Building Opportunity

Nora and one of our friends were in the same doctoral program long ago, and they’ve been writing back and forth over the past week or so about one of their shared doctoral advisers, who was notoriously reluctant to write enthusiastic letters for her students. Just before that I had a conversation with a neighbor who’d had an undergraduate adviser who was noted in his field. Of his own accord, that adviser called one of his friends who was a faculty member at an Ivy League graduate program to make an enthusiastic recommendation. Sure enough, our neighbor was admitted to that graduate program.

We can push all we want against the locked door, but someone has a key.

The great American myth is that success is specifically individual. We’ve seen that this week in the Supreme Court’s college admissions decision, but that’s only a confirmation of the general belief that we all rise exactly and only on our own merits. But as Malcolm Gladwell showed us well fifteen years ago, success comprises three elements: talent, effort, and opportunity.

So rather than be one of those motivational-speaker guys who says “What have you done TODAY to increase your value?” I’m going to reclaim the ecological condition of success. My question to you is “What have you done TODAY to create opportunity for someone else?”

The work of making space for others’ success is vital to every job, but I don’t think we foreground it the way we should. So I want you, today, to make a phone call or send an email on behalf of one of your coworkers, one of your students, one of your friends. To be the key for the door they hope to walk through.

And then do it again tomorrow.