Opportunity at Work is Not Random: 3 Ways to Make it Yours
Reliability beats brilliance every time.
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Lebron James was drafted first overall in the 2003 NBA Draft at just 18 years old. On day one of his career, he was expected to raise the floor of a struggling franchise and help them win immediately. Fortunately for us, you and I are not Lebron James.
I thought I needed to be excellent at everything on day one. I remember the pressure I felt showing up to my desk at Starbucks in my first corporate role. The first-time imposter syndrome hits differently when you’re a first-generation college student whose family is more familiar with hard work than navigating a corporate campus.
Early in your career, it’s easy to believe that opportunity goes to the most exceptional person in the room: the fastest learner, the smartest voice, the one who nails everything on day one, but that’s wrong. Maybe this perspective is born out of the education system where students are expected to know the answers and are graded on their performance, but that model doesn’t carry over from school to work.
Managers do not expect interns or early-to-mid career professionals to be exceptional on day one. Even senior executives are given structured onboarding plans, so they don’t break things before they understand them.
In most roles, opportunity doesn’t flow to brilliance; it flows to reliability.
If you want more opportunities at work, do three things consistently:
Excellent at the basics
Enjoyable as a colleague
Someone your boss can depend on
Opportunity compounds around people who make work easier for others and get better without needing attention.
A Day in the Life of Your Manager
If you want to succeed at work, one of your primary jobs is to make your manager’s life easier.
Most managers are not spending their days doing deep, focused work. They’re moving between back-to-back meetings, juggling competing priorities, and translating vague executive direction into something the team can actually execute. Their attention is fragmented which is why you want them to be encouraged and energized when they see your name on their calendar or pass you in the hall.
The people who get the best projects, most flexibility, and stronger sponsorship at work tend to share a set of unglamorous traits. Typically, it’s not because they’re the most talented but because they reduce uncertainty for the person accountable for the outcome. If you create great work inconsistently and unreliably, you become more of a headache than star.
Before reading further, take a moment to score yourself from 1–5 on each of the three traits from your manager's perspective:
Excellent at the basics
Enjoyable as a colleague
Someone your boss can depend on
Excellent at the Basics
Your work holds up without supervision
One of the strongest early-career people I ever managed struggled mightily with public speaking, but when something was assigned to them, it came back complete, on time, and at a high level of quality. I trusted them to deliver without creating more work for everyone else.
Practically, this means closing loops, hitting timelines, and catching small issues before they turn into bigger ones. When your name is on something, your manager shouldn’t feel the need to double-check or chase.
This kind of excellence is quiet and unglamorous, but it earns autonomy. People who are excellent at the basics get more freedom not because they ask for it, but because their work consistently holds up when no one is watching.
When this person later asked for extended remote work over the summer, I didn’t hesitate because I knew the work would be done the same way. Regardless of what HR policies may suggest, flexibility doesn’t come from a policy. It comes from trust.
Enjoyable as a Colleague
People want to work with you
When you’re being interviewed, hiring managers are quietly weighing three things: can this person do the job, will they help take us to the next level, and do I actually want to spend time with them on a work trip.
You spend 40–60 hours a week with your colleagues. Over time, managers don’t just assign work based on skill, they choose for who they want more of in their day.
Being enjoyable to work with doesn’t mean being funny or extroverted, but it does mean reducing emotional friction. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
When feedback arrives, the enjoyable colleague says “Let me think about that and get back to you” instead of immediately defending their approach. They treat feedback as information, not an attack.
When a meeting is spiraling, they’re the person who says “I can take that” rather than explaining why something isn’t their responsibility. They make the path forward clearer, not more complicated.
When stress is high, they don’t amplify it. They stay steady when others are spinning, which makes them the person managers want in the room when things get hard. If they flag a problem, they also bring a solution.
One of the harder lessons I’ve learned over my career is that driving results isn’t the only goal. How you get the work done matters just as much, especially as responsibility grows because when work gets intense, people gravitate toward colleagues who make it feel lighter rather than heavier. Those are the people who get pulled into better projects, given the benefit of the doubt, and trusted when things get messy.
Someone Your Boss Can Depend On
Managers know what they’re getting.
I once managed someone who, on their best weeks, was high energy, fast, and knocked assignments out of the park. I also managed someone who was defensive, missed details, and needed constant reminders to get work across the finish line. Unfortunately, this wasn’t two different people. It was the same person, depending on the week.
From a manager’s perspective, that volatility is expensive. Even strong results lose value when they’re unpredictable, because it becomes harder to plan around you. Work quality is a piece of the puzzle, but it’s also emotional stability, attitude, and how you interact with coworkers or clients.
Everyone has an off day occasionally, but managers gravitate toward people who show up the same way because consistency makes everything else easier to manage. Early in your career, steady progress beats occasional brilliance. Consistency earns trust, larger responsibilities, and eventually the freedom to take bigger swings.
Managers can’t bet bigger on people they can’t plan around.
Next Steps
You don’t need to be like Lebron. Success can look like Tim Duncan—consistent on the fundamentals and quietly reliable. The people who get more opportunities aren't exceptional on day 1, they're reliable on day 100.
Getting more opportunity isn’t about trying to be exceptional at everything all at once. It’s about earning trust in the moments that matter: being excellent at the basics, enjoyable as a colleague, and someone your boss can depend on.
What’s one specific behavior you’ll change this week to close that gap?
To help you move from assessment to action, I’ve created a worksheet that walks you through:
Assessing your strengths and current patterns of reliability
Identifying specific behaviors to adjust
Applying those changes in a practical, immediate way
Set aside 15 minutes to work through it. The people who get more opportunities aren't always the smartest in the room, they're the ones their managers can count on when it matters.
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