What Looks Like Career Luck Isn't Random
- 12 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Jeff Olson's The Slight Edge offers a useful way to think about luck: opportunity is not always a random break that arrives out of the blue. Often, what looks like luck from the outside, is preparedness practiced long enough that it creates better conditions for opportunity.
When a career transition feels stalled, most of us instinctively look for evidence that the work is finally paying off: the interview request, the recruiter message, the promotion conversation, the first client inquiry, or any visible sign that things are moving.
Yes, those signs matter because they're real outcomes and wanting them does not make you impatient or unstrategic.
The problem is that the earliest phase of a career transition often has very little visible evidence to offer. You may be learning the language of a new industry, building confidence, testing assumptions, strengthening relationships, mastering new skills, and becoming more credible before any external metric has enough time to respond.
That stillness can make a thoughtful, strategic career pivot feel like waiting, even when the work is invisibly changing the conditions around your next opportunity.
In the last post about the foundation phase of career change, we established that the work often happens below the surface before it becomes visible.
This post is about what to measure while you're in that phase: the deposits, leading indicators, and career equity that tell you whether opportunity is forming before it has fully arrived.
The Career Transition That Looked Like Luck
In 2019, after 12 years in television marketing, I started studying project management at 5AM before work.
I consumed any free resource, listened to countless podcasts on my commute, practiced questions before the rest of the house was awake.
For fifteen months, the visible indicators barely moved. My title was still the same, no bump in salary, my LinkedIn profile still said I worked in TV, and nothing about my public professional life would have connected me to project management at all.
If you had looked only at the external dashboard, you would have seen a career transition with very little measurable progress.
Then, in March 2020, a recruiter reached out to gauge my interest in a project management role.
From the outside, that kind of moment can look like a sudden stroke of luck. From my vantage point, I knew it was fifteen months of small deposits finally becoming visible.
It was applying project management thinking to projects I was already leading in my television role, and sharing what I was learning publicly on professional platforms. All of it while I was assessing whether this new direction had substance.
That's why Olson's idea is key here. Luck is often described as preparedness meeting opportunity, but his interpretation is much more insightful: preparedness practiced consistently can create the conditions that make opportunity more likely to appear, easier to recognize, and more useful when it does.
Why Invisible Progress Feels So Hard to Trust
The hardest part of a career transition is not always the work itself. Sometimes, it's continuing to make deposits before the account shows a balance.
In project management we use leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators are the actions and conditions that make a future result more likely. Lagging indicators are the outcomes that confirm what has already occurred.
In a career transition, lagging indicators are things like:
interview requests
job offers
promotions
client inquiries
audience growth
revenue
public recognition
Leading indicators are more subtle
skills practiced
conversations initiated
assumptions tested
portfolio assets created
feedback collected
visibility increased
Outcomes are important, but they are usually late-stage evidence. When you use outcome metrics too early, the absence of visible results can start to look like proof that nothing is working.
In the early phase, a flat lagging indicator may simply mean the leading indicators have not had enough time to convert.
Career Equity Compounds Before It Converts
I think of this as career equity.
Also called career capital, career equity is the accumulated value of the skills, relationships, proof, reputation, and visibility you've built over time.
You cannot always see career equity while it's compounding. A conversation may not lead anywhere this week. A post may not get much traction. A skill may not produce an immediate role change. A credential may not immediately make you feel transformed.
Each deposit can still change the project conditions.
You understand the language a little better. You ask a sharper question. You notice a pattern you would have missed before. You can explain your career transition with more clarity. You become easier to refer, easier to remember, and easier to trust with the kind of opportunity you are working toward.
This is why stalled days need to be evaluated carefully. A day with no visible result can still be a deposit day if it strengthens the conditions that make the future opportunity more likely.
Where Preparedness Meets Positive Risk
In project management, risk is not limited to what could go wrong.
A risk is any uncertain event or condition that could affect the project, which means some risks are threats and some are opportunities. Positive risk is an uncertain event that, if it occurs, has a beneficial impact on the project. Project managers can exploit, enhance, share, or accept these positive risks.
A common version of positive risk shows up in construction projects.
A crew finishes a phase early because the weather cooperated, and the schedule slack that opens up gets used to add a feature that was already scoped and valued, just cut earlier when the budget or timeline couldn't support it. This is an example of "accept," one of the four strategies to manage positive risk.
The same applies to your own career change project but with an important distinction. Where the construction team is accepting an opportunity that presented on its own, fifteen months of deposits before a recruiter calls is an example of "enhance." This is the strategy where you actively and deliberately increase the probability or impact of positive risk or opportunity occurring.
And that essentially supports Olson's argument that consistent, unglamorous effort done over time is what turns luck from something that happens to you into something you're positioned to create.
That's where preparedness and opportunity connect.
In PM terms, that is an opportunity-enhancement strategy. You are strengthening the conditions that make a positive risk more likely to happen and more valuable if it does.
Studying before work did not guarantee that a recruiter would reach out to me in March 2020.
But applying what I was learning, gaining confidence in the skills, and sharing my knowledge publicly, drastically enhanced the likelihood of the opportunity coming my way, which would not have happened fifteen months earlier.
The MANAGE Problem: Uncertainty Without Evidence
The emotional challenge is that you cannot prove the deposits are working while they are still compounding.
There is no dashboard that says, “Your career equity increased by 3% this week,” or progress bar showing the exact moment when learning becomes credibility, or credibility creates opportunity.
This is where the MANAGE Framework becomes a useful and tangible tool.
Managing uncertainty in a career transition means separating what you can control from what you cannot, then creating certainty anchors around the actions that keep the project healthy.
→ The full MANAGE Framework, including the uncertainty audit and certainty anchors, is here.
What to Track While Opportunity Is Still Forming
If your career transition feels like just waiting, check whether you are watching only the lagging indicators.
For the next 30 days, try tracking the deposits instead:
What did I practice this week or contribute to that makes my next opportunity more likely?
What conversation did I initiate or deepen?
What skill did I improve?
What assumption did I test?
What action did I repeat even without immediate feedback?
What did I learn that changes the next wave of the plan?
These questions keep you from abandoning the project before the early indicators have had time to do their work.
The Deposit for Today
When you reframe from waiting to depositing, the daily question changes.
Instead of asking, “Why hasn’t the opportunity arrived yet?” you ask, “What can I do today that makes the right opportunity more likely?”
That question puts agency back where it belongs.
It does not give you full control, because career transitions are too complex for that. Timing, market conditions, relationships, health, family responsibilities, energy, and luck all still play a role. But it gives you a practical place to better navigate uncertainty.
You can make the next deposit. You can strengthen the leading indicators. You can build career equity before the return is visible.
That is often what opportunity looks like: deposits subtly growing a balance before the "lucky break" arrives.
Want more strategy like this each week?
I write the Sunday Strategy Brief — a short weekly email on managing career transitions like strategic projects (systems, decision-making, and momentum when results are lagging).
This is part 7 of The Intuitive PM Approach to Career Pivots — 8 Frameworks for Treating Your Career Transition Like the Strategic Project It Is.
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