If Eileen Gu can be an elite Olympic athlete, a model, and a Stanford student all at once, why should you be known for just one skill and title?
That was a note I posted here recently and it resonated more than most things I have written, which told me it must have hit a nerve.
And I think I know why.
Most of us grew up with some version of the same script. Pick one thing, commit to it fully, stay in your lane. One title, path, and one version of yourself worth presenting to the world. You could have hobbies on the side but only one serious profession.
Too bad, I never fully believed it. After all, when you have many interests and skills, why should you not follow them?
…
There was a period a few years ago where I was deep in processes at some of the most competitive places you can try to get into. Final rounds, offers, the whole thing. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, someone at an interview told me I was not ambitious enough.
I think about that comment sometimes.
Not because it hurt but because of how absurd it is in hindsight. They had a box, and I did not fit it cleanly because I hadn’t followed some ideal type X’s script. So they called it a lack of ambition.
(The irony is that they still wanted to interview me.)
The truth is I did not take most of those offers. Not because they were not great but because when I got close enough to see what those rooms actually looked like from the inside, I realised they were not where I wanted to go.
And that is a harder thing to admit than a rejection because it means you have to stop pointing at the door and start being honest about whether you actually wanted to walk through it in the first place. Whether you wanted to fit that box and reach the more known form of success, while silencing the parts that don’t fit inside.
That question took me a while to answer honestly, but eventually with the answer came a completely different way of thinking about what a career could look like.
…
Today, the market is telling a completely new story.
As Dan Shipper put it, we are moving from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy. You will not be judged on how much you know but on how well you can allocate and manage the resources to get work done.
The roles being created and rewarded right now are going to the people who can hold multiple things at once, translate complexity, and bring judgment that does not come from one discipline alone.
And that makes perfect sense to me and my story, so I started building accordingly.
I treat my career like a VC treats a portfolio.
Not doing everything alone but investing my judgment, my thinking, and my most distinctive skills across different projects and letting the right people carry the execution in each one.
The discipline is not doing more, but being ruthlessly clear on where my specific contribution creates the most value and protecting that.
(I will write about the more practical side of this in another article.)
But it is not easy. Not at all. And I’m still early on it.
There are moments where I wonder whether I made the biggest mistake of my career by saying no to things most people would have said yes to without hesitation.
Whether the unconventional path is actually courage or just a story I tell myself to make the uncertainty feel more intentional.
I do not have a clean answer to that, but what I do know is that the only thing worse than the uncertainty of building your own path is the certainty of being on someone else’s and knowing it is the wrong one.
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So if you are the person who has been told you are not ambitious enough, not focused enough, not a clear enough fit, ask yourself honestly whether you actually wanted to be in those rooms or whether you were chasing the validation and the brand name.
Be honest about the answer.
Then start building the new career. Today. Even if you do not know exactly yet what your so called career thesis or direction is. It will emerge when you start moving.
All of this, I like to think about like linear regression.
The individual data points of your career will never sit in a perfectly straight line. They will look scattered and messy up close. But zoom out and there is a thread running through all of it; something true to you that is moving forward.
So trust the direction, not every single point.