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Career advice for people with bad luck

chiefofstuff.substack.com

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Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#421

Post by koverda »

triceratops wrote: post #398
Reedx wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To dismiss as dangerous is silly. Here are the 12 rules. Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back Rule 2: Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you Rule 4: Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them Rule 6: Set y…

Rule 6 taken together with the maxim "Nobody's perfect" means a world where nobody can criticize anything, ever. Doesn't sound ideal to me. Rule 10 is self-contradictory, since it doesn't specify what "precise in your speech" means. Rule 11 is oddly-specific (why just skateboarding and not any other risky activity?), and reads like it's thrown in there to look "cool" ("how do you do fellow kids?" meme). Rule 12 is va…

I think you may be judging a book by the cover here. I'd imagine that those 12 rules are metaphors, and expounded upon.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#422

Post by achillesheels »

mgolawala wrote: post #246
designium wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most opinions and suggestions are based on the "standard path of success". If we use beauty contest as an analogy of success, only one will be the winner and all losers. In case of North American perspective, success looks like this: - Have good academic credentials - Have good big corporation names on your resume - Have good connections - Have nice car - Have nice house - Have kids, partner, etc. - Travel a lot when…

Well said. I was reading the responses, and seeing the implicit group consensus on what "success" looks like. The thing though is, your entire life outcome is based on luck. There is nothing you can really do to compensate for that, besides getting back up, brushing the dust of your knees, counting your blessings and keep going. List of things that are luck: 1) Where you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time…

Luck presupposes different outcomes of what will be determined. How can a person have different outcomes from the origin of their conception?

I encourage you to read my essay On the Skill of Luck:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XKPJ9ZY/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_...

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#423

Post by FabHK »

KerryJones wrote: post #249
LarryDarrell wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's because there isn't much advice to give. My answer, having checked a few of your boxes... Your lifetime wages are going to be lower than many of your peers. This is unlikely to change. Adjust your worldview accordingly. Don't assume any debt that relies on increasing future earnings to be comfortable. By all means, keep trying, but stay level headed. Success for most is not always right around the corn…

I don't think luck is as "random" of a factor as much as most people think it is. Checkout "Luck Factor" by Dr. Richard Wiseman. I do think there are a lot of things you can due to get probability more on your side: - Keep your eyes open for opportunities and look for the upside ("be optimistic" is the woo-woo version), but it's been proven in experiments that you'll catch things others won't - Only keep friends arou…

Counterpoint: Luck (broadly seen, including your genetic disposition and where you’ve been born - you might not call it luck, but it’s certainly not something you’ve chosen or earned) plays a much bigger role than most people think it does.

Source and book recommendation:

Robert H. Frank: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167404/su...

> In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. In Success and Luck, bestselling author and New York Times economics columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success—and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy.

Good summary in his article in The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/why-luc...

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#424

Post by FabHK »

dvt wrote: post #367
Pamar wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting. Can you expand it a bit, please?

Philosophy major here (I jokingly tout myself as a trained philosopher ). Philosophy is a big field with different schools of thought. In the US/UK, the primary school is known as "analytic (philosophy)" which is focused on tight arguments, precise language, and clarity of thought (see Russell, Wittgenstein, Lewis, Godel). This is contrasted by European -- in particular, French -- "continental (philosophy)" which wax…

Just to clarify, and defend the old continent a bit: while it certainly originated German Idealism and its descendants all the way to post-structuralism and (gasp) “critical theory”, today of course you can find proponents of both schools (the continental/hermeneutic/postmodern and the analytic) on all continents.

And regarding the gp: most philosophy programs will have classes in informal and some even in formal logic, to Goedel’s incompleteness theorems and way beyond.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#425

Post by brabel »

pmiller2 wrote: post #369
protonimitate wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great advice. I see a lot of people in tech with inflated ideas of what success means, and they're almost all tied strictly to salary/net worth. Yeah, having money is nice, but if that's all you base happiness/idea of success on, its going to be a bumpy road. >There are a lot of self-conscious IT people in the midwest making $70k/year feeling like failures I understand how this can point of view can develop, but one…

> Yeah, having money is nice, As someone who was broke for many years and now is less broke (cash is flowing, there's money in my accounts, but I'm deeply in negative net worth due to student debt), I think you're understating the issue, vastly. Simply put, money is freedom. If you have it, you can do things people who don't have it can't. If you have enough of it, you can do just about anything. And, I'm not necessa…

> If you have enough money, you can send your kids to a good school and get them off to the best possible start in life.

> If you have an absurd amount of money, you don't need to worry about going bankrupt from getting sick.

I don't know where you're from, but most rich countries, and even some poorer ones, have free, quality education for all, and health care tends to be nearly free... if you get sick, the government will support you for as long as needed. If you're from a very poor country, sorry about that... maybe you should consider migrating to a better country, if you have skills that are in demand, that's pretty easy nowadays!

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#428

Post by FabHK »

KerryJones wrote: post #249
LarryDarrell wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's because there isn't much advice to give. My answer, having checked a few of your boxes... Your lifetime wages are going to be lower than many of your peers. This is unlikely to change. Adjust your worldview accordingly. Don't assume any debt that relies on increasing future earnings to be comfortable. By all means, keep trying, but stay level headed. Success for most is not always right around the corn…

I don't think luck is as "random" of a factor as much as most people think it is. Checkout "Luck Factor" by Dr. Richard Wiseman. I do think there are a lot of things you can due to get probability more on your side: - Keep your eyes open for opportunities and look for the upside ("be optimistic" is the woo-woo version), but it's been proven in experiments that you'll catch things others won't - Only keep friends arou…

> - Learn about probability (Fooled by Randomness is a good start). If you constantly expose yourself to more chances of success, _odds are_, you'll start to find more of it.

A) You really want to identify gambles with positive expectation. If you constantly expose yourself to “more chances of success” with negative expectation (such as going to the casino for the chance of winning big), you’ll end up ruined.

B) Even if you can identify gambles with positive expectation, the more resources you have initially, the more you can afford to gamble. Thus, people initially deprived of luck might have less chance of catching up, let alone making it big.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#429

Post by specitley »

larrik wrote: post #150
2sk21 wrote: post #6

Having worked for a dying tech startup at one point in the early 2000s - I spent time agonizing over the fact that if I quit, the company would become unviable - I was one of the key technical people and was the only person with a good understanding of our entire product. After much dithering, I did ultimately leave and the company did fold shortly thereafter. I did feel bad at the time but in retrospect, I have come…

I feel like this situation calls for making you a partner. If you are SO valuable the company can't even survive without you, then you ARE the company and should be treated as such.

I’m in this position now as the only developer in a successful company that has been operating in lean startup mode for years and every employee has become “irreplaceable” with no contingency plans. I brought partnership up with the owner and he wouldn’t consider it. It’s going to be rough For them when I leave and any “friendships” will definitely be erased.

Re: Career advice for people with bad luck

#430

Post by FabHK »

miguelmota wrote: post #405
chosenbreed37 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car. Look inward for contentment. Try therapy if your shitty childhood and shitty parents made inward a hard place to look. I'd recommend the following: 1. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius 2. 12 Rules for Life - Jordan B Peterson 3. Letters from a self made merchant - John Graham

I've read 12 Rules for Life and disliked that Peterson uses a lot of Disney movie and bible references to support his claims. He makes some good points every once in a while but the book is unnecessarily verbose. I recommend reading the cliff notes to understand 90% of the book.

He uses Disney quotes to support his contention that there are profound, yet universal archetypes and myths that pop up everywhere - even in Disney movies.
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