Torrence wrote:
Employers will always keep the ones who produce the best work and trim from the ones who don't 'try as hard'.
That's absolutely not true. Some employers, perhaps. A great many will keep someone who outputs at 70% for $10/hr over a veteran who outputs at 95% but is at $18/hr.
People have real problems with luck, I guess for fear that it will invalidate their hard work. My current job is luck. I didn't make the person who held it before me decide to get out of the industry. I didn't set it up so a former co-worker of mine would be at that company and in a position to recommend me. That I took the job just weeks before my old company went under was complete luck -- people with far more experience than I are still out of work and I'm employed not because they're less qualified or didn't try as hard but pretty much just luck.
Now I've worked hard which gives me the ability to exploit that luck. If that former co-worker didn't think well of my work, he wouldn't have recommended me. If I was doing a poor job, I'd be fired rather than getting ready to go to the company Christmas party. But I don't think it cheapens my work and effort to admit that, yeah, it's pretty much luck that unknowingly landed me into a good job weeks before I would have been laid off otherwise and scraping to pay the mortgage in between sending out fifty resumes like some other people I know.