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.