The Wish List

I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy. When things change, my first instinct is to look for what's possible, not what's lost. That orientation has served me well across a lot of career transitions, and it's a real part of how I operate.

Lately, I've been thinking about why. 

I don't think it's the optimism itself. Plenty of optimistic people get blindsided by change. They feel good right up until the moment they realize they have no idea what they want or where they'd go next.

Luck is where preparation meets opportunity — I've said that to people more times than I can count. And I stand by it. What I've come to realize is that I was thinking about the preparation part incorrectly. 

People prepare for the uncertainty  all the time. We buy insurance, keep emergency funds, back up our files, run fire drills. Preparing for events we can't predict is something we take seriously in almost every part of life. When it comes to careers, that instinct often disappears. 

People who would never let their homeowner's insurance lapse will go years without updating their sense of what they want, where they fit, or who knows them outside their current role.

The reason is that most of what we call preparation is defensive. Insurance, emergency funds, fire drills — they all protect the downside. You're not trying to benefit from the house fire. You're trying to survive it.

Career inflection points — a reorganization, an acquisition, a market shift, a role that suddenly opens up — are different. They contain risk and opportunity in the same package. The work that helps you absorb the shock is not the same work that positions you to capitalize on the opportunity. 

Most people know the “shock preparation playbook”— update the resume, check the savings account, scan the job boards. That's the career equivalent of the go-bag by the door.

The other kind is harder to see. It requires knowing what you actually want — well enough to articulate it without hesitation when someone asks. It requires relationships that aren't tethered to your current role, and self awareness to evaluate a new situation against something more durable than fear.

That's what separates people who navigate inflection points from people who just survive them.

That's the part people skip. Not the safety net — the wish list.

Where attention goes

When something big changes, the people who navigate it well often appear lucky. They had the right conversation at the right time, knew someone in the right place, had already been thinking about what came next.

From the outside, that reads as good fortune. The reality is less romantic: they'd been splitting their attention before they had to.

Most people pour everything into the work in front of them. That makes sense. The present is where performance lives, where trust gets built, where credibility is earned. Nobody advances by neglecting their current job.

But pouring everything into the present creates a specific vulnerability. When things shift — and they do— you're starting the next conversation cold. You haven't done the thinking. You don't know what you want. You're reacting to someone else's timeline with no framework of your own.

The people who handle inflection points well aren't necessarily smarter or better connected. They've been spreading their attention across three time horizons. Most people only live in one.

The present

Nobody earns standing by talking about what they're going to do next. The present is where credibility comes from execution, reliability, and the work that gives people a reason to trust and vouch for you. No amount of future-readiness compensates for neglecting what's in front of you right now.

But the present has a gravitational pull. It rewards urgency. It fills calendars. It generates enough activity to feel like progress, even when you're standing still.

The risk isn't that people ignore the present. It’s that the present consumes everything else, and that consumption feels productive.

The near future

This is where preparation actually lives, and where most people spend the least energy.

The near future isn't prediction. It's peripheral vision—noticing what's taking shape in your industry, your company, adjacent fields, before any of it becomes impossible to ignore.

You've seen this play out. A technology gains traction in an adjacent space, and the people who'd been quietly reading and paying attention have a six-month head start.. A competitor makes a move that telegraphs where the category is going, and some people saw it forming while others are scrambling to catch up. Most things rarely land without warning. They just land without warning for people whose attention was fully consumed by the present.

Near-future work doesn't look like work. It looks like reading something outside your immediate domain, or grabbing coffee with someone who operates in a different part of the business. It's keeping a relationship warm that has no immediate utility, or learning something adjacent to your current skill set before anyone asks you to. Working on your IWP — the pattern underneath your roles, as I wrote about in The Career Rubric Disappeared. Not because you're about to make a move, but because clarity has a way of making opportunities easier to recognize when they appear.

Then a move finds you.

The unknown future

This is where the defensive instinct kicks in—and where it falls short.

People prepare for unknown career disruptions the same way they prepare for natural disasters: protect the downside. Save money, keep the resume current, make sure your LinkedIn profile isn't embarrassing. All of that is sensible. None of it is sufficient. 

Downside protection keeps you from falling. Choosing where to land requires different work.

You're never going to have a plan for the specific disruption. Nobody does. But you can build the capacity to respond well when something unexpected arrives.

