not trying or blaming anyone else for my problems! I literally had a run of bad luck. It sucks, it's unfair and I'm angry about it, but I'm moving on. Housey is right about not getting caught up in it.

EDIT:

Chance is obscure and transient. Whether it is good or bad is for the most part, a subjective matter. By applying agency and 'working hard' when the 'good' chance comes your way, you maximise your outcome as there is likely to be some positive feedback. If the luck is 'bad', it won't matter or it will be inverse and at worst you will suffer.

We don't know the outcomes of anything. All we can do is make sure that we're in a strong position to benefit and take advantage of opportunity when it does present itself (equally being aware of it). If there's no opportunity or you're in a 'weak' position to take risk, then work-ethic doesn't really come in to it.

 

[dowie]

The way I see it is a game like Bridge where there is a mix of luck and skill. On average skilled players win more often.

No one is discounting taking shots in the first place... with bridge, poker etc.. you have a larger sample size. Within a finite lifetime there are only so many shots you can take. Clearly skill plays a part, chance/luck however plays a much bigger part than most people are willing to acknowledge.

Even in poker say the variance is huge, you'd have to play several hundred thousand hands at a particular level to really be able to say that you can probably beat the game at that level, even then the game evolves/gets harder over the time it takes for you to accumulate that data(we'd be assuming a reasonable skill level here - obviously someone who is very bad will find out quite quickly - others don't actually know - they don't make obvious mistakes but can easily attribute a positive pnl curve to 'skill' when it may well just be down to luck even over tens of thousands of hands...).

Conversely you could be a skilled player, theoretically you could have an expectation of winning 2.5 big blinds per 100 hands and still have a probability of around 0.2 of finishing up a net loser after a sample of 100,000 hands have been played. Not uncommon to see in the middle of say a winning player's sample of 1,000,000 plus... now if those 100,000 hands had happened to occur at the start of those players careers would they still be playing poker even, would they have even got to the point where they played 100,000 hands?

Hedge fund managers fall into this trap all the time, calling beta alpha and pretending the result of chance, unpredicted moves they profited from were down to their 'system'. Of course chance moves that go the wrong way, that they didn't predict and that cause them serious loss then have to be explained away as unpredictable etc... These people perhaps then close shop and return funds to the investors as the strategy no longer works in today's markets... they don't necessarily know that it ever worked in the first place a lot of the time, they just arrogantly attributed positive results to their own 'skill' for a while and were happy to claim credit for them.

You don't tend to have anywhere near the sample size that you can accumulate from poker decisions when it comes to business or career decisions yet people are often more than happy to attribute sucess to hard work and carefully calculated risks etc.. whilst ignoring the massive role luck played too. Its a complete fallacy - oh but these guys got back up and tried again... well so did a lot of people who re-mortgaged their house for the third time and so on...

Obviously taking shots/taking risks is necessary, obviously taking more shots, working hard, having the skills are attributes plenty of successful people have... all of it can increase your chances of success. But that huge chance element is massively overlooked by people. Tell the average person in the street that you played a few thousand hands of poker online, casually, over the year and are up some five figure sum they'll think you are skilled at the game and did rather well, they might be impressed even... they might expect that you can repeat that success and tell their friends about their mate who makes 50k a year in his spare time on online poker... In reality it is meaningless, it's mostly variance.. the sample size is way too small in infer anything and the assumption that any skill was involved above and beyond not being completely useless is flawed... we can perhaps assume sufficient skill to not completely suck but we can't assume anything about having sufficient skill to have a positive expectation of winning overall. Plenty of equally skilled players could easily have lost the same sum over the same sample size and there would be plenty of people making the same flawed assumptions about their skill level or lack of it.

 

[Housey]

If you continuously wait for 'things' to happen or to come to you then luck is going to be a big part of your success, or more often than not lack of it. If you act differently to those who are waiting for such things then luck will have significantly less or even no influence over your success and you will find that in fact it isn't luck or magic pixy dust that influences your success, but your actions. This is the crux of this debate.

We have people who seek to analyse their own situation, often as the case is, in microscopic detail to convince themselves and others that their situation is different and they have been unlucky or hindered in life. They will usually put this down to something outside of their control, when the reality is they have not acted in a way too see them move forward and frankly, experience shows that the last people to realise that or who have the most inaccurate grasp on the actually reality of their own situation is the person themselves.

You can 'yes but you don't understand and I've done everything I can' as much as you like, but experience has shown me that this is virtually always down to the person themselves and has nothing to do with luck. When you have some experience behind you, when you are or have had responsibility for people and their careers it becomes far clearer. When all you have done is sit there and analyse you own situation, for that is all you REALLY know, you have a very insular view. This view often sees the language such as 'my manager is crap' or 'the management have no idea what they are doing' or 'I could do their job with my eyes close'.

