👋🏻 Hey, before we get started, as a valued subscriber, I wanted to give you a heads-up about a change coming. This newsletter is being rebranded as the “Anti-Resume Newsletter”. It will still feature the same content you've come to value, but I will also include lessons from my book (like the one in this week’s edition) of the same name to help readers build a future-proof career.

It was 3am, and I was in a recording studio, absolutely knackered.

Every sensible person I knew had been asleep for hours. My eyes felt like they’d been sanded. And yet I was buzzing, wide awake in that strange, electric way you only get when something brilliant is happening in the room and you’re part of it.

This wasn’t step four of a carefully considered five-year plan. I didn’t have a five-year plan. I barely had a plan for breakfast.

What I did have, though I wouldn’t have called it this at the time, was a signal. A needle swinging firmly in one direction.

Not long before, I’d been stacking tyres in a warehouse in Manchester, being shouted at by foremen who treated basic dignity as an optional extra. I’d also done a stint making small talk about trouser measurements in a menswear shop. Same person. Same brain. Completely different reading on the dial.

That 3am feeling wasn’t a plan. It was a compass.

Now, I’ll be honest with you. Back then, I didn’t see it that way at all. When you’re cycling through jobs in your late teens, everyone has a question. “What are you doing with your life?” “When are you going to settle down?” Every family gathering felt like an appraisal I hadn’t prepared for. And I half believed them. I assumed the confusion meant something was wrong with me, and that somewhere out there was a laminated plan I’d simply failed to collect.

The irony? When I was stacking those tyres, the career I’d go on to spend decades in wasn’t even in my vocabulary. I didn’t know product marketing was a job. The Xbox didn’t exist. LinkedIn didn’t exist. Any five-year plan I’d written would have been a beautifully detailed map of a country that was about to be redrawn.

And yet we still ask people, with a perfectly straight face, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” As if any of us saw the last five coming.

A career plan is the giant fold-out road atlas from the 1980s. Overly complicated, usually out of date, and utterly useless the moment you miss the one turning you were supposed to take three miles back. Anyone who has tried to refold one in a lay-by while someone in the passenger seat sighs knows exactly how that feels.

Planning isn’t the problem. The problem is that a plan assumes the terrain stays still. It doesn’t. Roles get invented, renamed and restructured out of existence over a long weekend. Your manager leaves. Your company gets bought. You discover at 34 that you’d rather teach than sell. A plan treats every one of those as a failure. A compass treats them as weather.

A compass doesn’t give you the route. It tells you which way is north: a direction built from your values, your curiosities and your emerging strengths. It’s internal GPS that still works when the map doesn’t.

Every pivot I’ve made - sound engineer to tour manager, music to the Xbox launch team, gaming to cybersecurity, employee to consultant, marketer to author - happened without a master plan. Each one started with a compass reading and the nerve to follow it.

So how do you take a bearing? Five questions.

Not the problems you think you should enjoy. Not the ones that look impressive on a slide. The ones that make you lose track of time.

Some people light up untangling a messy spreadsheet. Others would rather chew their own lanyard. Neither is wrong; they’re just pointing at different norths. The mistake is ignoring the reading because it doesn’t match the job title you were told to want.

Take a bearing: List the last five times at work you looked up and an hour had vanished. What kind of problem were you solving each time?

Small team or large organisation? Fast chaos or structured predictability? Creative collaboration or heads-down independent work?

The same person can be brilliant in one setting and invisible in another. That isn’t a talent problem. It’s a soil problem.

Take a bearing: Think of the time you felt most competent at work. Describe the room, not the role: the size of the team, the pace, how decisions got made.

Your greatest strengths often feel so effortless that you assume everyone can do them. They can’t. It’s obvious to you and invisible to them, which is precisely why you’ve never thought to mention it.

The clue is in what people ask you for. The colleague who always sends you the email to “sense check”. The friend who rings you before a difficult conversation. That isn’t random. That’s a market telling you what you’re good at.

Take a bearing: Write down the three things people most often ask for your help with. Then ask two people who know you well what they’d add.

This is usually where the magic lives. For me, it was that studio at 3am. For you, it might be building a model, coaching a junior colleague, fixing a broken process, or winning over a room that started out sceptical.

Most of us reach for our phones the instant we’re bored, which makes the phone an accidentally brilliant measuring instrument. Whatever makes you forget it exists deserves your attention.

Take a bearing: For one week, notice every time you went two hours without reaching for your phone. Write down what you were doing. Follow that feeling, not the job title.

A compass shows you south as well as north. Before I knew what I wanted, I knew with growing certainty what I was allergic to: being shouted at, pointless small talk, and working for people who’d given up on life and expected me to do the same.

Those “not this” moments aren’t failures. They’re signal fires. Each one narrows the field. On paper, my early career looked flaky. In reality, it was the most useful market research I’ve ever done.

Take a bearing: Name three working conditions you’d never voluntarily sign up for again. Be specific. “Bad culture” doesn’t count. “A manager who reads emails during my one-to-ones” does.

One warning. Don’t expect the answer to arrive like a lightning bolt, with your perfect job title spelt out across the sky in fireworks. We expect clarity to feel like a billboard. In real life, it’s far quieter:

Clarity is a dimmer switch, not a light switch. It brightens gradually, and only if you keep moving. A compass in a drawer is just an ornament.

This week

Answer the five questions in writing. Not in your head on the train; on paper. Fifteen minutes, no editing. Then circle any word or theme that turns up more than once. That repetition is your needle settling.

This month

Keep a simple energy log. At the end of each working day, write one line on what gave you energy and one on what drained it (two lines only - this is a compass, not a diary). By week four, you’ll have a pattern you can’t argue with. Then book one conversation with someone whose career intrigues you, and ask what their compass was telling them at your stage.

This quarter

Run one small experiment in the direction your needle points. Volunteer for a project that stretches you towards it. Start a side project. Say yes to one thing that scares you slightly. You’re not making a permanent decision; you’re gathering data. Every result counts, including “not this”.

At 3am in that studio, I had no idea the feeling would eventually lead to a games console launch, a cybersecurity company and a coaching business. I couldn’t have planned it if I’d tried. But I could feel which way was north, and I kept walking.

You don’t need to know where you’ll be in five years. Nobody does, whatever they say in interviews. You just need to know which direction feels like you, and to take the next step that way.

Be kind to yourself out there. A career that’s hard to explain isn’t a weakness. It’s a map only you could have drawn.

Keep on rockin’

Harvey.

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