Financial margin helps — not wealth, just enough room that urgency doesn't dictate your choices. Relationships matter, especially the ones that aren't tethered to a single context. People who understand  how you think rather than just what you currently do. And clarity about your own values and wiring matters more than people expect. Without it, you're figuring out what matters to you under pressure, with a deadline imposed by someone else.

The person who's done this work can look at a new situation and ask "does this fit?" — because they've already thought about what "fit" means. That's the advantage. Not a plan. A framework.

Where the balance breaks

Each horizon has a way of consuming too much attention.

Overinvesting in the present and you’ll be blindsided when things change. Strong resume, narrow options, because you never looked up.

The near-future version is subtler. You're always scanning,  networking, and hedging. Your current work suffers because part of your attention is perpetually somewhere else — planning an exit before you've earned the credibility that makes it worth anything.

And when the unknown future takes over, anxiety runs the show. You're saving for a catastrophe that may never arrive, so focused on keeping options open that you never commit deeply enough to build real expertise or meaningful relationships in any one place.

The balance shifts depending on where you are. Early in a career or a new role, the present deserves most of your energy — that's where you earn standing. As you gain stability, the near future deserves more conscious attention. The unknown future requires the least effort of all. It's a small, steady practice of self-awareness and relationship-building that compounds whether or not the disruption ever comes.

The wish list

One thing I tell people when they're facing a transition: write down what you want. Not what's available. Not what seems realistic. What you want.

I call it the Christmas wish list, because that's essentially what it is. Your kids want everything. They're not going to get it all. But the list tells you what they're excited about, what they're drawn to, what matters to them right now. And it gives you something to work with.

Career transitions work the same way. When something shifts, someone is eventually going to ask you what you want — a manager, an HR partner, a friend over coffee trying to help. And most people don't have an answer, because they haven't done the thinking recently enough for it to be useful. They've been so consumed by the present that the question catches them flat-footed.

The wish list changes that. It forces you to articulate what you're drawn toward before the pressure is on. And writing it down does something that thinking about it doesn't — it makes the possibilities concrete enough to evaluate, share, and act on.

Here's why it matters: when someone asks what you want and you have an answer, it signals that you've been doing the work. That you're thinking ahead. That you're not waiting to be sorted.

This isn't about being idealistic. The person who walks into a transition with a list of what they want — even a rough one, even one that's wrong in places — is in a completely different position than the person who's waiting to be told what's available.

One walks in with a point of view. The other is starting from a blank page.

I wrote about this from a different angle in Start With Not a Blank Page — the idea that the best work starts from context, not from zero. The wish list is that idea, applied to your career. It's the context you give yourself before someone else defines the options for you.

What preparation actually looks like

The preparation that matters doesn't feel like preparation. Most of it looks like curiosity — reading something outside your lane, maintaining a relationship that has no immediate purpose, spending twenty minutes on a topic that won't show up in your Q3 review. And underneath all of it, a question you've already answered for yourself: what kind of work actually fits me?

The people who've done that thinking don't need a crisis to know what they want.

Berkson's Bits

Building a function from scratch is not the same as running that existing function within a business. Just because you can build it doesn't mean you can run it at scale. Just because you can run it at scale doesn't mean you can build it from 0 to 1. It doesn't mean you can't. It's just not a given. 

What I'm Listening To...

Years ago I went to see Rickie Lee Jones at the outdoor theater at Jones Beach in New York. She was good, but the opening act blew me away. I became a Lyle Lovett fan that day. He’s got an amazing blend of blues, country, and storytelling. And he’s great live. Check out Lyle Lovett - Live In Texas. 

Most people won't write the list until they're forced to. Something changes, and only then does the thinking begin. That's human nature. The present is loud and the future is abstract, and it's hard to justify spending time on something that doesn't have a deadline.

But the list doesn't take long. An hour, maybe. A drive home. A weekend morning before anyone else is up. And once it exists, it changes how you move through everything else — because you have a reference point that isn't your current job title.

When people say luck is where preparation meets opportunity, they usually mean it in the moment — the right place, the right time. The more useful version is that preparation is what you've been doing with your attention all along. The people who seem lucky have just been paying attention to more than what was directly in front of them. For longer. And more deliberately.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation...

Alan