> but is optimising for this lottery the best use of time and effort?
The difference is that you're not optimizing for a single lottery. If you build a habit of caring about things and doing a good job, people will notice. You'll meet thousands or tens of thousands of people across your career. The more of those people who walk away with a positive idea of your reputation, the more "lotteries" you've entered. The more positive your reputation, the more entries you get.
This really shows up in the second decade of a career, when many of the people you've worked with in the past have moved up into management positions and are looking for good candidates to recruit. Having established a reputation as a person who cares and who does the right thing will fast-track you through interview processes and move you to the top of recruiting lists (and rightly so, because you've already proven yourself).
He didn't invest much time, just the time on the call and the time to determine it wasn't a fit. So I wouldn't call it optimizing for lottery. Instead, I'd call it optimizing for reputation. And you can't know what doors your reputation will open for you. You just can't.
What's the alternative? If he'd fibbed and tried to make it work, and then wasted everyone's time during the sales process. Or worse had an unhappy team at the end of the POC or a contract that the company wouldn't renew?
I guess he could have not taken the call, but I think if a client asks you to do that and it isn't invasive in terms of effort, most consulting folks would do it.
There's other low-but-non-zero probability outcomes with a high payoff out of such a call, too. For instance, it may turn out that you are a good fit, because the requirements got mangled during the inevitable game of telephone. There's enough such possibilities that it's worth taking the call, but also not wasting anyone's time once the situation has become clear.
Another one I encounter frequently ... it isn't a good fit for this team, but seems like it might be for $PeerDepartment. And now you have a warm introduction from someone they trust.
Also some high-probability relatively low payoff events. The OP could probably expect the hedge fund that took the meeting would feed back to the bank that referred them that they appreciated the introduction and thought the team had integrity and good sector-specific knowledge. That might help cement relations with the existing client and win more referrals for the company.
And hedge fund employees impressed by a presentation are likely to talk to and occasionally move to work at banks. The headhunting relative with the ideal job vacancy certainly wasn't the most likely of the many potential positive outcomes!
People who don't "optimize for this lottery" are the ones who luck always seems to pass them by. They just don't know why, and they guess they're just unlucky. It's just not fair!
What they don't see is how the "lucky" people put extra effort in over an extended period of time, without immediate personal gain. It's not worth it... Until it is.
Calling these lotteries is actually a big misrepresentation. Lotteries are for astronomical odds. Plus you can do things to change your odds.
Instead of waiting to be picked, you could have been proactive and reached out to them for a job. The odds massively improve in your favor compared to a lottery in terms of winning (winning = getting a job in this case). And to belabor the obvious, no matter how cool I am with the gas station clerk, it's not going to improve my odds of winning the lottery.
That leads us to part 2, which is "why do anything at all for your career when you already have skills" and it's because doing things like signalling that you give a shit alerts other folks with decision-making powers that can benefit you.
If this was the only time in their life they'd be implicitly taking this gamble, sure, that's a reasonable question. But if you behave "impressively" in a consistent fashion, things like this are more likely to happen.
Is an optimizing your life around best use of time and effort the meta-optimal path for a satisfying life?
One argument is that the parts of our life that make it our particular life are the things that are, by design not optimal. Any optimal choice we make is an optimal choice any rational actor in our shoes would make, so says nothing about us or our particular place in the universe.
You are what you're willing to squandor time and attention on.
I wouldn't call it winning the lottery; it's just that people remember people they admire for whatever reason. I am early in my career, but I definitely have a short list of people I've worked with that I admire for a number of reasons (integrity, empathy, getting shit done, etc). I have pushed to work with them for those reasons, and I feel like I've gotten work people admiring me for whatever reason.
I find a lot of people conflate building and maintaining relationships with people with going to "networking" events and other artificial faux network building.
I've also never thought of myself as deliberately building a network but the (few) jobs I've landed over the past 25 years have been directly through people I knew.
It's honestly up there. Success is a combination of luck and effort; where opportunity meets preparation. You can control preparation. You can't control opportunity, you can only put yourself in places where opportunity hangs out.
