You're wasting your potential. It's not your fault.

What I've learned trying to rethink traditional careers advice.

There is an epidemic of career meaninglessness. Millions of people feel stuck, lost, or trapped in work that doesn’t suit who they are. The entire careers infrastructure is set up to help with the job-searching part: here are jobs, here are salaries, here’s what’s hiring, apply now. There are hundreds of tools for this, and they work fine once you have a direction.

But the part that comes before all of that, the figuring-out-who-you-are part, has almost nothing. Career advisers are overstretched and underfunded. Coaches charge £200 an hour. The personality tests that do exist put you in a box and leave you there. There is no real infrastructure for the most important step in the entire process: helping people understand themselves well enough to make a good decision about what to do with their working lives.

Yesterday we launched something to try to change that. It’s called Rumbo. Before I explain what it is, I want to explain why this problem matters so much to me.

Why this is personal

At school I enjoyed maths and science, and so the recommended path for me was engineering, for no other reason than that’s the thing kids who like maths and science do. I took Further Maths, Maths, Physics, and Economics, lined up an internship at an engineering consultancy, and started down the path everyone told me made sense.

I lasted a few months. The engineers I worked with were brilliant, deeply focused on technical problems, happy to spend hours on detail that bored me within minutes. I wasn’t like them. I was broader, restless, interested in too many things at once, and I had no framework for understanding what that meant or what to do about it. So I left and did the most opposite thing I could think of: a degree in music production.

Three years later I realised I didn’t want to be a musician either. I’d enjoyed studying it, but the reality of trying to build a career in music didn’t match what I’d imagined, and I still had that restless feeling of being in the wrong place.

After graduating I got a job as a junior marketer at a music tech startup, which was where I first discovered that I liked building things and communicating ideas. That led me to start my own marketing agency, which failed. It was a difficult experience but it taught me more about what I was drawn to than any of the paths that had come before it.

After the agency I needed to regroup, so I took a role as a creative director at a startup. The company scaled quickly while I was there and I learnt an enormous amount, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t found the thing I was supposed to be doing. So I hired a career coach and spent seven months travelling around Latin America with twelve friends. For the first time, someone helped me think properly about who I was, what kind of work suited my personality, and what I was drawn to beyond the obvious options. And every single one of the friends I was travelling with was wrestling with the same question I’d been circling for years: what am I supposed to do with my career? They were capable, motivated people, and they were completely stuck.

When I got back I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The career advice my peers had received, including me, had been remarkably unhelpful. The people I knew who felt stuck weren’t lazy or unambitious. They simply hadn’t been helped to figure out what kind of work would suit who they are. And the infrastructure that’s supposed to help with that wasn’t designed to answer that question.

What happened next

About six months ago I started a newsletter called Still Wandering. The idea was simple: I’d been through my own period of career confusion, I kept seeing it in everyone around me, and I wanted to write about it. I expected a few hundred readers.

One of the early articles, “The Death of the Corporate Job,” went viral almost overnight. It was picked up by the Financial Times and the Free Press and ended up being read by several million people. The newsletter grew to over 17,000 subscribers. Hundreds of you wrote to me sharing your own stories, and I ended up having thousands of conversations with people who all seemed to be circling the same question.

Through those conversations I began to realise that a lot of the career confusion I was seeing came downstream of one thing: most people simply don’t have access to quality career advice. The infrastructure that’s supposed to help people figure out what to do with their lives is either too expensive, too generic, or too stretched to be useful. And nobody seemed to be building anything to change that.

So we started building something ourselves:

• It began as TrueNorth, got completely rebuilt, and rebranded to Rumbo

• Hundreds of iterations of the product

• Beta users whose honest feedback changed the direction of the product more than once

• Partnerships with some incredible organisations

• A waitlist of over 2,000 people

• Late nights, early mornings, moments of real doubt, and moments where everything clicked into place at two in the morning

Three things I’ve learnt

1. Most people think they have a motivation problem. They have an information problem.

This is the thing I hear most often: “I just can’t get motivated to figure out my career.” But when you dig into it, the issue is rarely motivation. It’s that people are trying to make what is essentially the biggest decision of their lives with remarkably little data. They don’t know what kind of work suits their personality. They don’t know what problems they find genuinely interesting. They don’t have an accurate picture of what they’re good at versus what they’ve simply been told they’re good at. And they have almost no understanding of what the market looks like through the lens of who they are rather than what happens to be hiring.

When you give people that information, the motivation takes care of itself. The paralysis most people feel is a rational response to being asked to make a high-stakes decision with almost no useful data.

2. Careers are long, and this is a process.

There is enormous pressure to have everything figured out by 25, or 30, or even 50. And that pressure is paralysing in itself, because it implies there’s a right answer you’re supposed to arrive at, a destination you should have reached by now. The truth is that careers are long and the process of understanding what kind of work suits you is lifelong. The people I’ve spoken to who seem happiest in their work are the ones who got comfortable with the process of revisiting the question, regularly and honestly, throughout their lives.

We want to help people familiarise themselves with that process and give them the tools to return to it whenever they need to, whether that’s at 22 or 45 or 60.

3. You don’t need to be an expert to solve a problem you really care about.

I don’t have a background in psychology or career counselling or product development. A year ago I was a creative director who wrote a newsletter on the side. But I cared about this problem deeply, because I’d lived it, and because every conversation I had confirmed that millions of other people were living it too. The expertise came from the conversations, from the research, from the hundreds of iterations, from listening carefully to what people told us they needed and then trying to build it.

I think there’s a version of this that applies to everyone reading this. You don’t need to have your career figured out before you start moving. You just need to care about a problem enough to keep showing up, and be willing to learn as you go.

What we built

That’s what Rumbo is. A platform designed to help you better understand yourself, better understand the market, and make more informed career decisions. It starts with a series of assessments and reports that build a picture of who you are: your personality, your interests, your skills, and the kinds of problems you’re drawn to. From there, Rumbo helps you explore the market through the lens of what you’ve learned about yourself, and gives you the tools to make career decisions that are grounded in self-understanding rather than guesswork.

And this is just the beginning. We’re shipping new features every month. What you see today is the foundation, and it’s going to get significantly better over the coming weeks and months based on how people use it and what they tell us they need.

I feel incredibly lucky to say that I’ve found work that feels meaningful and aligned to me: rethinking traditional career advice and helping people find meaningful work. I want to help more people find theirs.

To everyone who has supported us on this journey so far, whether you’ve been reading this newsletter, sharing posts, filling out the waitlist, testing the beta, or just sending a message of encouragement when we needed it most: thank you. We’re just getting started.

If you’d like to try Rumbo, you can sign up here.

And if you know someone who’s struggling with career uncertainty, I’d be grateful if you shared this with them.

Alex