​
#188 - I Know This Tired

A few weeks ago, a TalentStories community member reached out with a request. An AI startup was growing quickly and its founder was keen to explore the work I do: scaling culture, hiring, and performance. “Can I make an introduction?”, he wanted to know.

It’s the kind of ask I’ve always reflexively said yes to. That’s what you do when you're building a business: you say yes. You take the meeting.

But this time I said, “Please don’t.”

I was surprised to hear myself say the words, and even more surprised by how right they felt. Not because it was a dramatic choice, but because it signaled a change I’d been thinking about for a long time.

The B2B ➡ B2C Pivot

For the last three years, I’ve built TalentStories with a B2B consulting revenue model. I provide talent advisory services for tech companies and startups.

It's the logical extension of the work I’ve always done and enjoyed. I love startups. The network was there. So the clients showed up. Through word-of-mouth, through the writing, through former colleagues. And it’s been fulfilling, well-paid work.

But for months now -- even years -- I’ve been drawn to working more with individuals. Not with companies, but with people. Helping them navigate uncertainty, versus helping organizations steer it.

Subtle, then loud

Looking back, this newsletter changed first; subconsciously, then consciously. I started to write less about leadership, hiring and macro work trends. Instead, for months now, these pages have been about us: navigating a modern career, and the missing language and frameworks needed for that.

The shift manifested in conversations with friends, too. When they asked “How’s TalentStories?”, it was always some version of, “Good. But think I want to do more B2C work, and put the B2B on hold for a bit.”

It was signs like these, followed by the louder “no” to the AI startup.

Then came the loudest sign of all: the way I felt at the end of last week. A week in which I took on a new career coaching client. Wrote LinkedIn posts on career resilience and job search. Flushed out a storytelling course. Experimented with Claude Code to explore the pros and cons of offering these products versus, say, doing a podcast, lauching a paid community, or writing a book.

By Friday night, I was drained. And not the usual "parent-husband-founder" tired, but a deeper level of mental and physical fatigue from using, I realized, a new set of muscles all week.

And then I thought, "Ohhh, wait a sec. I know this tired. I know why I feel this way: I’m diverging again."

"Wait. I know this tired."

In last week's issue, I introduced the idea of career capital: the portfolio of skills, stories, awareness, network, and judgment we accumulate and allocate over the course of our careers. We raise that capital, “build the player”, in our exploratory, divergent phases. And we deploy that capital, “pay the player”, in our focused, convergent phases.

Today, I realize that in taking my foot off the pedal of something that’s working – B2B consulting work – to build a B2C business that doesn’t exist yet, I'm going from paying the player, to building the player in real-time. From converging, to diverging.

In practice that means leaving a known and comfortable B2B world, and crossing into a new consumer world. Learning new language; coming up to speed on consumer psychology, pricing, and conversion; deciding which products to build and services to offer.

A timeless response to uncertainty

Divergence and convergence isn’t a one-off phase we go through and move on from. It’s a cycle that repeats. In fact, it's an ancient, biological one. It's how living systems adapt to uncertainty.

Ants, for instance, don’t just find food and exploit it forever. They always keep some of the colony exploring, even when they have enough food.

The cycle also powers every creative field humans practice: writers draft before they edit, sculptors add clay before they carve away, jazz musicians explore before they commit. Scientists hypothesize before they test, and test before they conclude. Diverge, then converge. Explore, then exploit.

Our careers are not immune to it either. Even if we've convinced ourselves otherwise. The idea that we should find a lane and stay in it (or the reverse: only ever explore) is just wrong.

After all, our careers are open-ended, uncertain, creative problems. Which makes the diverge-converge cycle not just relevant, but a powerful way to understand and guide them with awareness and intent.

Two kinds of hard

Not all divergence is the same though. There's a difference between poking at the edges of your current identity, or "lightweight divergence". And stepping into a version of you that requires rewiring, or "structural divergence".

Lightweight divergence could be starting to write online while keeping your day job. Or hosting an event to see if there's a community worth building. You create optionality and things compound slowly, but nothing breaks. Your core stays intact.

