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Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

Wah.

>The vast majority of your lifetime income will come from a dozen or fewer opportunities that you happen to be in a position to take advantage of, whether it's a new job offer or a high-profile project you volunteer for or a startup that takes off

Is this really true? I'm still way too early in my career to know. But I'd have thought if you stick with the more "traditional" route, your income would be fairly consistent (as opposed to something similar to the startup lottery, for example).

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Even if you stick with the traditional route, having a tiny initial advantage for your first job will have compounding results over your lifetime. This is significant enough that people who graduate college during a recession on average have a 9% lower salary during the first 10 years of working [0].

Many people can tell you about their "big break". That one success that seemed to cascade into other successes. Whether this is a real phenomenon or simply an illusion of memory, I don't know. It's quite possible that if that big event hadn't taken place, there'd have been a similar one just a little later, taking the person on a different, but equally pleasant path. I suggest you not trust individual narratives, only systematic analysis.

[0] http://www.nber.org/digest/nov06/w12159.html

The big break has also an important psychological effect that acts basically like compound interest.

It certainly feels like I have had a series of lucky events in my own life, but who knows...

The opportunities are transition points, not isolated events. Like moving from 100k/yr salary to 400k or whatever. OP is saying (in my understanding) that the bulk of your outcome will be determined by the magnitude of those transitions.

No. It's just the poster's belief masquerading as fact (with helpful quantification: 'vast majority', 'dozen or fewer').

He's talking about opportunities. For sure, if you keep doing what you're doing, you will have consistent income. But what if, one day, your boss came to you with a novel, difficult problem that no one in the company, and perhaps in your industry, had already solved? The argument goes, having an arsenal of advanced math at your disposal would make you more likely to solve that difficult, novel problem, and set you up to be handsomely rewarded.

You don't often get "handsomely rewarded" for doing what people consider to be your job, even if you do it much better than anybody else. The opportunities are when you get to jump to a different role, getting promoted or going to a different company or using your insight to start your own company.

That's one way of looking at it, but you don't just happen to have those skills. You get them from experience and practice - or doing well at the 99% that doesn't feel important.

This arguement reminds me of people who focus on a key, heroic play in sports, rather than all the good and bad that led up to it.

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