You were lucky in this instance, 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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for sharing!
I have never been one to deliberately "build my network" and even I have had several beneficial things come about via my network.
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.