From Passenger to Driver in Your Career
Three sentences I wish someone had told me about career growth
In the first part of this series, I wrote about the leadership mindset: holding the question, reducing friction and regulating your reactions. In the second, I looked at decision-making: how framing, testing your thinking and involving others changes the quality of the choices you make.
This third part shifts the lens to how careers grow. Not through theory or competency frameworks, but in the complex and interconnected reality of our working lives. If you’re capable and working hard but not seeing it translate into momentum, this article is for you
Looking back, the biggest inflection points in my own career didn’t come from job titles or performance ratings, but from shifts in how I saw my agency, whom I chose to work with and how willing I was to look (and feel) out of my depth. So here are the Three Sentences I Wish Someone Had Told Me much earlier in my career.
1️⃣ Your career accelerates the moment you stop asking for permission.
I used to treat development as something that other people organised for me. I waited for training budgets and formal programmes. When none of those appeared, I read that as a signal to stay in my lane and just didn’t do anything.
I remember one particular case where I was frustrated. I could see opportunities to improve how we used a certain dataset, but my job description wasn’t quite in that direction and my calendar was full. I told myself: “If they wanted me to do that, they’d ask.” So I kept doing what was in front of me and watched those opportunities drift past.
Over time, two things happened. First, I realised that people rarely come and tap you on the shoulder when opportunities are available. Second, I noticed that other people around me were moving faster because they volunteered for messy work and suggested ideas rather than waiting to be briefed. They put their hand up before they felt completely ready.
So, on one occasion, I tried an experiment. Instead of waiting to be given a more strategic task, I developed a plan for a process improvement that could save us lots of time. I expected a complicated conversation about priorities, but instead my manager said: “If you’re willing to own it, go ahead.” That effort ended up opening doors I hadn’t even seen: relationships, new skills and endorsement from leadership.
The lesson here is that the opportunities that change your trajectory often start with you acting as if you already have partial permission. You can test the waters with a concrete proposal instead of waiting for a perfectly timed invitation (which, by the way, may never come!). Careers accelerate when you start treating your growth as something you’re responsible for.
2️⃣ Who you work with shapes who you become. Choose carefully.
We like to think of our careers as individual journeys: our skills and our effort. But time has shown me just how much we are shaped by the people around us: by their standards, habits, fears and ambitions.
I once joined a project team where the dominant tone was cynical. The work was interesting and the client important, but the internal culture was pretty much built on resignation. Deadlines were met, just about, and there was an undercurrent of “this will never change” running through conversations. I was involved long enough to notice that my own posture was shifting. I was complaining more, experimenting less and starting to see problems as fixed features of the landscape rather than challenges we could influence.
In contrast, some of the most energising periods of my career were in projects that treated constraints as something to design around. One research collaboration in particular comes to mind: the budget was tight, the timeline ambitious and the stakeholders demanding. But the people in the room were generous with ideas and honest about risks. When something went wrong, the first question was, “What do we try next?” not “Whose fault is this?” By the end of that project, I had grown so much, because the people were radically different.
What I’m saying is that who you work with influences what you see as normal:
how rigorous your thinking is
how you handle setbacks
how you speak about clients and colleagues when they’re not in the room
what you believe is possible
Obviously, you can’t always choose your manager or your immediate team. But you often have more choice than you think: which projects you volunteer for, whose feedback you seek out, which rooms you spend time in and how long you stay once you’ve understood the culture. Changing jobs is hard, but it’s often on the table. Treat the people you work with as a deliberate career choice, not an accident.
3️⃣ If you’re not failing at anything, you’re not growing.
For a long time, I treated “not failing” as a key indicator of success. If I was on top of my work, delivering consistently and getting good feedback, I assumed I was on the right track. Discomfort, to me, looked like a sign I’d overreached.
The problem is that comfort is an unreliable guide. You can be comfortable because you’re thriving but also because you’ve stopped stretching.
One example stands out. I was invited to design and deliver a workshop on a topic I cared about but had never taught in that format before. My first instinct was to decline politely: it seemed too risky to experiment in front of a new audience. But then I thought this would be a great opportunity, so I said yes, prepared as well as I could and ran the session.
Parts of it went well. Others less so. For example, an exercise fell flat, and I remember the sinking feeling of watching a room lose energy. On the train home I wrote two lists: what worked and what I would redesign from scratch. It was humbling, but it also became the basis for a far better version of that workshop, which I’ve since delivered with much stronger results.
Failure in this context wasn’t a dramatic collapse or a career-ending mistake. It was simply evidence that I was operating at the edge of my current skillset.
This example is not an encouragement to chase chaos or take excessive risks. Of course, recklessness isn’t growth. But if you go months or years without anything feeling shaky, without anything forcing you to rethink your approach, it’s worth asking whether you’re stretching yourself enough.
Growth usually feels awkward up close, and you only recognise it as progress when you look back and see that what you can now do once felt impossible.
Closing reflections
Career growth isn’t a straight line and it surely isn’t a reward that eventually arrives if you wait long enough. It’s the cumulative effect of many small choices that you need to make and own: what you volunteer for, who you stand next to and how willing you are to feel inexperienced again.
The three principles I wish I’d learned earlier are that:
You need to stop asking for permission and take ownership of your development.
Who you work with shapes who you become, so you need to choose carefully.
You need to take some risks and occasionally fail, or you won’t grow.
Together, these principles shift the story of a career from something that happens to you to something you design and of which you are an active participant. They invite you to treat agency, environment and discomfort as levers you can move.
In the final part of this series, I’ll turn to the human side of work: the emotional and relational patterns that make a career sustainable or erode it over time.
Until then, it might be worth asking yourself three questions:
Where am I still waiting for permission I could start to give myself?
Which people around me are shaping who I’m becoming?
Where could I allow myself to fail a little more in service of growing faster?
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I’m Andrea, a management consultant with over a decade of experience across industry and academia. I work with commercial, non-profit, academic and government organisations worldwide, helping them capture meaningful insights through mixed methods research.
I write about practical frameworks to help you discover what others miss. My main goal is to translate complex concepts into techniques that readers can use immediately.
Thank you, Andrea, for this thoughtful and resonant article, as always. Your point about "your career accelerates the moment you stop asking for permission" struck a deep chord with me. In both my work and at home, I’ve noticed how easy it is to fall into the habit of waiting — whether it’s for the 'right' project, the perfect conditions, or even a nudge from someone else. But much like my daughter’s fearless exploration of her world, the most exciting discoveries in my work have come when I’ve simply decided to dive in, unprompted.
What really made me pause was thinking about how we often view discomfort as a warning sign, rather than as evidence of growth. This leads me to an additional reflection: sometimes, the greatest catalyst isn’t just embracing discomfort, but actively seeking environments that challenge your default thinking. It’s not just about the projects we take on, but also the questions we let ourselves sit with, the ones without immediate answers. Perhaps growth isn’t just about doing more, but about lingering longer in the spaces that make us uncomfortable. Thank you again for sparking such reflection.
Re: failing, that's why it's so hard to work for people who don't challenge me enough. If I'm not scared to death by a task, I'm not learning anything from it. I can't tolerate not learning, so it's become a deal-breaker for me.