Never accept career advice blindly.
Sometimes I get asked to do something like a brown bag lunch talk on careers and career advice. The above comic is always the first thing that I show the audience. If I leave them with nothing else, I want them to not simply follow the advice of some schmuck like me just because I/we have achieved some measure of “success”. If I can get the audience to think critically about my presentation then I have succeeded in the most important goal.
I like to think that I am reasonably good at what I do. After ten years in academia and twelve years in industry I have learned a few things that make me more effective as a researcher, engineer, and manager. Still, a significant degree of luck has also shaped my career path. Here are a few, off the top of my head:
1) Having my grad school interview schedule changed at the last minute and randomly meeting the person who would be my future advisor.
2) Finding a great postdoc position because I literally ran into a professor at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference in New York and he said that his lab had a job available.
3) My first software manager deciding to take a risk and hire me even though I had no formal training as a software engineer.
4) Getting my first software management position because the CEO happened to remember that I organized large research projects as a postdoc.
5) The startup I joined getting acquired by a FAANG nine months after they almost ran out of money and laid off 30% of the company.
Hard work is always necessary. A little bit of luck can make all the difference though. Survivorship bias pops up when only the successful people are around at the end. Put another way, the people who have gotten lucky are much more likely to be giving presentations than the people who never got a fortunate nod from the statistical universe. Always know that.
Comic from XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1827/
Associated explainer: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1827:_Survivorship_Bias