Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Think of the best thing that has ever happened in your career. Now sit with the uncomfortable second question: how much of that was actually you, and how much was just where you happened to be standing when the door opened? Most people never honestly answer that.
I think you owe it to yourself to.
You are standing in a checkout line at a convenience store. It is late. The person in front of you has a lottery ticket and a six-pack. They are laughing at the news on the speaker.
They are buying their dream. You check your phone. You have an email that says you got the job. You won.
You think: I am smart. I am fast. I am the person. Fair enough.
It feels like a personal victory. You worked for it. You stayed up late. You sent the right emails.
But wait. Look around. There was a line. There was a phone.
There was a slot of time. If you had walked in ten minutes earlier, or if that person had bought the lottery ticket and left, the slot would have closed. The job would be gone. You would be standing there without the job, but you would still be you.
The outcome changed, but your talent did not change that fast. You cannot improve a process whose outcome you have already credited to your own judgment. That is the mistake of the lottery winner. They think they bought the winning numbers because they have a lucky hand.
They will keep playing with the same hand until they run out of money. We do the same thing with our careers. We take the prize and we put our own name on it. We say we figured it out.
We say we are the genius. I want to walk you through the accounting of my own career. I want to look at the things I did right and the things that were just luck. I want to show you that the distinction matters more to the person who succeeded than to anyone else.
Because the person who succeeded, the winner, thinks the prize is proof of their greatness. They think they can do it again. They think they can build a machine that always prints money. They want to improve a process that is, in fact, just a matter of timing.
In the next few beats, we will look at what really happened.
I want to quote myself directly. It is a strange thing to do, but the sentence is important enough to keep whole. I said: "There are some truths in the claim that my background is interesting: Not many people in the world have attended Harvard, MIT, and Oxford -- all with full scholarships -- let alone someone like me, an ordinary student from a developing country on the far side of Southeast Asia who barely spoke English and was without any knowledge of western thoughts when he entered MIT in 2004." This is the honest accounting.
I look at that sentence now and I see two different things mixed together. One is the literal list: the schools, the money, the geography. The other is the story I tell myself about how I got here. I was a "troubled kid" who couldn't fit in.
I was an outcast. That sounds like a reason for success, doesn't it? It sounds like I was rejected so many times that I became desperate, and desperation turned into intelligence. I want to introduce you to a French thinker named Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sartre was a smart man who spent a lot of time in cafés thinking about freedom. He had a problem with this idea. He called it "bad faith." It is a fancy way of saying you lie to yourself about your own motives.
Sartre watched people try to make themselves feel safe. He saw a man who wanted to be a great actor but was too scared to try. Instead of saying "I am afraid to fail," he said "I am a person who cannot be an actor because I have a bad back." He took a fear and turned it into a fact.
He pretended his fear was his character. I did the same thing. I looked at my lack of connection to other students and I decided that this was my superpower. I decided that being lonely made me smarter.
I decided that reading books when everyone else was playing made me special. I did not see that I was just alone. I turned my isolation into a virtue. That is the lie.
That is the accounting error. I was not a genius who studied in a vacuum. I was just a kid who had nobody to talk to. I want to show you a concrete image to make this clearer.
Imagine you are in a boat in the middle of the ocean. You are rowing hard. You are sweating. You are pulling the oars up and down.
You feel like you are doing all the work. You are powerful. You are strong. But look over the side of the boat.
There is a current. It is a very strong current. It is pushing the boat to the right. You are rowing to the left to fight it.
You feel the strain. You feel like your muscles are the only thing that matter. You think, "I am doing this. I am a strong rower."
You are absolutely right. You are rowing. You are working hard. But if you take away the current, if the ocean were flat and still, you would get nowhere.
You would be rowing in circles. You would be tired, but you would have not moved an inch. The current did the work. The current carried you from point A to point B.
My education was like that current. I read the books. I prepared the application. I had the habits.
All of that was me rowing. But I also had the situation. I was in a place where nobody else read. I was in a place where the idea of an architecture student reading the "canonical text" was rare.
I was in a boat that had a very strong current pushing me toward the top schools. I could not have rowed to MIT if the ocean had been calm. I could not have rowed to MIT if the current did not exist. When I say I was prepared, I am not lying.
I did the work. But I am wrong to think that the work was the only thing that mattered. I am wrong to think that the current does not exist. Most people, when they succeed, they look at the water and they say, "Look at my muscles.
Look at how strong I am." They forget about the current. They forget about where they started. They forget about the luck of being in a boat moving with the tide.
They think the victory is entirely theirs. They think they can replicate it.
You might be stop listening right now. If you are a winner, it feels insulting to hear that you only got there because the tide was running in your direction. If you are a person who worked hard, and you see someone else coasting on a "current" that you cannot feel, the word "luck" sounds like a slap in the face. It sounds like you are saying their effort didn't matter.
