As a kid, do you have ambitions for the future? “When I grow up I want to become a …”. Maybe you wanted to become a fireman, an astronaut, a nurse, a teacher, or a police officer? As you grow up, these ideas evolve and get replaced with actual ambitions, actual hopes and dreams. These might be entirely different than your childhood dreams.

But how do you reach these goals?
How do you accomplish these dreams?
By listening to your parents, friends, or teachers?
By doing it yourself?
Or maybe, you have given up and settled for a watered down version of the career and life you envisioned?

People often attribute success to luck, and lack of success to incompetence. But what if I told you it’s all about controlling the variables?

Luck is something that you can control in a way. The more you figure out the context, the key players, the relationships, the values, and the rules of the ecosystem in which you want to succeed, the easier it is to gain from it. The more variables you control, the easier it is to find potential opportunities and to bank on them.

Maybe you didn’t get lucky, maybe you just saw it coming, and prepared yourself for it.

In this talk, Thijs is going to share his experiences, his hopes, his dreams, and how he applies a positive mental attitude to level up in his career, and in life in general.

This is not a growth hacking talk, but a simple set of tips and tricks to succeed, even if it seems like the odds are stacked against you.

Comments

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John Fansler at 11:28 on 16 Oct 2018

Really loved the talk and found it inspiring. The videos in the slides were definitely mesmerizing! Your passion definitely came through today - thank you for sharing!

Shelley Evans at 17:54 on 18 Oct 2018

I loved this talk - it was a fun and inspiring way to kick off the conference. I'm so glad to have started out this way! The concepts Thijs discussed helped me to think about a plan for my time at the conference and to say yes to opportunities!

Thijs is a fantastic speaker and his personal stories illustrated the points in the discussion and made them easy to relate to. I feel like I got just as much out of this talk as the technical ones - thank you! I will be taking these ideas back to my team, and looking out for more from Thijs.

Great job!

Fantastic talk. I came to ZendCon for professional enrichment. I walked away from this talk with that, and an encouraging new approach to personal areas of my life as well. It could not have come at a better time too!

Thijs, talked of changing the variables... I found it profound that this talk could in itself be seen as another variable that I could take a hold off and make my own luck simply by taking the tips and tricks discussed and use them as a springboard for exploring the whole concept further.