Many successful people never meticulously planned their careers let alone took a career test. They appear to have stumbled into their passion through a string of lucky coincidences. If intuition and spontaneity rather than “planning” is your MO, then I’ll show you how to engineer luck in order to raise your chances of success. We will call this the Lucky Approach and believe it or not, it can work just as well as a more systematic approach.
It’s deceptively simple and consists of one core activity: pursue a micro-passion, then sit back and relax, waiting to see what doors it opens up in terms of your career. What’s a micro-passion, you ask? Well, it’s a project that satisfies these 3 criteria:
It can be executed in under a month
You are excited by it
It can be shared widely
Stuart is a great example of how the micro-passion actually engineers the luck within the Lucky Approach. At one time he was the leader of an indie band that had to quit touring because a member passed away. After that, he worked uninspiring jobs that didn’t really harness his skill set for a few years. Then he decided to volunteer as a curator for an arts festival—and that project ended up being the micro-passion that opened the doors to a new, satisfying career.
Let’s look at the first criteria and see how it applies to Stuart’s case. The micro-passion needs to be executed in under a month or you run a higher risk getting overwhelmed. Curating this festival line-up took him a few weeks; it was a nice, quick win.
When we take on small, well-defined challenges like this, we are much more likely to accomplish them. That’s because smaller, specific, time-bound goals fuel our sense of motivation.
Now let’s look at the second criterion: the micro-passion must excite you. If you pick something you don’t actually like, you are going to have a tough time overcoming procrastination. And even if you do manage to pull it off through sheer will power, you risk attracting opportunities you don’t really want. If they turned out to be prestigious opportunities, you could be on your way to an enviable career thatend up burying you in private misery.
In Stuart’s case, he loved the process of curating the festival and threw himself into every task.
The third criterion says that you should be able to share your micro-passion widely. And when that sharing happens, so does the magic. By sharing the project, you transform the people in your network into your champions and recruiters.
Part of Stuart’s responsibilities involved speaking with the media about this festival and promoting it in his networks. His leadership skills—and love for this community-run festival—were on full display. It led to him being courted to run as a candidate for a political party, and then hired as an Executive Director for an arts council where he gets to be a champion and evangelist for the arts. This is his job today and he feels profoundly lucky to have found his way into it.
Just remember that you need to be truly excited by your micro-passion in order to get the opportunities you really want. When you’re authentically excited, you tend to share your project more widely and with more conviction. When people see the actual product you produced and get to experience it for themselves, it helps them “get it” and “get you”.
They may recognize something special in you that you are unaware of and offer you opportunities that you never would have known to ask for but are nevertheless uncannily fitting. You’ve essentially crowd-sourced the problem of discovering your career path.
The amplified power and reach of your sharing of your micropassion increases the number of good opportunities that will flow your way. And on the surface, this will just look like your luck is improving.
Now, sometimes we think we’re going to like a project due to peer influence or its perceived prestige. Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator startup incubator, once said, “Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”
By actually doing the micro-passion, you test your true level of interest. Maybe you liked the idea of it but didn’t enjoy the process. Maybe you enjoyed writing the songs but hated performing them on stage. Whichever the case, you get a chance to test drive your interest before making a bigger commitment. Along the way, hopefully you’ve picked up some new skills and formed some new connections, which makes this a no-lose situation however it turns out.
Finally, I want to point out that the two methods for discovering your career path: the systematic approach and the luck approach are not mutually exclusive. In my life, I have used both. In combination, you can enjoy the deliberateness of planning along with the benefits of lucky opportunities. I hope, no matter what your personal style is, this has given you some strategies and insights on how to find your ideal career.