I'm sorry but I have little sympathy for self pity, but I also appreciate that depression, which I suspect is present here in some places, will make you only seek negative conclusions for your own situation. You need to try and get that element fixed as you won't see the wood from the trees until you do.

 

[Ayahuasca]

I think the trick is finding a company that actually gives a crap about professional development, and one who looks to current staff to fill roles rather than external ones.

This is what I did, started out as an apprentice with the company, they decided to take me on for a role after it finished as they "saw something in me" since then I've been promoted twice, I owe a lot to my boss for my development.

 

[Richdog]

Knowing what I want is something that's beyond me right now and has been for years. You're just going to have to trust me when I tell you the sheer amount of effort and frustration that's gone in into trying to work it out, but being depressed I was fighting a losing battle. At its worst, nothing engages you and everything is very, very meaningless.

Exactly the reasons I was talking about. That's not bad luck stopping you, that's your own issues.

 

[HangTime]

I think the trick is finding a company that actually gives a crap about professional development, and one who looks to current staff to fill roles rather than external ones.

I think part of the problem is some people have only worked for companies who don't and thus can't really place a value on that (or know how to progress away from such places for that matter).

Early signs at my new employer are very good with a consistent approach seemingly in place from senior management downwards - the values of the organisation do genuinely seem to provide drive rather than just being a token soundbite. However, it is only now that I've seen this in action that I realise how bad my previous employers have been in this regard.

 

[Nix]

Snip

Again, not telling me anything I don't already know. I know you mean well, but it's utterly redundant.

If you can't see where and why I differ from your more blanket view on chance, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

As I've said many times, I'm not pointing the finger at anyone. I blame myself for the situation however, it is completely incorrect and wrong to assume it's all of my own doing. Bad luck very much played its hand. The last thing I want is people trying to twist the situation to make me think that it's all of my own doing and thus continuing the self-abuse that prevents me from moving on.

I've always done what I needed to, yet this still happened. You can take that whatever way you want but that's how life works out. If I 'deserved' this it wouldn't have made the past six years utter hell as I wouldn't have been so frantically clawing at the walls to find a way out and instead would have been okay with it.

Circumstances at home have been awful. My employer has been awful preventing progression. The job itself has been a poisoned well hindering recovery. It's been a very dark hole and I had to play the long game to get out of it. I don't need people to keep telling me that I'm to blame. I've done nothing but resist and try to help myself. If I'd had had a way out before now I would have latched on with both hands and gone with it, and no I wasn't waiting for anything to fall on my lap. Granted though, that depression often made me lose the will to fight, and catastrophically forecasted all outcomes whilst robbing everything of all meaning. It's not as simple as badgering companies non-stop when you're struggling to even find the meaning just to continue in to the next day. But, when I have had the energy I've thrown everything I had at it.

I've been forced to play a long game to get where I needed to be. I'm finally breaking away and that's all that matters. It's time for the next chapter.

Exactly the reasons I was talking about. That's not bad luck stopping you, that's your own issues.

Because that's the only information I've given you. I haven't given you any information on the circumstances.

This isn't my fault. At least, not primarily. This happened to me, not because of me.

 

[Housey]

Again, not telling me anything I don't already know. I know you mean well, but it's utterly redundant.

If you can't see where and why I differ from your more blanket view on chance, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

As I've said many times, I'm not pointing the finger at anyone. I blame myself for the situation however, it is completely incorrect and wrong to assume it's all of my own doing. Bad luck very much played its hand. The last thing I want is people trying to twist the situation to make me think that it's all of my own doing and thus continuing the self-abuse that prevents me from moving on.

I've always done what I needed to, yet this still happened. You can take that whatever way you want but that's how life works out. If I 'deserved' this it wouldn't have made the past six years utter hell as I wouldn't have been so frantically clawing at the walls to find a way out and instead would have been okay with it.

Circumstances at home have been awful. My employer has been awful preventing progression. The job itself has been a poisoned well hindering recovery. It's been a very dark hole and I had to play the long game to get out of it. I don't need people to keep telling me that I'm to blame. I've done nothing but resist and try to help myself. If I'd had had a way out before now I would have latched on with both hands and gone with it, and no I wasn't waiting for anything to fall on my lap. Granted though, that depression often made me lose the will to fight, and catastrophically forecasted all outcomes whilst robbing everything of all meaning. It's not as simple as badgering companies non-stop when you're struggling to even find the meaning just to continue in to the next day. But, when I have had the energy I've thrown everything I had at it.

I've been forced to play a long game to get where I needed to be. I'm finally breaking away and that's all that matters. It's time for the next chapter.

Good luck

 

[Jono8]

What I see in this thread is the age old conflict between struggle and success where the struggling party has worked themselves into the mental position that they're just not lucky enough to get the right opportunity, versus the successful party having convinced themselves their success is primarily their own doing and was not down to getting lucky.
.