By contrast, structural divergence is when your job title changes and doesn’t go back. Or when your physical geography changes. Or when you take a path and your peer group doesn't recognize you anymore. It's crossing a threshold.

When you cross, you leave your status behind. You feel like a beginner again. You experience sustained discomfort. But you also raise powerful forms of career capital like resilience, learning agility and stories. As a result, these experiences compound and remix aggressively, and create real optionality.

Structural divergence builds changes the player

It turns out that the deeper mechanism -- the reason true, structural divergence compounds -- isn’t about what you collect during those phases. But about who you become. It's about forced adaptation; rewiring, unwiring, and transformation.

I think back to going to Spain on my own when I was 11. Or to studying abroad as a 19-year old in Beijing. Both involved moving -- literally -- to a new world, and coming back a different person.

Becoming a father fit the bill, too, for how it changed me. Overnight, everything was new and hard and different, and you had no choice but to change and rewire.

Moving to Guatemala for work in 2004 was smaller scale, but the adaptation was still material. I’d spent the prior years as a recruiter in San Francisco; I was good at it, and earned well. It was comfortable. I could read a room, crack a joke, and talk my way in and out of situations.

Then I got to Guatemala City to do finance for a non-profit. My high-school Spanish was nil, and I had no background in the work, which was accounting, budgets, and payroll.

It was disorienting at the office, but after hours, too. Everything that made me “me” before -- the dorky humor, the persuasion, the confidence -- was gone. Stripped. I couldn’t be me. I had to become someone new.

It was, looking back, forced identity change.

When I left the corporate world and Netflix to start TalentStories, same shift: I went from being a director with a team and a title and a brand behind me, to being, well, nobody. 😬

Status: crushed ✅
Credentials: irrelevant ✅
Stage: beginner ✅
Feeling: incompetent ✅
​
Conclusion: structural divergence unlocked 🙌

I had to rebuild from scratch. And that forced rebuilding -- that adaptation at the identity level -- was the defining experience of TalentStories for the first year and a half.

This is the bargain, though, with structural divergence. It has a cost. It’s hard, and makes you feel exposed and small. You miss your old competency. But that discomfort is also the key. Breaking down the player and changing them is how they get built.

This is also why opting in to such discomfort, from time to time, makes career sense: divergent bets that compound and remix so intensely are the ones that force you to become someone who can place better bets in the future. In short, they build a better bettor.

Atrophy as strategy

Stepping back from B2B consulting means letting a high-functioning version of myself atrophy so a more versatile one can grow. The B2B world worked because I knew it; the vocabulary, the relationships, the content.

B2C has none of that yet. I’m a beginner to consumer psychology, pricing math, and funnel mechanics. But that's the point: I have to muddle my way through a new world when I start in it.

It's also what makes this structural for me, and a bet worth making. Regardless of whether a course sells or a coaching practice takes off, it's about what the forced adaptation will do to me; to my skills, my unique "talent stack", the options I'll create, and the unexpected upsides I might enjoy.

One question

I’ll end with a simple question that's also the most useful one I’ve learned to ask in twenty years of twisting and turning through a non-linear career:

Am I diverging in my career right now, or am I converging, or am I somewhere in between?

It's worth asking.

I didn’t have it for most of my career. I just…went. I felt lost during the exploratory, divergent phases and relieved during the convergent ones. I judged the divergent stretches because I couldn’t see what they were building.

But now -- navigating this B2C pivot, building new material, new revenue streams -- I have a name for it. Now, I'm aware I'm diverging.

So I know this is meant to be hard. That the friction I feel isn’t a sign something’s off, but a sign that I’m adapting. That I'm changing the player again.

I don't know if I’ll pull it off. I just know that I’ll be changed. And from years past, that those changes tend to be healthy.

This awareness doesn't erase the hard. But it does ease its sting at the end of a long week. It gives me a bit of permission and grace. And it makes me curious to meet the person I’ll be on the other side.

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

Aki

P.S. The 1:1 career coaching I talked about is open. If you're either feeling stuck and want to map a path ahead with more awareness, are content but keen to build career resilience before you have to call on it, or are actively job searching and want to hone a sharper strategy, let's talk. My DMs are open, or hit reply.