At networking events, the stories I love most are the ones that start with “my path is squiggly.”
And here is what I have noticed. The people who say it almost always say it as an apology. A small wince before the explanation. As if the detours were the part to get past, not the part worth talking about.
I think they have it backwards.
I do not think a messy path is a problem to clean up. I do not think the goal is a story that finally looks linear. I do not believe the people with the tidiest CVs are the ones with the most to say. And I do not believe expertise is something you can prove with a certificate.
What I do believe is that the most original thinking usually comes from the least tidy paths. Quietly, underneath the polished version people present. The mess is not the thing to hide. The mess is usually where the gold is.
Credentials are not the same as expertise
I have met people with impressive degrees and a perfectly linear career story, and still, their thinking feels thin. And I have met people whose CV looks like a detour map, but the moment they speak, you can feel the depth. Not because they have collected titles, but because they have collected angles.
That is the difference between credentials and expertise.
I do not think credentials are worthless. I do not think the right degree is something to apologize for. I do not think a straight path means shallow thinking.
What I do believe is that credentials only prove you completed a path. Expertise proves you can see — patterns, trade-offs, context, the second-order effects most people miss. And that kind of seeing is rarely built on a straight line.
Where the gold actually comes from
Five things I keep noticing about people whose expertise feels genuinely theirs — in client work, in conversations, in the way the sharpest minds tend to be built:
1. Detours give you angles.
Every field you pass through leaves you with a lens. The person who moved from law to design, or from science to strategy, is not behind. They are carrying frameworks the people who stayed in one lane never had to learn. Cross-field experience is one of the few things that is genuinely hard to copy.
2. The margins are where taste is built.
Real judgment does not come from the theory. It comes from being close to the work, long enough, often enough, to develop a feel for what good looks like. Taste is earned in the unglamorous middle, not handed out at the end of a program.
3. Getting it wrong is data.
The paths that included a failure, a wrong bet, a thing that did not work, tend to produce sharper thinkers. Not because failure is noble, but because it forces you to learn why. That “why” is the part nobody can borrow from you.
4. The through-line matters more than the timeline.
A squiggly path is not a random walk. There is almost always a thread running through it — a kind of problem you keep being drawn to, a way of thinking you bring everywhere. The timeline looks messy. The through-line is the real story.
5. The gold is in the part you usually leave out.
The role you were not supposed to take. The years that look like a gap on paper. The detour you skip in the networking version of your story. That is often exactly where your most original perspective came from.
In that light, the goal is not a cleaner story. The goal is a clearer one.
Why your uniqueness is the real asset
Uniqueness is what makes you the person for something, rather than one of many people who do a thing. It is the difference between I have a background in X and I see this specific problem in a way most people in the room do not — and here is where that came from.
One is a summary. The other is a position. Only one of them makes you the obvious choice when it matters.
Most people I work with are not short on experience. They are short on a way to make their experience legible. They have the gold. It is just still buried in the mess, where no one else can see it — including, often, themselves.
That is what my work is really about. Not polishing anyone into something they are not. Not flattening an interesting path into a generic one. Helping you mine your own story for the perspective only you have, and making it something the market can actually recognize.
Why positioning sits underneath all of this
Positioning is what turns a messy path into a clear point of view. It is what takes the angles you collected and makes them portable — so the market knows what you stand for whether you are inside an organization, advising a few, or building your own thing.
Without it, your best material stays private. The cross-field insight, the hard-earned judgment, the lens you cannot Google — all of it sits inside you, undescribed. With it, the same messy path becomes the most interesting thing about you.
This is why I keep saying positioning is not a marketing exercise. It is how you make your expertise legible. The brand is downstream. The website is downstream. The LinkedIn, the offers, the proposals — all downstream of one question: What do you understand that is hard-earned, and how do you make it visible?
One thing to do this week
Write down the part of your path you usually leave out. The detour. The pivot. The chapter that does not fit the clean narrative.
Then finish this sentence: Because of that, I see ___ in a way most people in my field do not.
If you can write that cleanly, you have found a seam of gold. If you cannot yet, that is the work — not because your path is wrong, but because the most original thing about you is still invisible, even to you.
You do not have to straighten your path.
You just have to stop hiding what it taught you.
Find the gold in the mess. It is usually where the original thinking lives.
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