The Art of Career Seasons: Beyond Busy Work to Strategic Growth

Q: I have 20 years of experience in IT. Why am I not able to break into growth positions?

Filling a calendar is easy. Being busy is effortless. But is this the right use of your time? The harder question (and the one that determines whether your career compounds or merely accumulates) is whether every activity you choose represents a high-leverage move for your current season.

Most professionals mistake motion for progress. They work for years without strategic awareness, only to find themselves career-irrelevant despite their experience. The difference between those who rise strategically and those who plateau isn't luck, it's seasonal awareness.

The Composite Nature of Career Seasons

Career growth operates on multiple seasonal layers simultaneously, each requiring different types of high-leverage activities:

Career Tenure Seasons (0-5, 5-10, 10-15, 15-20+ years) Your foundational season shapes everything. In years 0-5, more work isn't a trap, it's essential for building patterns. The high-leverage activity is exposure to variety, learning through multiple project types, and building foundational skills. Fighting this season by chasing "strategic" work too early actually slows compound growth.

As you progress through decades, your leverage points shift dramatically. The 10-year professional should be building systems and influence networks, not still optimising individual tasks. The 20-year veteran should be creating legacy and transferring knowledge, not competing on technical execution alone.

Company Context Seasons Even a 25-year industry veteran enters a "learning season" when joining a new company. The political landscape, business processes, and cultural dynamics create a temporary context that requires specific activities, regardless of your tenure elsewhere. Ignoring this season because you're "senior" is a classic mistake that leads to organizational irrelevance.

Disruption Seasons External forces like AI transformation can suddenly shift entire industries into "re-skilling seasons." These disruptions compress normal learning cycles and require adaptability regardless of your other seasonal positions. The professionals who thrive are those who recognise these shifts early and experiment with new capabilities before they become mandatory.

The Settlement Trap: Where Careers Go to Die

We are wired to settle. Maslow's hierarchy drives us toward safety and stability, and achieving career comfort feels like success. But settlement is where compounding stops and career death begins.

The tragedy isn't that settled professionals are lazy, in fact the opposite. They're often working hard. But they're rowing vigorously in the wrong direction, accumulating experience instead of compounding it. They mistake their 8-10 years of experience for growth when they've actually repeated the same year multiple times.

This creates the brutal awakening: suddenly finding yourself un-hireable, irrelevant, wondering why your experience doesn't translate to opportunity. The answer is uncomfortable, experience without strategic progression doesn't compound, it just ages.

Progressive Overload: The Career Muscle Principle

Career growth mirrors strength training. Just as your muscles adapt to consistent weight, your professional capacity adapts to consistent responsibility levels. Growth requires progressive overload, gradually increasing the complexity, scope, and altitude of your work.

The Altitude Principle True career progression isn't about doing more activities, it's about operating at higher altitudes with greater ownership. A junior person owns tasks. A mid-level person owns projects. A senior person owns systems. A leader owns ecosystems.

The volume of work compounds, but you're handling larger pieces of the puzzle at each level. This requires progressively appropriate risk-taking and decision-making capabilities.

The Boredom Signal When you start feeling bored, your career muscle is telling you the current load is no longer challenging. This isn't a problem to solve with distractions, it's a signal to add weight. Just as lifting the same amount forever won't build strength, handling the same responsibility level forever won't build career capacity.

The Experimentation Mindset

Strategic professionals don't wait for perfect opportunities - they experiment with progressive overload in small doses. Instead of binary thinking about readiness, they test their limits through calculated experiments:

• Leading small cross-functional initiatives before seeking team leadership

• Contributing to strategic decisions through working groups before pursuing executive roles

• Mentoring individuals before becoming formal managers

These experiments provide real-time calibration of your capacity. You discover whether the "next weight up" feels manageable or requires more preparation. The key is paying attention to the feedback and adjusting accordingly.

The Little Loves: Your Career DNA

The most successful career experiments aren't random, they're guided by intrinsic patterns formed since childhood. Those "little loves" - chemistry, mathematics, programming, building, teaching, organizing events, connecting people - are your career DNA. They guide you toward experiments that feel energizing rather than forced.

This is why some people's careers seem to flow while others feel like constant struggle. The strategic ones amplify their natural patterns through progressive overload, while others fight against their nature in pursuit of external expectations.

The Spark Test Constantly staying connected to these intrinsic patterns is crucial. When you lose touch with your little loves, you become career-dead, going through motions, checking boxes, but feeling exhausted despite success. The sparkles that once made work energizing disappear, replaced by obligation and routine.

Those who rise "through the tide" with apparent luck often never lost this connection. They naturally gravitated toward opportunities aligned with their intrinsic patterns, making their growth feel organic rather than forced.

The Framework: Seasonal Awareness in Practice

Strategic career management requires continuous vigilance across multiple dimensions:

Seasonal Diagnosis

• What career tenure season am I in, and what are its natural high-leverage activities?

• What company/role context season am I navigating simultaneously?

• Are there disruption seasons affecting my industry that I need to acknowledge?

Progressive Overload Assessment

• What's my current "career weight" in terms of responsibility and complexity?

• Am I feeling appropriately challenged, or have I settled into comfort?

• What experiments can I run to test my readiness for the next altitude?

Intrinsic Alignment Check

• Are my current experiments aligned with my "little loves" or fighting against them?

• Do I still feel sparks of energy in my work, or have I drifted into career death?

• How can I design growth opportunities that amplify rather than drain my natural patterns?

Beyond Busy Work: The Compound Career

The difference between busy and strategic isn't about working harder- it's about working in harmony with your seasons. Learning never stops, but what you learn and how you apply it should evolve with your phase of life and career.

Without learning, there's no compounding. Without compounding, there's no career- just time served. But learning must be strategically aligned with your current seasonal context and intrinsic patterns to create sustainable growth.

The professionals who thrive long-term aren't necessarily the smartest or hardest working. They're the ones who maintain seasonal awareness, embrace appropriate progressive overload, stay connected to their intrinsic patterns, and experiment strategically with their growth.

They understand that career altitude, like physical strength, requires consistent, progressive challenge. They know when to push and when to consolidate. Most importantly, they never lose the spark that makes the entire journey worthwhile.

The question isn't whether you're busy. The question is whether you're strategically alive in your current season, progressively overloading toward greater altitude, while staying true to the patterns that make you uniquely capable of sustained growth.

That awareness and the actions it guides, is what separates careers that compound from those that merely accumulate time.