FEATURE ARTICLE
April 2003

Luck Is No Accident
By Al Levin

If your experience has been anything like mine, you’ve probably heard the following advice:

1. Make your career plans as soon as possible, preferably in high school or college at the latest.
   
2. Meet with your counselor and take tests that identify the name of the best occupation for you.
   
3. Don’t make the mistake of choosing a career until you are sure that there is a match with your skills, interests, and values.
   
4. Pursue your dream career and success will follow.
   
5. Don’t begin a career without having all of the skills.
   
6. Leave your job at age 65 and retire from your career.
   
   

When you think about today’s world of uncertainties, perhaps it’s time to reconsider the relevance of much of this advice. If you think that not much should change, consider how the same list would look if we were to replace the words "career" and "occupation" with either the words "marriage" or "spouse":

1. Make your marriage plans as soon as possible, preferably in high school or college at the latest.
   
2. Meet with your counselor and take tests that identify the name of the best spouse for you.
   
3. Don’t make the mistake of choosing a spouse until you are sure that there is a match with your skills, interests, and values.
   
4. Pursue your dream spouse and success will follow.
   
5. Don’t begin a marriage without having all of the skills.
   
6. Leave your spouse at age 65 and retire from your marriage.
   
   

How does the advice list sound now? If you were to actually provide this type of advice to someone you know, he or she would probably think that you were joking. As we all know, people don’t usually make their marriage plans in high school or even in college anymore. Not many people would take a test to determine the name of his or her future spouse. It’s probably impossible to find a spouse who is your exact match, nor would you want to marry that person anyway. Doesn’t the idea of pursuing your dream spouse sound a little like stalking? Has anyone delayed his or her marriage until both parties had all of the skills to be a spouse? And finally, since the divorce rate in the U.S. is already high, should we really encourage people to leave their spouses at age 65? As you can see, none of the suggestions on the second list really make any sense anymore. Does the first list concerning careers sound much better?

In our upcoming book, Luck Is No Accident: Making the Most of Happenstance in Your Life and Career, (Impact Publishers, in-press), John Krumboltz and I present a different approach to career planning. We believe that much of the traditional advice about choosing and planning a career is no longer the best strategy. We are not against planning per se, just as long as the plans are open to change. In these uncertain times (up and down stock market, threat of terrorism, corporate mergers, etc.) everyone’s career will continue to be effected by unexpected events on an individual, family, local community, state, national, and even international level.

So what is our advice? We believe that it is more important to for people to take action in order to create both planned and unplanned opportunities for themselves. Here is some of our advice:

1. Keep your career options open despite the pressure to make a decision before you are ready.
   
2. Meet with your counselor for help in challenging beliefs that keep you from taking action.
   
3. Take action (network, volunteer, job shadow, intern, etc.), even if you think your plans will change.
   
4. Have multiple dreams and test each dream one step at a time.
   
5. Go for the job opportunity, even if you don’t possess all of the skills.
   
6. When you’re ready to leave your job, find new ways of helping others.
   
   

Despite the fact that career counseling has traditionally been about eliminating indecision and minimizing unplanned events, we came to the realization that chance events are a normal part of everyone’s life, and it will be important for people to make the most of these experiences. Our upcoming book includes numerous stories of real people who created luck for themselves by keeping and open mind, taking action, and making the most of unexpected opportunities. In the words of a recent high school graduate, "It’s a good idea to have a game plan in life, but you should probably write in pencil and have an eraser ready." We believe that may be the best career advice of all.

Al Levin, Ed.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Counselor Education at California State University, Sacramento, and can be reached at alevin@csus.edu. The book, Luck Is No Accident, will be published by Impact Publishers (www.impactpublishers.com), release date to be announced.