He interviewed for a job a step below what he wanted and was told he had not got it. A few days later the company called: they would like him to come in for a chat about the role above it.
He went in confused. He had a cup of tea with the operations manager. He was offered the job — a £25,000 pay rise and the role he had been working towards for most of his working life.
He wrote that the difference was not luck so much as reps. Over five years he had done more than fifteen interviews; the early ones, he said, were terrible. Somewhere along the way he had stopped being nervous, on the theory that he was either going to get it or not. He kept a notebook of every question he had not been able to answer and read it before each new interview — it covered, by his estimate, 99% of what he was later asked.
His advice was to interview as widely as possible, and to treat every rejection as practice for the next one.