By the time most women hear the advice that would have changed things, they are already significantly constrained by the decisions they made without it.
The career advice that circulates most freely, the advice that fills the books and the conferences and the mentoring conversations, is advice about how to operate within a system. How to negotiate better. How to make yourself more visible. How to communicate your value. How to build the right relationships. How to position yourself for the next opportunity. How to take up more space. How to advocate for yourself with the skill and the confidence that the system responds to.
This advice is not wrong. It addresses real challenges and it offers real tools. The problem is what it assumes before it begins. It assumes that the system you are learning to navigate is the right system for you. It assumes that the direction the system points is the direction you want to go. It assumes that the goal of developing these skills is to advance further and faster along a path that was defined before you arrived and will be defined after you leave. It is advice about how to run better without ever asking whether you are running toward the right thing.
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The career ladder is a lie for most of the people climbing it.
Not because it does not exist. It exists. The rungs are there. The climb is real. The view from further up is genuinely different from the view at the bottom. But the ladder metaphor carries with it a set of assumptions that are worth examining before you spend the better part of your working life orienting yourself by them.
The ladder assumes that progress is vertical. That higher is better by definition. That the person at the top of the organisational hierarchy has, by the fact of being at the top, made the best possible set of career decisions. That lateral movement is stagnation. That any departure from the upward trajectory is something that needs to be explained and managed and recovered from.
None of this is true. It is a metaphor that was designed for a world of careers that no longer exists, in which most people worked for a single organisation for most of their working lives and advancement meant moving through that organisation’s hierarchy in a predictable direction. That world is gone. Most careers are now more complicated and more varied than the ladder allows for. But the metaphor persists because it is simple and because the people who benefited most from it are the ones with the most influence over the conversations in which career advice is given.
Your career is more accurately a portfolio. Not a ladder. A collection of skills, relationships, experiences, and capacities that can be arranged and rearranged differently at different points in your life to serve different purposes. The question is not how high you can get. The question is what this portfolio enables you to do, and whether the shape of it is moving toward the life you actually want to live.
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This is the question no one asks you when you are starting out.
They ask where you see yourself in five years. They ask what your goals are. They ask what kind of leader you want to be. They do not ask what kind of life you want to live and whether the career you are building is the most direct route to that life or simply the most conventional one.
The difference between those two things is significant enough to change everything. The most conventional career path for someone with your skills and credentials is not necessarily the path that will produce the life you want. It is the path that produces the career others recognise and reward. Sometimes those are the same path. Often they are not. And discovering that they are not, after fifteen years of climbing the right ladder in the wrong direction, is an expensive discovery.
The life you are working toward. Not the career. The life. What does a good day actually look like, in practice, in the body? What kind of work do you want to be doing and in what conditions? What do you want your relationships to look like, your body, your time, your mornings? What kind of contribution matters to you in a way that is not about what other people think of the contribution?
These are not soft questions. They are the most strategic questions available. Because the career that is not moving toward the life you actually want is a career you will spend years dismantling or mourning or tolerating, and dismantling and mourning and tolerating all cost something.
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The other thing no one says early enough is about relationships.
Not the networking transactional version of relationships, where you collect people strategically because of what their proximity might eventually provide. The relationships where genuine investment has happened, where there is a real history of care and reciprocity and seeing each other clearly. These relationships are the thing that sustains a career across all its seasons. The introduction that opens the door. The phone call from someone who thought of you when the right thing came up. The reference from a person who can speak about you from years of watching you work. The colleague who will tell you the truth when the truth is uncomfortable.
These relationships take years to build. They cannot be built during the season when you need them. They are built during the seasons when everything is fine, when you are not looking for anything, when the investment is purely relational and not instrumental.
Most people understand this in theory. Most people invest in relationships instrumentally, when there is something they need, which means the depth is never there when the depth is needed.
Build them now. While you have nothing to ask for. That is when it is possible to build them properly.
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The last thing.
Your career is a vehicle for your life. Not the other way around. It is supposed to take you somewhere worth going. If you get in the vehicle and drive it with great skill and considerable speed and then look up one day to discover that you are somewhere you did not want to be, the skill and the speed were not the problem. The direction was the problem.
Ask about the direction early. Revisit it often. The direction you wanted when you were twenty-three is not the direction you will want at thirty-five. And the willingness to update the direction based on who you are actually becoming, rather than who you planned to become, is one of the more courageous professional decisions available to you.
Nobody will give you permission to do this. You will have to give yourself permission.
Give it early.
