Claude Silver once poured smoothies behind the counter at Jamba Juice. Today she leads 2,000 people as Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia. One job title has the word "juice" in it. The other has the word "heart." No straight line runs between them.
I think about her whenever someone tells me they feel stuck.
Because here is the thing nobody admits out loud: someone sold most of us a map of how careers work, and the map was wrong.
My career looks like spilled spaghetti
Let me show you mine.
I started in the US Army. Then I earned a computer science degree from the University of North Texas in 1993. Then I became a research engineer at Sun Laboratories, writing C and wiring up databases on VAX/VMS machines. Then mobile apps for a survey firm. Then Android for a bank with 2.2 million monthly users. Then leading 43 engineers across seven teams at a fintech in London.
Now? I write books about bad bosses. I give keynotes in Croatia and Iceland. I host a podcast.
From Texas to London. From a green-screen terminal in a dim office to a stage with a spotlight and a microphone. If you drew my career as a chart, you would swear a toddler got hold of the crayons.
And I would not straighten a single zigzag.
"Stuck" is a feeling, not a fact
One in three UK workers want to completely change careers, according to research from Employment Hero in 2025. One in three. Sit with the number.
Now look around your office. Most of those people are in the same seat they sat in last year. The wanting is everywhere. The moving is rare.
The space between "I want out" and "I walked out" is where stuck lives. And stuck is not a fact about your situation. It is a story you tell yourself. I have invested too much to switch now. I am too old. I do not have the right background. My degree says one thing, so my life has to say the same thing.
I believed every version of those. They were lies. Comfortable lies, the kind you wear like an old coat.
The ladder was always a lie
Someone handed us a single metaphor for work: the career ladder. One company. One rung at a time. Straight up. Fall off and you have failed.
The trouble is the ladder never matched real life.
The average American holds 12 jobs across a working life. Roughly half of the people who change employers also switch occupations entirely, according to Pew Research. The straight climb up one pole was never how most of us lived. We kept the picture anyway, then felt like frauds for not fitting it.
A lattice fits better. You grow sideways. You grow at angles. Sometimes you step down a level to reach a branch you want. The lattice has no single top, so there is no single way to fall off it.
Staying put has a price too
We treat the leap as the only risky move. We weigh the downside of changing and ignore the downside of standing still.
The slow erosion of curiosity. The Sunday-night dread. The version of you who keeps shrinking to fit a role you outgrew three years ago. Staying still feels safe because the bill arrives quietly, in instalments. A leap arrives all at once, so we fear it more. Both options cost you something. One cost you notice. The other you do not... until the total is enormous and you wonder where the years went.
The "too late" myth
The loudest lie of all is the clock. You are too old, you missed your window, reinvention is a young person's game.
I did not write my first book or stand on my first keynote stage as a fresh graduate. I did it after decades of shipping code and managing teams. The grey hair was the point. Nobody wants leadership advice from someone who has never led. Nobody trusts a book about bad bosses written by a person who has never survived one, hired around one, or quietly become one for an afternoon and hated themselves for it.
Your years are not a sunk cost. They are the credibility no one hands you and no one fakes. The 22-year-old has energy. You have evidence. Stop apologising for what makes your next move believable.
What carries over
The biggest fear about changing direction is the belief you start again from zero. You do not.
Skills compound. They follow you. The Army taught me how people behave under pressure, and who a person truly is when things go wrong. Engineering taught me systems thinking, how one small change ripples through everything downstream. Leading 43 engineers taught me why so many managers fail the people beneath them.
Every one of those feeds what I do now.
My whole second act exists because of one number I found in my own research: 99.5% of the people I surveyed said they had suffered one or more types of bad boss. 99.5%. The engineer in me refused to look away from a figure like this. The manager in me had watched it happen, team after team. The writer in me had to say something about it. Three careers, all pointing at one book.
You are not throwing away your past when you change. You are bringing it with you as raw material.
How you start without blowing up your life
You do not quit on Monday and panic by Friday. You run a small experiment.
- Have one conversation with someone doing the work you are curious about. Ask what their average Tuesday looks like, not their highlight reel.
- Build one tiny side project in the new direction. An evening, a weekend. See whether the work itself holds your attention.
- Write one thing in public about a problem you find interesting. See who shows up.
- Find someone one step ahead of you on the path and buy them a coffee. Most people love being asked how they got where they are.
- Name your through-line. What is the thread running under all your jobs so far? Mine was always people and systems, long before I had the words for it.
None of those steps need anyone's permission. None of them burn the house down. Each one turns "stuck" from a wall into a door you have not opened yet.
The day you stop believing the story
Claude Silver did not map a route from smoothies to leading thousands of people. She followed the work, the people, and her own curiosity, one branch at a time. The title with "heart" in it did not exist until she grew into it.
Your next chapter likely has no name yet either.
So here is my question for you. What is the story you have been telling yourself about why you are stuck... and what changes on the day you stop believing it?