The cheap casino felt has a specific kind of pill, a roughness that catches the side of your hand as you push the chips forward. His knuckles are white. The guy across from you, the one in the too-tight polo shirt, is blaming you for the turn of a card. His voice is rising, and you can feel the attention of the table turning, that familiar prickling heat of a public scene. Your heart rate doesn’t even quicken. Instead, a thought surfaces, uninvited and strange: this is just like the man who screamed about the temperature of his latte that Tuesday morning in 2012.
We have a profound misunderstanding of what a career is. We see it as a place, a destination we arrive at. ‘I am a barista.’ ‘I am a software engineer.’ ‘I am a logistics coordinator.’ We treat these titles like passports to a fixed country. The decision to leave that country feels like an act of exile, forcing you to show up at a new border with no papers, no history, and no recognizable currency. Ten, fifteen, twenty years of experience, seemingly turned to dust. This is the great lie that keeps talented people stuck. It’s the story we tell ourselves: that to do something new, we must become someone new, starting from zero.
Starting From Zero
The great lie that keeps us stuck.
It’s an Act of Translation
Unlock your hidden expertise.
It’s not a leap. It’s an act of translation.
I used to be terrible at seeing this. A friend of mine, Iris G., spent twelve years as a medical equipment courier. Her job, from the outside, looked straightforward: drive a van, drop off a box, get a signature. She was efficient, reliable, and that was that. When she told me she was thinking of moving into corporate project management, my unfiltered, internal reaction was a form of intellectual snobbery. The kind you don’t admit to. I thought, *But your job is driving. Project management is… spreadsheets and meetings.* I saw her career as the van itself, not the intricate web of skills she deployed from inside it.
“
“But your job is driving. Project management is… spreadsheets and meetings.”
– Author’s internal thought
I was wrong. Embarrassingly, fundamentally wrong.
Iris G.: The Hidden Project Manager
Iris’s daily route wasn’t just a route. It was a complex logistical puzzle with 42 daily variables: hospital receiving hours, surgeon schedules, traffic patterns, and the fragile shelf-life of sterilized equipment. She wasn’t just dropping off a box; she was managing the expectations of 232 different stakeholders a month, from calm receptionists to panicked surgical nurses who needed a specific replacement valve *right now*. Packing her van wasn’t just manual labor; it was a daily masterclass in spatial reasoning and risk management, ensuring a half-million dollars of delicate machinery didn’t get damaged on a bumpy road. She did all this, alone, with no manager looking over her shoulder. That’s not driving; that’s autonomous operational command.
“
She didn’t need to learn project management. She had been a project manager every single day for the last twelve years. She just needed to learn to translate her experience from the language of ‘deliveries and routes’ into the language of ‘timelines and deliverables.’
Experience Buffered by Perception
Actual Skillset Loaded
99%
Her experience was at 99%, fully loaded, but her industry’s perception of her role made it feel like it was buffering.
This is the friction so many people feel. They have the skills, but they’re encoded in a format their target industry doesn’t recognize. The grace under pressure you developed waiting tables during a dinner rush is identical to the grace required to handle a product launch when a server goes down. The rapid, iterative problem-solving you used as a line cook to salvage a sauce is the same agile thinking that tech companies pay six figures for. You’re just used to speaking ‘kitchen French’ and now you’re being asked to interview in ‘corporate English.’ The ideas are the same; the vocabulary is the block.
Kitchen French
Salvaging a sauce, managing a rush.
Corporate English
Agile thinking, product launches.
Some fields are more direct in this translation. The skills required to manage a chaotic retail floor, for example, map almost one-to-one with the skills needed to run a successful poker table. You need situational awareness, a calm demeanor, an ability to read people quickly, and enforce rules without escalating conflict. The translation is so direct that a focused program like a casino dealer school becomes less about learning entirely new skills and more about learning a new syntax for the abilities you already command. It’s not an erasure of your past; it’s a reframing. You’re not starting over; you’re specializing.
The Audit of Your Actual Work
I am skeptical of most things, especially the idea that you can just reinvent yourself overnight. That’s a fantasy sold in airport bookstores. You can’t erase who you are. But you can learn to speak a different professional language. You can take the novel of your experience and create a stunning new translation. Sometimes, this involves a bit of formal study to learn the new industry’s jargon and rituals. More often, it simply involves a deep, honest audit of what you *actually* did every day, not what your job title said you did.
Handled customer complaint.
Executed real-time crisis de-escalation and implemented a temporary service recovery protocol.
Think about the last time a system failed at your job. A computer crashed, a supplier was late, a customer was irate. What did you do? You didn’t just ‘deal with it.’ You likely executed a dozen micro-skills in minutes. You communicated with multiple parties. You prioritized actions. You assessed risk. You documented the issue. You probably did it with a pulse of 122 beats per minute while maintaining a calm exterior. Write that down. Not ‘handled customer complaint.’ But ‘Executed real-time crisis de-escalation and implemented a temporary service recovery protocol.’ It’s the same event, in a different, more powerful language.
Iris G. eventually made her move. She spent two months not learning new skills, but meticulously translating her old ones. She listed ‘Route Optimization’ as ‘Logistical Efficiency Planning.’ ‘Handling nurses’ became ‘Stakeholder Management and Client Relations.’ She got a junior project manager role and was promoted in a year. Her new boss commended her for her “natural ability to stay calm and find solutions under immense pressure.” A natural ability she’d been sharpening for 4,382 days in a delivery van.
“
“natural ability to stay calm and find solutions under immense pressure.”
– Iris G.’s New Boss
Her past wasn’t a liability she had to overcome. It was a hidden asset, an invisible expertise that made her better at her new job than colleagues who had only ever known the inside of an office. The problem was never her skillset. It was just a translation issue.