It sounds like you are saying the whole thing is a scam. You might be right about that feeling. I am not here to take away your credit. I am here to protect your future.
You have to look at the accounting. If you think you are a genius because you bought a winning lottery ticket, you will go back to the store tomorrow and you will buy another ticket. You will bet your life on the same roll of numbers. But if you think you are lucky, you will look at the situation.
You will ask, "What was the lottery machine?" and "Who was the person in front of me?" You will look for the process. You will say, "I cannot replicate the luck, but I can replicate the process that created the luck."
I want to talk about my own education. I said: "I may be an outlier, but I was not a genius or a special one. I wasn't even that good as a student when I was young -- in fact, I never was a good student if you look at my GPA. In fact, I find it difficult to memorize things, so I could only wish that I had the photographic memory.
And the list goes on." That is the honest accounting.
"So, today, I'd like to sit down, reflect, and write about how and why I think I was able to obtain a few precious academic opportunities. I was lucky -- that's for sure. In my earlier posts, I discussed my childhood and how I was always different from other kids in the way I saw everything around me. I was regarded by most of my teachers as the "troubled kid" who couldn't come to grip with his role as a student."
That is what I wrote once, and that is the honest truth. I tell myself I did it because I was smart. I tell myself I had a plan. But I was a "troubled kid."
I was the one nobody asked to the party. I was the one who did not fit the shape of the box they had built for students. I was not the star pupil. I was the outcast.
I think I got into those places because I was lonely. I think I read all those books because I did not have friends to talk to. I think I was ready for MIT because I had nowhere else to go. It is a strange thing to admit.
It sounds like I am saying I was just the lucky guy who sat in the right boat. I want to talk about where you are right now. You are an architect. You are a designer.
You have a project that is finished. It is on the board. It is printed. The client is happy.
The price is paid. The contract is signed. You feel good. You feel like you earned this.
You fixed the model. You argued with the contractor. You delivered exactly what they asked for. That is the work you did.
That is the part that is yours. It feels solid. It feels real. Look at the project again.
Did anyone question the requirement? Did anyone ask why the building had to be this color, or why this wall had to go here? Or did they just say, "Yes, of course," and move on? Did the reviewer sit with a red pen and tear your work apart?
Or did they simply nod and say, "This is fine"? If nobody questioned it, if nobody pushed back, if nobody asked you to defend the choice, then the quality of the work is not proven. It is just not proven. It is floating.
The work you did is real, but the fact that the work is good is not proven. I want to introduce you to a Greek idea called "The Ship of Theseus." It is about a ship that is kept in a harbor. Over time, the wood rots.
The captain replaces every single plank. Every nail is removed and put back. Eventually, there is not a single piece of the original ship left. The ship is new, but it is the same ship.
The question is: is it the same ship? Or is it a new ship that just looks like the old one? Your career is like that ship. You might feel like you are building a new career every day.
You are building your reputation. You are building your name. You are replacing the old work with the new work. You are learning new skills.
You are changing. But the question is: is the ship you are sailing on still the same one? Or is it a different one? If you take the luck out of the equation—if you take the timing out of the equation—if you take the fact that nobody questioned your work out of the equation—what is left?
What is the real ship? What is the real you? I think the answer is that the ship is not the pieces. The ship is the structure.
The ship is the logic. The ship is the process. The ship is the decision. If you cannot explain the decision, then you are not sailing the ship.
You are just riding on a raft that someone else built. You are just a passenger. Imagine you are a driver. You are driving a car.
You are going down the highway. You are doing a great job. You are staying in your lane. You are obeying the speed limit.
You are a good driver. But look at the steering wheel. Do you know how it works? Do you know how the gears shift?
Do you know how the engine starts? You are driving the car. You are doing the work. But the car is doing the work, too.
The car is moving. The car is stopping. The car is turning. You are just the driver.
You are not the car. You are not the engine. You are not the car. You are just the driver.
I said: "How did I get into MIT then? In other words, how did an ordinary architecture student from a third-grade technical college in Thailand get admitted to one of the world's most prominent institutions to learn about western theories and architecture and urban design with a full scholarship? The short answer is that 'I was prepared to go to MIT' from the first day of my student life as an ordinary student from a technical college."
I was prepared. That much is true. But preparation is a thing you can only test against a door that happens to open, and I do not get to run the experiment the other way, to see what the same effort looks like in front of a door that stays shut. So here is the full accounting, and it is shorter than the story I used to tell myself. I drove the car. I do not know how much of the road was already downhill.
Go back to the best thing that ever happened in your career. You already answered how much of it was you. Now answer the harder half. What would you have to see to admit you got the easier hand? And once you saw it, would you actually change anything, or just stop taking credit for it?