[justinlloyd]

I was playing Diablo 3 one evening (I use my real name), and the guy who I was grouped with was streaming on Twitch. Reasonably big name streamer. He looked up my name, found my personal resume website, played the small game on there. His viewers play the game. It is just some super simple stupid little space invaders game. Next day I wake up to several hundred emails in my inbox from various people just randomly talking about game dev and software development. Several trolls of course. Couple of "are you interested in a job?" pings. An interesting phenomenon.

[Shocka1]

This is a cool story and a lot can be said about it, including how authentic/organic it is. I think your exact scenario had a lot of luck involved, but I think what we call "luck" is the type of thing is more common than we would think. What I'm talking about is continuously getting in situations that allow luck to happen. If someone is consciously aware of this phenomenon, they can continuously expose themselves and increase their odds. I think some refer to this as the law of attraction, but that doesn't seem right to me given the law of attraction's magical attributes. It's more statistics at play IMO.

It's important that it's authentic though as people can see right through someone's BS. In your situation you were simply playing a game you liked, which is about as authentic as it gets. There are a lot of people out there grinding away at something they don't necessarily enjoy, for the end goal of making money or success, which sounds terrible to me. I'd much rather grind away at something I truly enjoyed and where it's a win/win whether success comes with it or not.

In my younger and very introverted days I accidentally figured this phenom out. I was on a BBS site for a couple years, just hanging out with people with the same interest (motorcycle riding/racing). This led to IRL meetups, which led to me riding for a professional motorcycle racing team, where I lived my dream racing fully built Superbikes for several years. There was some luck involved of course, but it would have never happened if I hadn't participated authentically on some random website.

Since learning this important life lesson I've applied the same philosophy to my professional life. At this point I've had enough "lucky" situations happen where it's affirmed my opinion of statistics at play.

[PainfullyNormal]

You know, I've been contemplating whether I should lose the pseudonyms and start using my real name for all of my online activity. This story has convinced me that it's something I need to do. That's such a crazy sequence of events that would have never happened if you had been playing under a pseudonym that's hard or impossible to connect back to your resume. All these years, I've been sabotaging my "luck surface area" with my stubborn insistence of online anonymity.