Build Your Own Rubric

Last week, I introduced the idea of the Ideal Work Profile—the IWP. A working hypothesis about the kind of work that fits you, tested across roles and refined over time.

I ended with a question: how do you know if your hypothesis is working?

Startups read market signals. Revenue tells them if people will pay. Retention tells them if the product holds. Engagement tells them if anyone cares. Those signals don't arrive as a grade. They arrive as patterns you learn to interpret.

Careers work the same way. The signals are already there. Most people just haven't learned how to read them.

This is one of the clearest signals. When someone reaches out and says "I need your help with this," they're telling you what they trust you for. Not your title. Not your resume. What they've experienced.

If the same request keeps showing up, pay attention. That's your swim lane revealing itself. In Your Swim Lane Is a Signal, Not a Constraint, I made the case that being trusted for something specific beats trying to be everything to everyone. This is how you discover what that thing is. You don't declare it. Other people show you.

A role is a bundle. It comes with a title, a team, a set of responsibilities, a pace, a culture. When it doesn't work, the instinct is to move on and try a different bundle. That skips the diagnostic.

My father wanted to be an engineer. After failing physics twice, that path closed. He moved through a series of roles before landing in editing—which, back then, included page layout.  Much later, he realized why it worked: the technical drawing tools he'd always gravitated toward—compass, protractor, mechanical pencil. Same tools, different field. The ingredients that fit him were there the whole time. He just didn't have a framework to read them.

There's a tell that shows up in conversations, interviews, and even LinkedIn profiles. When someone is clear on their value, they talk about impact—the change they create for the people they work with. When that clarity fades, they list activities. Titles. Tools.

If you find yourself explaining what you do instead of why it matters, the clarity has drifted. The IWP isn't a list of skills. It's the reason those skills matter to someone else.

Every time you rewrite your positioning for a new job search without connecting it to a through-line, your professional narrative builds debt. A career with range but no arc is the individual version of what I wrote about in Narrative Debt—a house with rooms that don't connect.

The indicator here is coherence. Can someone look at your last three roles and see a thread—and can you? If each move feels like a reset rather than a build, the IWP might need sharpening. Not every move needs to be linear. But the through-line should be visible, at least to you. 

People wait—to hear back, to get approval, to gain clarity. It feels disciplined, careful, smart. Mostly, it burns time.  

The old rubric was linear—one major, one career, one right move—and that linearity sticks. I wrote about what that produces in Afraid of Running Out—the quiet belief that there's only one viable path, and you'd better not let go of it.

While you wait, nothing new enters the picture. The pipeline doesn't refill. The options shrink. That's a sign too—not about the market, but about how you're operating inside it. If your IWP has only one active path—one role, no side projects, no parallel bets—you're not learning from your choices. You're waiting. 

Most people don't decide they're good at something on their own. They decide based on mirrors—co-workers, managers, mentors. People they trust.

When those reflections aren’t clear or consistent, it’s easy to assume past success was circumstantial. What you need isn’t praise. It’s pattern recognition from people who’ve seen you work.

If you don’t have those people, that’s the first gap to close.

Mirrors show you what you're good at. A cohort does something else. These are peers at a similar stage, working on similar problems, figuring things out in parallel. Not mentors. Not managers. Builders in the same arena.

Careers no longer come with built-in scaffolding. You have to build your own network. And the people closest to your stage often see things about your IWP that you can’t. 

Every company has an implicit scoreboard. So does every career path. Responsiveness, visibility, meeting performance, executive fluency—these are the rules.. You can optimize for them, or choose a different game.

In Any Game but Chess, I wrote about the Buffett principle: you don't beat Bobby Fischer at chess. You play a different game. The career version is the same.

If you do your best work alone and you're in a culture that runs on constant collaboration—or the reverse—you're not failing. You're in the wrong tournament. That's an indicator of fit, not talent.

Some skills are context-bound. They matter inside a specific company, a specific stack, a specific team structure. Others travel—problem-solving, translating complexity into clarity, reading a room, building trust across functions. The context-bound skills depreciate the moment you leave. The portable ones compound.

If everything you're building only works in your current environment, you're not refining an IWP. You're deepening a dependency.

In Mentoring Is a Multiplayer Skill, I made the case that mentoring isn't a favor. It's a contract. Both sides are responsible for what happens next.

A good mentor doesn't just give advice. They close the loop. They expect to hear what happened. They refine their thinking based on your results. That feedback loop accelerates how fast your IWP comes into focus.

If you don't have that relationship at any stage of your career, you're making things harder than they need to be. 

Your LinkedIn. Your website. Your bio. Your introduction. These are your surfaces—the version of your story that the market sees when you're not in the room.

If your IWP is evolving, your surfaces should evolve with it. When they don’t, the market is meeting a version of you that no longer exists.

Reading the Rubric

None of this shows up on a report card. There's no GPA for clarity. No dean's list for mid-career evaluation. No medals for self-awareness. 

But the signals are real. 

They show up in what people ask you for, what work energizes you, what story your career tells when you're not managing it, and whether the game you're playing is one worth winning.

The old rubric was handed to you. This one you build yourself—insight by insight, prototype by prototype, iteration by iteration.

It's not a checklist you complete. It's a practice you maintain.

Come back to these when you need them. Use some. Use all. They're yours.

1. Are people coming to you for something specific—without being asked?

2. Are you learning what ingredients work—or just whether this role works?

3. Can you describe why you matter without listing what you do?

4. Is your story accumulating into an arc, or does each chapter start from scratch?

5. Are you waiting for one thing to resolve before pursuing the next?

6. Do you have people around you who reflect your strengths back—or are you relying on your own assessment?

7. Do you have a cohort—people building alongside you, not just above you?

8. Are you playing a game where the rules work in your favor—or someone else's?

9. Are you building skills that travel, or skills that only work here?

10. Do you have a mentor—and are you accountable to them?

11. Does the version of you the world sees match the version you're building toward?

Berkson’s Bits

Joining a video meeting two minutes late on mute with your camera off is the equivalent of sliding into a seat in the back of the room.

What I'm Watching and Listening…

This week is a watch AND listen. Hat tip to a loyal reader and avid musician who pointed me to this piece. I grew up listening to Lionel Hampton play the xylophone, but I don’t recall hearing a lot of marimbas. Here’s stunning version of “Over the Rainbow" (arranged and performed by Robert Oetomo).

The career rubric didn't disappear because someone decided it should. It disappeared because the world changed faster than the institutions that provided it. The replacement isn't another institution. It's you, paying attention to what's already in front of you.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation...

Alan