Someone told me last year I had a "non-traditional career path." I laughed. By non-traditional, they meant I didn't pick one thing at 22 and march in a straight line until I retired. My path looks more like a plate of spaghetti tossed at a wall... loops, dead ends, sauce stains, a few noodles stuck to the ceiling.
Here's what bothers me about the word "non-traditional." It implies the ladder is the default. Pick a rung. Step up. Repeat until you reach the top or fall off. And anyone who doesn't follow the script is a deviation, an outlier, a cautionary tale.
I don't buy it. I never did.
The ladder was always a lie
The ladder metaphor worked for about thirty years. Pick a company at 22. Get promoted every few years. Retire at 65 with a pension and a watch. Your boss did it. Your dad did it. Your career was a vertical line on a wall, hatch marks of your progress.
Look around now. Show me one person under 50 living the same life. The companies don't exist anymore. The pensions are gone. Loyalty runs about three years in either direction before someone gets restructured or someone takes a better offer. The ladder rotted out from under us a long time ago, but the metaphor stuck around because it's tidy.
Tidy is the problem.
A career is a messy human thing. People change. Markets shift. Your kids get sick. Your parents move in. You get bored. You get fired. You fall in love with paramotoring at 50 and want to spend Saturdays flying instead of grinding for the next title. None of this fits on a vertical line.
My own bowl of spaghetti
Let me show you what mine looks like.
I joined the US Army at 18. Spent a few years learning how to be patient with bureaucracy and how to fix things with whatever was in arm's reach. Left the service, did a degree in computer science, ended up writing software for a living. Worked my way from junior developer to senior to lead to architect to director to CTO. So far, it's a ladder.
Then I quit a perfectly good CTO role to write a book about leadership.
The book turned into a framework I called BAT. The framework turned into a company called StepUp2Bat. The company pulled me into speaking gigs, which pulled me into a podcast, which pulled me into coaching, which pulled me back into building software again... but now the software is about giving employees a voice instead of optimizing some ad delivery system.
Somewhere in there I also became a grandfather, learned to fly a paramotor, moved across an ocean, and started writing personal essays on a blog. None of those were on the original plan. None of them showed up in any career counselor's spreadsheet.
If you drew it on paper, my career looks like a child's scribble. It loops back on itself. It crosses over. There are bits of orange sauce where I have no idea what I was doing for six months.
And honestly? It's the best thing I've ever built.
What the ladder costs you
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're 25 and being told to pick a track. The ladder costs you something. It costs you the right to be curious. Every minute spent climbing toward the next rung is a minute you didn't spend exploring the room. And if the rung breaks, you fall back to where you started with nothing in your hands.
Spaghetti people have something the ladder people don't. They have range. They have skills they picked up sideways, on what looked like detours. They have networks across industries instead of inside one tower alone. When the music stops, they have somewhere to sit.
My Army time taught me discipline I use every day in business. My software career gave me a way to think about systems. My speaking career taught me to read a room. My writing taught me to listen to my own thinking. My paramotoring taught me to be calm when things go wrong at altitude. Every one of those threads runs through everything I do now.
Try to extract any one of them. You'd take the whole bowl apart.
The pressure to look linear
So why do we still pretend the ladder exists?
Because employers love it. Recruiters love it. LinkedIn loves it. Your resume is built for it. Anything you've done outside the line gets flagged as a "gap" or an "interest." The system rewards people who look like they had a plan all along, even when they're lying about it.
I've sat on hiring panels where someone with a beautiful linear resume got the role over someone with five years of real-world weirdness, and the linear person was worse at the job within six months. The boring resume doesn't tell you who the person is. It tells you who they were willing to perform as.
I think the truth is most of us never had a plan. We had a series of decisions, some good, some terrible, with the gaps backfilled by a story we told later. The spaghetti was always there. We were embarrassed about it.
How to live with the spaghetti
If you've got a messy career and you feel weird about it, here are four things I've learned the hard way.
Stop apologizing for the loops. Every time you took a detour, you picked up something. Name it. Use it. Stop calling it a gap year or a sabbatical or a "transition period" like you're filing a tax form. Call it what it was. You were learning.
Stop comparing your spaghetti to someone else's ladder. You'll lose every time, because their photo on LinkedIn is staged and yours is honest. Their ladder will break too, by the way. Most of them do.
Connect the strands on purpose. The trick to a spaghetti career is being able to tell the story of why each piece is there. Not as a justification, but as a thread. What did you learn in piece one? How does it show up in piece three? Make the connections explicit, to yourself first. If you don't see them, no one else will either.
Be honest about what you want next. Most career advice assumes you know your destination. You don't have to. But you do have to be honest about what energizes you this year and what doesn't. The next noodle goes where the energy is.
The bowl gets bigger
Ruth Wooderson, an HR leader I respect, says careers aren't ladders, they're spaghetti. She's right. But I'd push it further. Careers aren't even spaghetti. They're the whole bowl... pasta, sauce, garlic, the pot you cooked it in, and the friend who showed up unexpectedly to eat with you. Everything in your life feeds back into your work, whether you let it or not.
The people I admire most don't have tidy resumes. They have a body of work, and the work has fingerprints from every part of their life on it. The Army veteran who runs a yoga studio. The accountant who became a children's book author. The CTO who quit to fly paramotors and write essays at 5am.
If your career looks like a plate of spaghetti, you're doing it right. The line was never the point.
What detour did you take to learn something? Where does it show up in your work today? Sit with the question for a minute. The shape of your life is more honest than the resume you've been hiding behind.