The question. Nobody hands you a rule for this. Not for a job search, not for building something of your own. You are told to be persistent, and separately you are told not to keep doing something that does not work, and nobody explains how you are supposed to know which of those two situations you are currently in. I have run 31 career strategies for clients this year, and some version of that question has come back to me from almost all of them. Not in the first weeks. It arrives around the point where the plan has stopped being exciting and has not yet produced anything. The honest answer is that I could not read it in my own case either, and I was doing it full time. Nine months. In January I had nothing in the diary. No cohort, no one-to-ones, nothing lined up. I had also moved to a different platform and switched into English, so I was writing for a set of people who barely knew I did career advisory at all. What I decided then was deliberately narrow. One kind of work with one kind of person: premium one-to-one advisory for senior people in capital projects and engineering, with my own attention on it rather than a programme running quietly in the background. I am a competent generalist and I have worked well outside that world plenty of times. I narrowed anyway. I know what those roles pay, who signs off on them, how the hiring actually runs when you are sitting on the employer's side of it, and what a person has to do to get through that. Inside my own industry that knowledge is worth two or three times more to the person in front of me than general competence is, and I would rather be worth that much to fewer people. Then came the stretch nobody writes about. Months of writing, posting, messaging and having conversations that went nowhere in particular, with no way of telling whether any of it counted. At one point I was close to doing the obvious thing, which is to go around finding people, offering them something, and hoping it turned out to be what they needed. Then I had a conversation with someone whose approach to building partnerships was nothing like that. Slower, built on trust before anything is asked for, and far more interested in whether there is a real fit than in whether there is a sale. That is how I have worked since, and it is now most of what I say to clients about how to approach a move. I do not file that conversation as luck. It became possible because I had stayed in one place long enough, doing one visible thing, for it to happen at all. The odds of a conversation like that go up when you stay put and stay legible. They do not go up when you keep changing what you are. Two weeks. Take a week where you did everything right. You sent the two messages that were hard to send, you had the conversation you had been avoiding, you rewrote the part of your profile that was doing you no favours. Nothing came back. Now take a week where you did none of it. You opened LinkedIn twice, told yourself you were too busy, and closed it again. Nothing came back from that one either. From the inside, on a Sunday evening, those two weeks are indistinguishable. That is the whole problem. James Clear puts it well in Atomic Habits: we are built to value what pays us now, and we are poor at holding a course whose payoff sits somewhere past the horizon. It is harder than it used to be, because everything else within reach of your hand will pay you in seconds. A search pays you nothing for weeks and then everything at once. So the only signal most people have is how the week felt, and how the week felt is the least reliable number available to them. The people I watched do well with this were not more disciplined than everyone else, and they did not have better plans. They stayed on one plan long enough to have done it badly, then adequately, then well, which is the only order in which you ever find out whether something works. They asked questions in between rather than deciding in silence. And several of them, twenty years in with a director title on the door, were the most willing of anyone to be visibly bad at something for a few weeks. I did not find that easy myself. Selling in a language I had never sold in meant writing badly in public for months, in front of people whose opinion I cared about. What I put around it. Across 31 of these, the strategy itself was almost never the part that failed. What was missing sat in the weeks afterwards, and it was never capability. It was that nothing in those weeks told the person where they actually were. I would not have worked that out on my own. Those 31 people told me, mostly by asking me the same question at the same point, and the year they described back to me is the reason any of what follows exists. So I built things around it, one at a time, each time I had seen the same gap for the third or fourth time. - A plan every Monday, sized to the hours someone genuinely has that week rather than the hours they wish they had. - Roles arriving on a schedule, matched to the strategy rather than to a job board, so that looking happens whether or not Tuesday feels good. - A short note every Friday on what they did, written before they look at what came back. - Written feedback each week on where to push and, just as often, where not to panic. - Mock interviews early, so the first time someone is bad at the hard question is not in the room where it counts. - A line open between sessions, so the thing that stops them on a Tuesday does not sit there until the next call three weeks later. None of it makes the right opportunity arrive any sooner. What it does is make you far more likely to spot one when it surfaces, and prepared enough to take it when you do. This week. On Friday, before you open your inbox and before you check whether anyone replied, write down the three things you did towards your move this week. Only what you did. Nothing about what came of it. Do it again the next Friday, and the one after that. In a month you will have four lines in front of you that tell you something your Sunday mood cannot. If the lines are empty, you have an answer, and it is not about the market. If the lines are full and nothing has come back, you have an answer too, and it is that you are in the part where nothing comes back. Until next Saturday, Vitalii The thing I have been building. The Mondays, the Fridays and the open line above are not hypothetical. They are what I have spent this year assembling around the strategy work, for people running a serious search on three to five hours a week alongside a full job. It goes out properly in December. Before that I am taking three people through it, by admission rather than by signup, because it only does what it should when the fit is real on both sides. If something in this read like your own situation, hit reply and tell me where you are. If it looks like a match, we will set up a call and go through it properly. Find me on LinkedIn. You're reading The Next Move — a weekly newsletter by Vitalii Lavelin.
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