What luck has to do with it.

Someone in the Toronto Star writes about how people keep telling her she's lucky when really it's because of her hard work. That's interesting to me, because my professional success is entirely due to luck, but people keep telling me that it's not luck, it's because I'm smart and talented and work hard and learn quickly. A lot of people seem really invested in believing this, but it simply is not the reality I've experienced.

It is true that I work hard and learn quickly (can't speak to whether I'm smart and talented because my smarts and talents, whatever they may be, are all that I know), but that's not why I have a good job. From the fact that it took four years for me to convince an employer to hire me for a minimum-wage food-service job because no one wanted to hire someone who had never had a job, to the prospective employer just after my graduation who wouldn't hire me because I have a degree and the (bilingual tech-support) job didn't require one (still don't know why I got as far as the second interview), the vast majority of my job-seeking life has been characterized by employers who were unwilling to hire me for a job I am perfectly capable of doing. Being smart, talented, hard-working, and quick-learning has never been enough; what success I've had has been all about luck.

Here's all the luck it took me to get here:

In Grade 12, the first OAC French class (which was traditionally taken in Grade 12) conflicted with Grade 12 Music. Since technically you don't have to take the two OAC French classes in order and I was top in the class at French, they put me in the second OAC French class (which was traditionally taken in your OAC year (i.e. Grade 13 for the young'uns and the non-Ontarians)). Since you don't do your university apps until your OAC year, when people from the French-language and bilingual universities would come to talk to my class, I'd ignore the presentation and sit quietly reading the literature they handed out. It was in one of these booklets that I saw that you could major in translation. If I hadn't been in the "wrong" French class, I would never have learned that translation is a job that people can do.

In OAC, I finally got my first paying job. Why? Because it came up in the interview that I wanted to study translation, and the business owner's sister-in-law is a translator. If it hadn't been for that coincidence, I probably would never have gotten a paying job before university (which would have hindered my ability to get a paying job after starting university).

There was an entrance exam to enter the translation program. I applied to the program and was accepted pending a successful entrance exam, but I was never informed of the date and time of the exam. I happened to wander onto their website one day and found that the exam had taken place two weeks prior. I contacted them in a panic, and they very kindly let me come in and write the exam privately. If they hadn't extended that kindness (despite the fact that the number of candidates was already 10 or 20 times the number of available places) I would never have gotten into the program.

Once in, I managed to get an on-campus job doing tech support. I'm good at tech support, but people tend not to believe me on this because I've never formally studied computer science. So how did I swing the job? Because I was a translation student who had been on exchange to Germany, and the person doing the hiring was a translation grad of German descent who was self-taught in her own tech support skills. It was a good student job, well-paying as such jobs go, awesome people to work with and good opportunity to network with profs and staff. If tech support was being run by some comp sci grad, my resume probably would never have gotten looked at twice.

In the hopes of finding a full-time paying summer job, I applied for every paid work-experience and internship program I could find even if it wasn't translation. I also applied for a translation practicum, which are generally unpaid. So imagine my surprise when I was offered a paid practicum! It wasn't until I started working that I learned this paid practicum fell under one of the other programs I'd applied for - I'd had no idea they had translation placements! If I hadn't applied for this seemingly unrelated program, I would never have gotten my practicum.

However, despite this offer of a paid practicum, I was seriously considering declining it. It was for only a month, and my on-campus job had offered me a full-time paid summer position. I mentioned this to the person who had originally hired me at my on-campus job, and she insisted that I should go and take the practicum because it was such a good and important experience, and arranged things so that I could do the practicum for one month and keep my own job for the other three. I hadn't understood how important the practicum was, but because she had studied translation she'd seen how important it was to her classmates. So if I hadn't had a boss who not only knew better than I did how important this was, but was also kind and generous enough to let me take this long-term career development step at the expense of making her summer staffing issues more complicated, I would never have done my practicum.

On my first day at my practicum, I got my first text to translate with an administrative workflow sheet attached that included a translation time estimate. I was told to ignore the translation time estimate because I was just a student, I wasn't expected to work that fast. But I decided, just for the hell of it, to try to translate the text within the allotted time. I was at a stage in my professional development where I wasn't sure when to stop poking at a text, so I decided I'd work on it for the allotted time and see what happens. If it wasn't nearly good enough, it was only my first text and I had a whole month to improve. So I translated my text in the allotted time, and it was perfectly fine. The only things that needed changing were a result of my inexperience, which I couldn't have improved by poking at it longer. So I did the same thing for the next text. And the next one. And so on and so on for the entire month I was there. Some texts were especially difficult and took me longer than the allotted time, but the vast majority of them I did complete within the allotted time, basically because it was as good a method as any of telling when to stop poking at a text. Unbeknownst to me, they were on a huge push to improve productivity, and they were so impressed by a student who could meet professional productivity levels that ultimately they decided to hire me. (Although it wasn't that simple, it took a year and some other random behind-the-scenes drama before that became solidified, so I didn't have the luxury of doing my fourth year secure in the knowledge I had a job waiting for me.) If I hadn't decided on a whim to try to race the clock, I would never have been offered a job.

This wasn't my entire job search arc, of course. There were hundreds of resumes unanswered, years spent unable to even get a job at Tim Hortons, one prospective employer unwilling to even consider me because I hadn't finished university while another prospective employer for what appeared to be an identical job unwilling to hire me because I had a degree, people unwilling to hire me part-time during school because I mentioned I'd be interested in doing full-time in the summer, all kinds of completely arbitrary decisions I don't understand. That's how far brains, talent, hard work and quick learning got me. But what I've listed above is literally every single time I have made any sort of advance in employment and career, and literally every single one was because of luck.