How is your Return on Luck (ROL) these days? As you advance in your legal career, you may not be paying attention to fortuitous events and opportunities that, if managed correctly, can propel your working life forward faster than you could have imagined. But you may miss out if you are constantly nose-down and doing your “worky work, busy bee” routine. By keeping your head in the sand, you may not even see that something you are doing is actually an opportunity for you to make critical moves and avoid pitfalls as you navigate through your working life. The career opportunity that comes when you are least expecting it may be the one you need to jump on before the train leaves you behind. Legal career paths take many forms, and you don’t want to make the wrong decision at the next fork in the road by being too busy to see the opportunity in front of you.
“A nine-year study found extremely successful entrepreneurs weren’t any luckier than those in a control group—but they did get the best “return on luck” or ROL….Jim Collins and Morten Hansen summarized their findings in the New York Times. They found that “10Xers”—companies that outperformed their competitors by a factor of 10 at a certain point in time—managed to capitalize on lucky events and avoid catastrophic outcomes through “productive paranoia, combined with empirical creativity and fanatic discipline.””
Read: Study Finds Most Successful People Managed to Get the Best Return on Luck at the ABA Journal