It’s been a minute since I posted anything but been thinking a lot about this panel on careers from last week with @soleio @maryrosecook @jocarrasqueira @adelwu_ and Sarah. One of the few conversations on career that felt honest about the messy parts If you're feeling stuck, took a few notes which felt worth sharing here (no sanitized LinkedIn advice, just what actually happens when you're in between versions of yourself) No one shied away from the non glamorous phases of our life/careers: grief, apathy, reinvention, & ambiguity and of course we also chatted about AI One of the most useful ideas: prototyping different futures in parallel. Assign different paths to different time blocks and experiment. Watch where your energy naturally goes after the honeymoon phase wears off. It's usually a good predictor of where you want to pursue deeper work Career pivots are usually framed as a strategy problem but they're often grief problems. You're not just leaving a job, but potentially leaving an identity, a status story, a version of yourself you spent years building. And that's ok. The strategy part is easy. The letting go is hard. Just build and ship. Only way to move forward is to do the damn thing. No point in wasting time thinking in circles about stuff. That's just wasted energy Contrarian but true: Apathy can be a stronger signal than failure. If your career is working on paper, but you feel dead inside with every win, that's not ingratitude but a data point about what you want to be doing. Don't worry so much about resume gaps. These unstructured periods also contain real career work like recovery, experimentation, and identity building and taste formation. The world is slowly catching up to this. Your job is to articulate what you learned, not apologize for the space. Soleio shared this underrated career exercise - Ask 2-3 people who know you well, "How do you describe me to other people?" They often see your strengths and through lines more clearly than you do, especially when you're in a transition. A subtle but important shift is that the future may reward people who care more about outcomes than ownership. Mary talked about AI writing code, and being ok with it. Why? Because she cared about making things, not defending old processes. Another contrarian take which i think was so interesting to hear and has had me thinking still A coherent identity is overrated (thank you @soleio for this wonderful line) Contradiction isn't always confusion. Sometimes it's just evidence you can contain multitudes. Vulnerability can deepen your network, not weaken it. People tend to respond with more trust, not less. That said, be strategic about where you're vulnerable. Not every room rewards honesty the same way. Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg for the night. So many after panel conversations. Also got a chance to meet so many awesome people, felt like finding my crowd (thx, @adelwu_ ) If you were there and we didn't say hi then lets connect. Would love to know what you're up to.