Still Pivoting

There is a version of the career advice genre that tells you to pick a lane. Specialize. Build a brand around one thing. Become the person who is known for that thing.

I have never been able to do that.

My career has been a series of pivots -- from theatre to agency work, from agency work to enterprise consulting, from consulting to defense tech, from defense tech to healthcare startups, from healthcare to AI. Every time I move, I carry the skills from the last thing into the next thing. The pattern recognition compounds. The empathy deepens. The toolkit gets wider.

The myth of the straight line

Most career advice assumes a straight line. You start at A, you end at Z, and the path between them should be as direct as possible. But the most interesting people I know -- the ones who build things that matter, who see problems others miss, who connect dots across disciplines -- their paths look nothing like straight lines.

They look like mine. Messy. Recursive. Full of apparent detours that turned out to be the most important stretches.

What pivoting actually teaches you

Every pivot forces you to be a beginner again. And being a beginner is the most powerful position in product work. Beginners ask the questions that experts have stopped asking. Beginners see the friction that insiders have normalized. Beginners bring frameworks from other worlds that crack open stuck problems.

When I moved from theatre to tech, I brought character analysis (which became persona development), directing (which became product vision), and improv (which became comfort with ambiguity). When I moved from Pivotal to defense, I brought balanced team methodology into environments that had never seen it. When I moved from Kaiser to FLUXX, I brought enterprise transformation patterns into a five-person startup.

The cost of pivoting

I will not pretend it is free. Every pivot costs you seniority, at least temporarily. You lose the shorthand. You have to prove yourself again. People who stayed in one lane for a decade will sometimes look at your resume and not know what to do with it.

But the people who hire me -- the ones who have complex, messy, high-stakes problems -- they are not looking for a straight line. They are looking for someone who has seen enough different contexts to know which patterns transfer and which ones do not.

Still pivoting

I am still pivoting. I will probably always be pivoting. The domain changes, but the work stays the same: name what is actually happening, build a structure that helps people move, and make the work usable in the real world.

If your career looks like a series of pivots, you are not lost. You are building range. And range is what complex problems require.