They say that "you make your own luck." But the people who say that typically are showing you their winning lottery ticket or just after their story about how they hit it off with a guy in the elevator who ended up being the interviewer for their first job. Or maybe those are the sour grapes from beginning my career during the financial crisis. While luck has something to do with it, there's wisdom in preparing for a big break or, to put it in nerdy terms, in increasing the surface area for your luck. When it comes to career, a successful friend of mine gave me this formula: doing good work, networking, and Fortuna.
For people with desk jobs, the second ingredient in my friend's formula can sort of be done online: you can build a digital network on LinkedIn or in other more niche (and more useful) places in the digital world. My company's co-founder, Dharmesh Shah, talks a lot about how posting on LinkedIn can be a competitive advantages (in posts like this one and this one). He's worth following just to see how he does it. If my LinkedIn feed is at all a representative sample, though, some people think that building your network and reputation is entirely about posting, not about what to post, and their output is pointless puffery. Maybe it's the curmudgeon in me, but I think these folks, even if their social footprint is enormous, aren't positioning themselves for career success. One glance is all it takes to realize this person doesn't know much, or at least to conclude they don't have much to say. The right approach to writing about your work should be a little like the old 'show your work' axiom from math class—show that you deserve a decent grade for your actual work.
Dr. Michael Kucks showed me this in my college physics class. I and just about everyone else in the class was a liberal arts major. We were so afraid to fail this math-required class that we were just about afraid to try. Kucks attacked this fear head-on, by opening every class period with a 5-minute pop quiz. We walk into class and see, on the whiteboard, some physics problem to solve. You could get five points per day. Simple writing your name and copying the problem onto a piece of paper was worth 1 point, or 20% of the total. If you got the right answer, and anyone who'd read the homework likely could get it, you might get another point. 60% of the available points were for showing how you went from problem to solution, including both the maths and the logic. Kucks had us writing words in physics class! Even if you got the math wrong, you could get a 4/5 if the logic was right. Why? Because writing about how you work through a challenge shows that you understand it. If you can teach or explain something, you've got it.
Online writing, especially about work, needs to be showing your work. Writing that glamorizes or valorizes the writer doesn't do anything for the writer's luck. Writing that shows the solution or demonstrates a sound approach to a complex challenge, writing that teaches the reader, that's going to increase the surface area on which the writer might get lucky. People may hit the like button for those AI-generated tepid takes you see on LinkedIn, but they will remember the name of someone who teaches them something.
Why don't people write? Why don't I write? We say that we don't have the time. This reminds me of an early-pandemic "ask me anything" session with our execs. Some people submitted questions about the business, working from home, and important stuff. Some of us were silly: what shows have you watched? I asked what books they's read. Something funny happened: each exec had watched Tiger King or Ted Lasso, but in reply to the books question they said, "who has the time for that?" You start and finish most books if, instead of a few nights of binge-watching, you cracked open a book. It's not that the time isn't there, it's that we choose to do something else with it.
Choosing to write, and to publish, not only helps grow your network and increases the chances of career luck, it is the process of finishing your learning. When you explain your experience, you take it out of your mind and analyze it. Knowing what actually happened and theorizing about why it worked (or didn't) is how you learn. Imagine the opposite: never writing or talking about what you do. In that sad world while you might succeed or fail, you'll identify with the work you did in a thinly, without consideration. No one will hear about it; no one will learn from your experience, least of all you.
For every snarky comment, there are 10x as many people admiring your work.