Well said . It does make for interesting reading though.

 

[Housey]

Life is not predicated on luck. Luck has influence but no more than an influence sometime for some people. Business is the same, it isn't them and us.

 

[Django x2]

£46k is not £50k

 

[HangTime]

To be fair while £46k is not £50k, dependent on hours, benefits etc a £46k job may possibly be 'better paid' than a £50k job. It is in the right ballpark given variances between contracts.

 

[D.P.]

No one is discounting taking shots in the first place... with bridge, poker etc.. you have a larger sample size. Within a finite lifetime there are only so many shots you can take. Clearly skill plays a part, chance/luck however plays a much bigger part than most people are willing to acknowledge.

Even in poker say the variance is huge, you'd have to play several hundred thousand hands at a particular level to really be able to say that you can probably beat the game at that level, even then the game evolves/gets harder over the time it takes for you to accumulate that data(we'd be assuming a reasonable skill level here - obviously someone who is very bad will find out quite quickly - others don't actually know - they don't make obvious mistakes but can easily attribute a positive pnl curve to 'skill' when it may well just be down to luck even over tens of thousands of hands...).

Conversely you could be a skilled player, theoretically you could have an expectation of winning 2.5 big blinds per 100 hands and still have a probability of around 0.2 of finishing up a net loser after a sample of 100,000 hands have been played. Not uncommon to see in the middle of say a winning player's sample of 1,000,000 plus... now if those 100,000 hands had happened to occur at the start of those players careers would they still be playing poker even, would they have even got to the point where they played 100,000 hands?

Hedge fund managers fall into this trap all the time, calling beta alpha and pretending the result of chance, unpredicted moves they profited from were down to their 'system'. Of course chance moves that go the wrong way, that they didn't predict and that cause them serious loss then have to be explained away as unpredictable etc... These people perhaps then close shop and return funds to the investors as the strategy no longer works in today's markets... they don't necessarily know that it ever worked in the first place a lot of the time, they just arrogantly attributed positive results to their own 'skill' for a while and were happy to claim credit for them.

You don't tend to have anywhere near the sample size that you can accumulate from poker decisions when it comes to business or career decisions yet people are often more than happy to attribute sucess to hard work and carefully calculated risks etc.. whilst ignoring the massive role luck played too. Its a complete fallacy - oh but these guys got back up and tried again... well so did a lot of people who re-mortgaged their house for the third time and so on...

Obviously taking shots/taking risks is necessary, obviously taking more shots, working hard, having the skills are attributes plenty of successful people have... all of it can increase your chances of success. But that huge chance element is massively overlooked by people. Tell the average person in the street that you played a few thousand hands of poker online, casually, over the year and are up some five figure sum they'll think you are skilled at the game and did rather well, they might be impressed even... they might expect that you can repeat that success and tell their friends about their mate who makes 50k a year in his spare time on online poker... In reality it is meaningless, it's mostly variance.. the sample size is way too small in infer anything and the assumption that any skill was involved above and beyond not being completely useless is flawed... we can perhaps assume sufficient skill to not completely suck but we can't assume anything about having sufficient skill to have a positive expectation of winning overall. Plenty of equally skilled players could easily have lost the same sum over the same sample size and there would be plenty of people making the same flawed assumptions about their skill level or lack of it.

I carefully didn't say poker because there is minimal skill involved. Games like Bridge are highly technical with a huge amount of strategy. A good Bridge player will almost always win against a weaker player in contract bridge within a single competition (and within a few hands really). It goes back to what I said earlier, a Bridge expert will maximize the payoff when lucky, increase the odds of being lucky, minimize the cost of being unlucky and minimize the chances of being unlucky. Even when getting a dream hand there is a lot of skill in maximising the points wn, and in a nightmare hand with good skill you can reduce the losses.


The main luck in life is the country you were born and your parents. As you grow up luck has less and less to do with life outcomes on average. You can decide to brown nose your boss for promotions, volanteer for ugly projects that earn brownie points, quit your job for higher sales or better prospects, move cities or countries, chabge careers, have children, don't have children, get married or not, apply for jobs you are underqualified for, bluff interviews, metwork, make new contacts, pay to get your CV professionally revised and type faced, pay to.go on extra training or certification, etc, etc.

You can never make bad luck k go away but you can certainly create more opertunities to get good luck

 

[Tunney]

The main luck in life is the country you were born and your parents.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. Parents and background are the biggest contributors to the luck element of being successful. It's the difference between a good education and a bad education, the difference between a positive attitude and a negative attitude. It's also the far easier to be a risk taker if you've got a safety net to fall back on. If you're comparing two people from the same background, luck has very little to do with success in my opinion.

Having said that, I know people who have risked more and worked harder than I do and yet have far less. I have been very lucky in life.