The number that decided a career

Ask adults how they chose their work and a surprising number describe something small: a teacher who said one sentence, a summer job taken for money, a subject chosen because a friend chose it. Very few describe a plan.

Researchers who study career paths have a name for this. Planned happenstance is the observation that most careers are shaped by unforeseen events, and that the people who benefit from such events are not luckier than everyone else. They behave differently in four identifiable ways.

They are curious: they investigate things that are not obviously useful. They are persistent: they stay with something awkward long enough to find out whether it becomes interesting, which many things only do after the unpleasant beginning. They are flexible about plans, treating a stated goal as a current best guess rather than a promise. And they say yes to things that are slightly too difficult, which is where most unexpected opportunities are hiding.

None of this is advice to abandon planning. A person with no direction drifts, and drift is not the same as openness. The distinction is between a plan held tightly, which breaks when the world changes, and a direction held loosely, which bends.

For a student the most useful part is the last behaviour. Nearly every interesting thing that happens to you in the next five years will arrive attached to something you were not confident you could do. The confidence was never the requirement. Saying yes before you feel ready is not recklessness; it is how the readiness gets built.