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#187 - Stop Keeping Their Score

I spent twenty years thinking about other people’s careers for a living.

My job was to sit across someone -- a software engineer in Shanghai, a finance leader in San Francisco, a CMO in Seoul -- and decode why they did what they did. Why they’d taken a job, left a company, thrived in a culture.

It was thousands of conversations. And I got pretty good at them. I could read between the lines of a resume, listen to a story, and tease out the thread of a career.

But, for the longest time, I couldn’t do the same for mine.

The cobbler’s kids

When I looked at others' careers, I saw patterns and themes. Causes and effects. I could tell you why a time at a small startup in 2018 set someone up for a leadership role in 2025. I could explain how a sideways move into a new function led to outsized impact five years later.

But when I looked at my own career? I saw randomness and chaos. Even dissonance.

There were "stints" I was loath to talk about. Phases that seemed unserious. Stretches where I felt directionless; guilty for not being on a “real” path. Then -- just next to those -- there were long runs at venture firms and big tech brands where things just clicked. It all seemed...incongruous.

What I couldn't explain to myself (or others) was why the messy phases mattered -- or how they tied to what came later.

Why? Because I lacked the language and framework for it.

Winging it

We use precise, cutting-edge language to manage our diet, our sleep, and our wealth. But for work -- where we spend a third of our waking lives -- we wing it, and hope for the best.

That was OK in a world of ladders, pensions and 30-year tenures. But that world is gone. We're all steering our own kayaks down rivers we haven't navigated before. And we’re doing it without a vocabulary for the most basic question:

What am I actually building and working towards?

To answer that, we need a new way to keep score. After all, what does it even mean to “win” in a career that is this fluid, volatile, and non-linear?

Winning isn't about summiting a mountain anymore; much less someone else's mountain. For most of us, it's closer to agency: the ability to steer our own ship, and chart our course, with intent.

It's about staying in the game on our own terms. Moving from their finite game to our infinite one. Ensuring we have the "currency" to do that, and to achieve the goals we define.

That currency is career capital.

A better way to keep score

Your career capital is the sum of everything you accumulate over your career: the skills, brands, relationships, and "muscles" you build as you go through jobs, experiences, and time. Your portfolio of capital is what you bring to a role; but it's portable: you also keep it when you leave.

Here's a breakdown:

The foundation: Time is the big one. It's our only non-renewable asset; you can't "raise" more of it, you can only spend or allocate it. The goal is to allocate it so it gives the most return.

Internal capital -- "the muscles": We're all born with the same set of muscles. But we build them through "reps", and experience. How you think (judgment, pattern recognition). How you learn (curiosity, adaptability). How you endure (resilience, energy).

External capital: "the signals": Assets that function externally, and signal we are safe, and can be trusted. The brands on our resume, the stories we tell, the relationships we build, and reputation that precedes us.

We've all been building capital for years. We just don't think and talk about it like this.

And what makes it so powerful is that career capital compounds. Skills build on skills. Relationships beget new relationships. Capital you raise now becomes leverage you deploy in future.

The flip

Career capital is a tidy enough framework. But there's also a deeper "so what?" here. And it brings me to the key reframe. (One I wish I'd embraced earlier in my career).

For most of my journey, I asked the questions we all do: “How did I interview? How am I performing in the job? How long have I been here?"

And when firms reciprocated by rewarding loyalty, tenure and performance, that made sense. After all, we were betting our time, energy and skill on one company.

But now, as we cling to jobs, navigate stretches of unemployment, and watch the power of AI grows exponentially? When we have the ability to hedge, and place eggs in different baskets?

Now, it's time to bet on you.

Career capital is the language for doing that. Its questions are yours, not theirs. And it flips the power dynamic.

When you stop asking "How am I performing for them?" and start asking "What capital am I accumulating for me?", you go from renting out your time to owning it.

The truth is, you've never been just an employee; you're a builder and investor. And in a world where companies no longer guarantee your future, the smart bet is on you.

That doesn't mean you don't need employers, or any such nonsense. I'm not telling you to throw caution to the wind, or back yourself to the point of arrogance.

It does demand, though, that you flip the equation; that you start to use new language and pose new questions, through a new lens, fit for a non-linear career world.

Let's bring it to life. Here are two examples.

Sarah's portfolio

I have a friend, I'll call her Sarah. On paper, she's untouchable: she has an Ivy League degree, went to an elite law school, and spent a decade at white glove firms. Her resume screams success.

But if you look at her journey through the lens of career capital, you see something a bit different: a lopsided portfolio.

What Sarah has is a ton of external capital. She's got signals, brands, and credentials to spare. But because her path has been so linear, she hasn't had to "wander." To root around in the dark or hack new paths.

