“I plan my career in one-year chapters now, not five-year ladders, after Tara Walpert Levy had our Google team write a Bold Vision as if the year had already happened. The exercise forced me to put my marriage, my kids, and my health next to my KPIs, and that’s when it stopped being a career plan and started being a life plan.”
“I stopped treating my career like a ladder and started treating it like a design problem. I audit where my time actually went, name the real drivers of my wins, and build the next year around what energizes me rather than what I’m merely good at.”
“I spent twenty years at adidas without a rigid plan, but I learned that an epic career is less about a fixed destination and more about knowing what still fits and what has started to pinch.”
“I picture myself at retirement, martini in hand, looking back at what I actually accomplished, then work backward so each job sets up the next. Epic means knowing what you want to have done, not just what you want to do next.”
“I stopped waiting for my boss to notice my work and started treating visibility like a skill I could build. My career only felt epic once I owned the story of what I was actually doing.”
“Stop waiting for a manager or a promotion to tell you what comes next; I learned that the hard way after moving from programming to corporate leadership to coaching without any playbook. Build your career like a product: know the value you already have, repackage it for where the market is heading, and make moves before you need to.”
“I stopped waiting for the right job to find me after watching brilliant candidates get passed over while connected ones got the offer. Build your career like a campaign: a clear target, a story that proves you can solve the employer's problem, and a network you feed before you need it.”
“I spent years thinking my career would advance if I just delivered, but at HSBC I learned that nobody promotes a mystery. I now build mine around three things: my actual values, the strengths other people name in me, and the work that puts me in flow.”
“I spent 20 years at ESA landing four dream jobs, then woke up one day realising the ladder I was climbing no longer led where I wanted to go. An epic career, in my view, is not a series of promotions; it is the repeated act of noticing when you have grown beyond the role that once fit you, and having the nerve to reposition around who you are becoming, not who you were.”