For nearly two decades, I was a performer: a singer, dancer, and actor working on Broadway shows. A “triple threat.” I was in the top less than 1% of performers in the country who earned that place. I had built an amazing network, earned accolades, and people knew who I was in my field. I had climbed to the top of that mountain.
Then, I changed mountains.
The Two Mountains
The conventional career narrative often forces professionals to feel like they are starting over when they switch fields. I’ve learned there is a painful reality to this: Success doesn’t transfer.
When you switch industries, you are most likely at the bottom of another mountain. You’ve climbed one to the top already, but when you jump to a new career, you are back at the bottom of the next. Your relationships, notoriety, and previous accolades become mere “trivia” or a “stat” on your resume. You can no longer draft on that previous success.
Instead, you find yourself staring up at this next mountain and wondering how steep the climb really is. How tall is it, really, to the top? What gear should I bring with me? Has anyone climbed this one before? Am I flat out crazy?
Your Experience Toolkit
While your success doesn’t move with you, your experience does. You aren’t starting from scratch; you are starting from a lived experience that insiders in your new industry simply don’t have. You spent a career building your toolkit of creative shortcuts, problem-solving approaches, and an experience of failing and trying things that will feel fresh to your new field. Sure, you’ve got new acronyms to learn. So what - That will take you a week. What you’re bringing with you took years, maybe decades, to learn and earn.
When I started Movers+Shakers, I didn’t actually know what an ad agency was. I was just doing what made sense to me given my knowledge and my experiences. As I reflect back on the last decade of building what has now become one of the fastest growing companies in America two years in a row, and named one of Fast Company’s most Innovative Companies, I cannot help but think that what I built here was merely a continuation of what I had built before.
By reflecting on and embracing that seemingly “irrelevant” past, you find your greatest competitive advantage.
Here is what actually transfers between the mountains:
Taste: The ability to evaluate if something is good or bad, even if you’ve never worked on that exact sort of thing before. Craft might look different from industry to industry, but taste does not change - it evolves. Craft is local, but taste is universal. Especially in an ever-evolving AI-driven world, with technology replacing basic creative functions, taste and the experience you bring from any industry or job you’ve had that has allowed you to define what taste is for you, will only become more valuable.
Persistence: As an actor I spent years going on hundreds of auditions and hearing “no”. I have two tattered moleskine notebooks filled to the brim with field notes from audition failures, and every audition I ever went on; 99% of them were projects I never booked. I consider each rejection my tuition, helping me learn to fail better, and setting me up for entrepreneurship in a way the business world never could.
Mindset: How you approach one thing is how you approach everything. And part of being successful as an outsider is not just about trying hard. It’s about refusing to see the industry’s limits. As a performer, I didn’t wait for success to come to me - I went out and chased it. That mindset does not get left behind when you change careers.
Being All In: In Broadway, we say “the best show is the one you’re in”. Whether you’re working on a new business idea, pitching a brand, a boss, or an investor, you have to believe what you’re doing is the best thing in the world, because if you don’t, you won’t get great results, and frankly, you won’t have a lot of fun doing it. And yes, turns out that if you’re having fun doing it, you can be a lot more successful.
The Real Outsider Superpower
The real value of the outsider, or of “outsider intelligence,” is the ability to do things differently, to be a change agent, to connect dots that hadn’t been connected before, to build an entirely new constellation.
Insiders try to improve the status quo by 10%. They have years of experience doing something the same way, and they have a vision of how it could be better. Different. They make adjustments. It does get better. 10% better.
But outsiders, by virtue of their “ignorance,” accidentally create something 10X different, breaking rules we didn’t know (yet) exist. And when we put it back together in a way that makes sense to us, we realize it’s completely different from what any insider would have done. Insiders look at us and say, “you’re brilliant.” We shrug and say, “I just did what made sense to me.”
As I’ve built my own company, one of my greatest challenges has been to resist the intellectual incest that grows in any industry, and to keep my blinders on to canonical expectations of how things “should” be done. By ignoring the noise and the gravitational pull towards sameness, which becomes a stronger and stronger echo chamber over time, I have been able to continue to provide something that didn’t yet exist.
Your weird background isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. Don’t try to fix it. Use it to draw the map the insiders are missing.
If this resonated, the website lives at geoffrey-goldberg.com