Someone asked me over coffee what I was looking for next. I gave them four minutes of mush. Something with impact. Something with good people. Something where I get to build. All true. All useless.
They nodded, we finished the coffee, and nothing happened. Nothing was ever going to happen. I had handed them a shape with no edges and expected them to go find one in the world.
Gillian Jones-Williams, a coach I have a lot of time for, puts it better than I do: until you know what you want, opportunity cannot find you. I resisted the line the first time I heard it. Sounded like a fridge magnet. Then I looked back at ten years of my own career and found the evidence sitting there in plain sight.
Vagueness feels like keeping your options open
It isn't. It's the opposite.
When you tell people you're "open to interesting things," you've made yourself unreferrable. Nobody forwards your name for a role because you sounded flexible. They forward your name when a specific thing lands on their desk and your face appears in their head, unbidden, attached to a specific want.
I've been on the other side of this hundreds of times. A friend calls, describes a job, asks who I know. My brain does a keyword search, not a vibe search. The people who surface are the ones who told me something concrete six months ago. "I want to run infrastructure at a company under 200 people." "I want to move into product without taking a title cut." Those people get named. The open-to-interesting-things people never do, and they never learn why.
Being unclear doesn't preserve your optionality. It quietly removes you from every list you weren't in the room for.
The parts of you want different things
Here's the harder bit, and the bit coaches call a parts conflict. You aren't unclear because you're lazy or young or bad at introspection. You're unclear because two honest parts of you want incompatible outcomes, and naming one out loud feels like killing the other.
Part of me wanted the big title. Part of me wanted to be home for dinner. Part of me wanted to be the deepest technical person in the room. Part of me wanted to stop touching code entirely and work on humans. Each one was real. Each one had a decent argument. So I said nothing specific to anybody, for years, and called it being open-minded.
What I was doing was avoiding a small grief.
Choosing means one of those parts loses. Not forever, and not completely, but for now. Something you genuinely wanted gets set down. Most people would rather stay in the fog than do the grieving, because in the fog every version of you is still theoretically alive.
The cost of staying in the fog is invisible, which is why it wins. You never see the introduction you didn't get. Nobody sends you a rejection letter for a conversation nobody had.
Twenty-four jars of jam
There's a study I keep coming back to. In 2000, Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a tasting table in a grocery store. Some days they put out 24 jams. Other days, six.
The big table pulled a bigger crowd. More people stopped, more people tasted. Then they walked away. Three percent of the people who stopped at the 24-jam table bought a jar. Thirty percent bought at the six-jam table.
Ten times the conversion, from taking options away.
I don't think your career works exactly like a jam display. But your own head does. When everything is technically still on the table, the decision cost of any single move goes up, so you keep tasting and never buy. You call it research. You call it timing. Two years pass.
Clarity is a sentence, not a life plan
People hear "know what you want" and picture a five-year vision document with a mission statement stapled to it. Then they don't do it, because who has the energy.
Lower the bar. Clarity is one sentence you're willing to say out loud to a near-stranger without softening it afterwards.
A usable sentence has three things in it:
- A shape. The kind of work, not the job title. "Owning a product line" beats "senior leadership role."
- A boundary. What you're saying no to. This is the part everybody skips, and it's the part doing the work. "Not another turnaround" tells me more than three paragraphs of aspiration.
- A size. Team of eight or team of eighty. Startup or enterprise. These are different lives, not different flavours.
Mine, at one point, was: I want to lead engineering somewhere small enough to know everyone's name, and I'm done with commutes over an hour. Not poetry. But someone heard it, remembered it, and eleven months later sent me a message starting with "this made me think of you."
One message is the whole mechanism. Opportunity doesn't find you. A person finds you, because your sentence was short enough to survive in their memory.
The test for whether you're clear
Say it to three people this month. Not a network, not a post. Three humans, out loud, unhedged.
Then watch what you do afterwards. If you find yourself immediately adding "but I'm open to other things too," you aren't clear yet. You're doing the thing I did over coffee, hedging the sentence back into mush the second it leaves your mouth, so nobody holds you to it.
The hedge feels polite. It reads as uncertainty, and people don't refer uncertainty.
You're allowed to change your mind
The fear underneath all of this is commitment. Name a thing, and you're stuck with it.
You aren't. A heading is not a destination. Ships change heading all the time, and they still get somewhere, because at any given moment they're pointed at something. Drifting doesn't preserve your freedom. It hands your direction to whatever current happens to be running.
I've changed my sentence five times. Each version was wrong in some way. Each one got me further than the fog did, because a wrong specific beats a right vague every single time. A wrong specific gets corrected by reality within months. A right vague sits there for a decade, feeling wise.
Worth noting: clarity about yourself and clarity from your boss are two different problems, and most people are short of both. Gallup found only 50% of on-site workers strongly agree they know what's expected of them at work, down from 59% in 2020. If your manager never tells you what good looks like, you're doing this work without a map, on top of doing it without a compass. I write about the manager half of the problem over at Step It Up HR.
But the compass is yours. Nobody hands it over.
So what's your sentence?
Not the polished version. The one with a boundary in it, the one costing you something to say, the one where a part of you loses.
Write it down today. Say it to three people this month. Then stop worrying about whether opportunity is going to find you, because you've finally given it a description to work from.