Cracking the Tech Career: Insider Advice on Landing a Job at Google, Microsoft, Apple, or any Top Tech Company

17On Luck, Leverage, and You

Success begets success. People who are successful at their job get stronger recommendations, get promoted faster, get cooler projects, broaden their network more, and get better opportunities across the board.

However, if you talk to successful people, they'll also point to a good amount of luck involved. They met just the right person, joined a company at just the right time, took some opportunity on a whim, or happened to stumble down a particularly lucrative path. How would they know where it would lead?

Most of us know that the truth lies in between these. It's luck, but it's also their work ethic, skills, intelligence, and other personal attributes.

There's another layer of complexity, though, and perhaps one of the best things you can do for your career: saying yes. These successful people said yes to opportunities.

Lucky opportunities pass you all the time. You won't and can't know that a coffee meeting, which you didn't really see the point of taking, will connect you to a to-be-pivotal person in your life. You won't and can't know that helping out your friend's company on the side will give you some skill that the next hot start-up will crave. You won't and can't know where many things will lead.

But what you can do is say yes to those little things that you normally wouldn't really feel like doing—because they just might be the stepping stone to something amazing.

Great careers are not linear so much as they are step functions. These lucky ...