If I should name one thing that has most shaped my personality and ability to tolerate uncertainty, exhaustion, and complexity, it is orienteering.

Equally, if I should name one skill I find most crucial for navigating a career, living abroad, building businesses, and keeping it all together, it is the tolerance for uncertainty, detours, and exhaustion combined with the ability to plan in an ordered way.

For that reason I find orienteering likely one of the most underrated sports out there.

Subscribe now

What orienteering actually is

For those who don’t know, in all its simplicity it is navigating in a forest with a map from one control point to another.

There is no support or anything in the deep forest indicating your way. It is just you, your compass, and the trust in yourself that you can do it and you can get out from there.

And it is physically very demanding, which makes rational and spotless decision making and choosing of routes even more challenging.

Why I think about it differently now

Funnily, I have never really written about the sport or made a big number of it.

But when I think about it, there are very few occasions in modern life where you can train those skills at the same time and be put in a situation where you really need to find the strength and ability from within. No panic allowed.

I ran my first competition when I was six years old and it just came so naturally to me.

Understanding the patterns, translating the abstract map to read the terrain, the ambition to optimise the route and come out without errors and as fast as I could. And it is today more than ever that I realise how much that sport has given me and how many lessons it holds for everyone.

The orienteer mode for business & life

Not everyone needs to go to the forest to learn those lessons.

But especially when I am building a business in an industry from the ground up (more about that later), I find myself going into the orienteer mode. The rules are surprisingly the same in business and in anything worth of pursuing.

1. Know your next most crucial step before everything else.

2. Have your direction correct.

3. Simplify the route where you can and remember the shortest route is not always the best.

4. Focus on details only when it is necessary for going forward.

5. Slow down when there is too much to handle.

6. And most importantly, my biggest weakness, just before you are about to reach the objective, stay focused till the end and never assume you are there yet.

7. And finally, there will be many people along the way who seem to have a point of view, go faster, or look like they have it all together. Don’t let that trick you. Stay on your path and trust yourself.

I have built more in the forest than I ever did in a classroom. And I am only now starting to understand how much of what I do today started there, and how much of those lessons are applicable for anyone who wants to go forward in business and life.

Share

Leave a comment

We do many things, are talented in many things, and lots of content and advice out there doesn’t reflect that. And I got tired of reading content that was too polished and too niche to feel real.

So that is my approach to this Substack. To not niche down, but to focus on the big picture and how it all comes together.

Business building, career, personal development, taste, doing uncomfortable things, lifestyle and travel. Not one thing. All of it.

Not advice, but unscripted observations.

Happy to have you along!

Subscribe now

Sending emails to people who do not know you exist, calling in German when you are not quite there yet with the language (I’m like B1 so…), pitching a business idea to someone who has no reason yet to believe in it.

All of it deeply uncomfortable, if you ask me.

The hardest part in these things is not knowing what to expect. Because when you cannot predict the reaction, you cannot really prepare a defence. So you just go in and hope you come up with something.

However, after enough frustration and the feeling that nothing was working, I decided I had to change my approach. I was done.

Because the problem was never the cold outreach. The problem was that I was thinking about it as a defence instead of a story. And those are two completely different things.

And that’s when I came across The Pitch by Danny Fontaine while randomly visiting a book store in London.

Subscribe now

It is not about you

I think we all know this but again it is not so easy to override as the default setting.

Anyway, the moment I stopped thinking about what I needed to say and started thinking about what the other person needed to feel, everything kind of shifted in my outcomes.

Think about it.

An interview, an investor meeting, a cold email, or just being an interesting person in a room.

All of these are moments where you need the other person to feel something. And to make them feel something you need to take them somewhere, not explain yourself to them.

Most of us pitch from a place of wanting to be understood. But that is not a story. That is a CV reading.

The brutal truth about who has the advantage

Some people have a head start on this. The voice, the posture, the appearance, the people you know, what is on the CV.

Yes, all of that can matter.

But here is what I have seen: it becomes secondary the moment your pitch is strong enough.

I genuinely believe this.

A strong enough story overrides almost everything else in the room.

What actually matters

Fontaine breaks it down into six things.

1. Why now,

2. what the vision is,

3. what the challenges are,

4. what you bring to the table,

5. what you need from the other person,

6. and why there is no better option than you.

Simple on paper, everything in the execution.

But beyond the framework, what I actually think makes the difference is this: Make the other person feel what your end customer feels or you feel.

Read the room because no tone works everywhere.

And if you can, skip the deck. Do something unexpected because the unexpected is what gets remembered.

And keep your cool

Know your non-negotiables before you walk in. You do not have to agree to everything just to win the room or be liked.

The strongest impression is almost always left by someone who is clear on what they will not move on. That is not arrogance. That is the whole pitch.

Leave a comment

I have always had a hard time adapting to that way of thinking.

Because no matter what you do, that experience compounds and moves with you. The lateral move that looked weird, the industry you left, the thing you built that nobody understood yet. It all follows you, quietly accumulating into something that is entirely yours.

And that is the version of a career I keep coming back to. Not the predictable one, but the one you build deliberately, where what you accumulate actually belongs to you.

Subscribe now

The index fund problem

I keep coming back to investing when I think about this. The way investors think about benchmarks, leverage, and where value actually lives turns out to be a good way to think about a career too.

Think about it, most people manage their careers like an index fund: stay in the right industry, collect the right titles, track roughly with their peer group. Completely fine but this is also the definition of zero alpha.

And don't get me wrong here, it entirely depends what you want and whether that is good or bad.

In investing, alpha is the return you generate beyond the benchmark. In your career it is everything you build that does not fit neatly in a job description: judgment, assets, reputation with the right people. The gap between a good CV and someone who actually creates outcomes.

Choose your benchmark

If your internal benchmark is people your age in similar roles, you have already capped your upside. You are tracking a market you did not choose and have no control over.

A better benchmark is the version of you who took slightly scarier assignments, shipped things in public, and treated each role as a launchpad and learning opportunity rather than a destination or as a proof of value.

Where your value actually lives

Career alpha comes from asymmetric bets.

From the strange, unconventional, and unexpected things you did. The project that was not in your job description but put your name on something visible. The lateral move that looked strange on LinkedIn but gave you proximity to decisions rather than just execution. The writing, the side work, the relationships that compound quietly.

But only if that value follows you. If all your usefulness is trapped inside one company’s systems, you do not own your upside. When you leave, most of it disappears. And that can be decades worth of work and proof.

Instead, alpha is what travels with you: a point of view people recognise, skills that work across contexts, people who pick up your call regardless of what is on your email signature.

And often we only see the compounded value of all of it on the day our employer changes strategy and suddenly we are not as safe as we thought.

The cold water moment.

The one that forces you to pivot and reinvent your path, whether you are ready or not. And that is exactly when you are grateful you have more than one story to tell and more than one thing to sell.

So play it deliberately

In all its simplicity, career alpha is simply deciding you will not move purely on autopilot.

You choose your benchmark, you place deliberate bets, you build things that keep paying you back even when the org chart does not.

Your career will move anyway. Markets shift, companies restructure, priorities change. And you should be in control.

Originally published at mariaespo.com

Leave a comment