A woman I used to sit beside at the agency bought me coffee at Ovation on Thursday and asked how I got out. She has been passed over twice in eighteen months. Both times the feedback was some version of keep doing exactly what you're doing.
Keep doing exactly what you're doing is not feedback. It is a request.
I have spent nine years making other people's companies legible. I can take a founder's eleven minutes of rambling and hand back a positioning line her whole sales team can repeat. I did this for a mattress company. I did it for a regional bank. I did it, twice, for a hard seltzer.
I could not do it for myself until I was already halfway out the door.
A strategist who cannot articulate her own value is a plumber with a flooded basement.
Every review season I watch smart people wait to be noticed, on the theory that good work is self describing. It is not. Good work is invisible by design. The better your strategy is, the more it looks like something the client thought of themselves, which is the whole point and also the trap.
Three things, and none of them are clever.
One. Write the receipts down the week they happen, not the month before your review. Nobody remembers March in August. You will not remember March in August either, and the version you reconstruct will be modest, because reconstructed memory always is.
Two. Name the category you want to be hired into, out loud, to a person who can hire you into it. I said the words brand side to four people before anything moved. Positioning does not work if you keep it in a document.
Three. Ask. Directly, with a number and a date attached. The quiet quitting conversation this summer has gotten enormous airtime and most of it misses the point. The problem is rarely that people are doing less. It is that they have stopped asking for anything and started calling that peace.
Titles are downstream of narrative. If you do not write yours, someone in HR will, and HR writes in the passive voice.
Good work is invisible by design.
My friend from Ovation is going to be fine. She has better instincts than I did at her stage and she already knows what she wants, which is most of the work.
Truffles has never advocated for himself once and gets fed twice a day on schedule. Barnaby screams. Barnaby gets fed first. I am not saying this is a career framework. I am saying I have watched it work every morning for four years.