As a result (and she would be the first to tell you this) her internal muscles are less developed. She's lighter on awareness, for instance; on knowing what energizes her outside of the law. And she hasn’t forged as much resilience because she hasn't experienced as many pivots and jolts.

A concentrated portfolio is great when things are up and to the right. But it's when volatility hits, that things get painful. Now, with work shifting beneath her, Sarah's concentrated portfolio has her anxious. She’s saved well, but she's struggling to adjust.

Needless to say, Sarah hasn't failed. She's hard-working and talented and will figure it out. In fact, her awareness of the imbalance is a form of capital she's now building. But she's also an instructive case; an example of someone whose focus on external signals has come at the expense of internal muscle. 💡

My portfolio

When I started TalentStories, I was chasing a different level of impact than I'd had in the corporate world. That led me to decide, early on, to focus on content.

But in choosing content, I was also making a conscious bet on specific career capital: that learning to write and storytell in public would compound. And that it would recombine powerfully with the capital already in my portfolio.

All well and good, but last year, when AI models became so potent, I began to fear that writing skills would get commoditized. So to diversify my capital, I made another intentional bet: on community.

I'd never built a community, so I knew the learning would be steep. I also knew it would have an opportunity cost: that the time it would take to build meant I couldn't allocate that time to other bets.

But in the end, I thought that using that time on community would return useful career capital:

• community-building skills, as a new muscle (internal capital)
• better writing, via interactions and feedback (internal capital)
• a network of meaningful relationships (external capital)
• a better story; adding "community builder" to my narrative makes it more distinct (external capital)

One year later, has allocating my time capital to community "worked"?

I don't know yet. But I can tell you it's been energizing -- which is a form of capital I didn't anticipate.

As well, the bet was never just about community. It was also about what community could add to what I already had. Talent acquisition experience plus writing plus community is a different mix than any one of those alone. I'm betting that the new combination will compound in ways I can't predict yet.

Of course, I'm an entrepreneur. But this is exactly my point: you may work for the world's biggest company, but when it comes to steering your career -- you're an entrepreneur, too. Because the core question is identical: What bets are you making with your time?

Are you raising your hand, say, for a cross-functional project that builds new muscle? Spending evenings on a skill your role doesn't value right now? Taking a lateral move that trades title for learning?

The capital framework works in any context, because wherever you work, you're the one who keeps the portfolio.

How to use it

Here's how you can use career capital language, looking back, right now, and looking forward. It won't give you "the answer." But it will cultivate clarity, intent, and awareness.

Retrospectively: to learn, and see meaning

• What skills have had an outsized impact on your career?
• Which people have had the biggest influence on you?
• Was a "bad" career choice actually bad -- or were you raising capital you couldn't see at the time?

Today: to audit how you're allocating your time

• Am I learning enough, or raising other forms of useful capital, to warrant staying here?
• Am I on the wrong path altogether?
• Why don't I enjoy what I'm doing? (Or, why do I enjoy it so much?)

Proactively: to make smart bets from here

• What capital can I add now that will compound, either on its own, or for how it remixes with what I already have?
• Should I spend the next six months networking outside my company? Learning a new tool? Building a personal brand?
• If I do, what bet do I need to trim, and is that a smart tradeoff?

In the end, we can't manufacture more time. And we can't go back and make different choices. But we can learn from those choices, and use those lessons to guide our time and decisions from here on out.

Build the player, pay the player

I don’t share this framework because I figured it all out as I went. I share it because I didn’t.

I spent years feeling guilty during the phases where I was exploring; dabbling, rooting around, trying to figure out what to work on or whom to work with. I felt lost in those moments. And I judged myself harshly.

But it turns out those phases were often me building career capital. I was building awareness, building skills, building networks. And yes, building resilience. Even when I couldn’t see it, even when it felt like nothing was happening -- I was building the player.

Then, when the right opportunity came along and I could deploy all that capital into roles and environments where it mattered -- the returns were outsized. Impact, learning, meaning, compensation. I was paying the player.

I realize, as I write this, that TalentStories is often an expression of grace for me. Grace towards my own non-linear career. Grace toward the phases that felt messy, and the decisions that felt risky. Grace towards a younger version of me -- in the hopes of channeling more of it to this one.

My guess is you've had phases like that too. Stretches that felt directionless. Bets that seemed to go nowhere. And here's what I'd offer: you weren't lost. You were accumulating something. Even if you couldn't name it at the time.

Now you can.

Your career is a portfolio. Its currency is career capital. And your guiding questions are what are you building? And is it compounding?

Thanks for reading and exploring with me – and have a great end of the week! 🙏

Aki