The Practical Ones

I admired people who went out on their own, but I recognized myself in a different type entirely. Someone who could do many things well but never felt a singular pull. Talented, capable, even creative, but “practical” first.

I liked stability - salary, healthcare, predictable structure - paired with work that felt meaningful and creative. My career looked varied, even glamorous from the outside - marketing, media, tech, startups. But every move was a calculation: Do interesting work without blowing up my life.

That would have surprised the kid I used to be. As a child I was bold and defiant. I assumed life would point me somewhere just as brave.

Instead, one sensible door opened to the next, and since none felt undeniable, I chose the doors that preserved optionality, quietly buying time while waiting for certainty. Over time that posture calcified into a philosophy.

So I built around range: Fortune 50 pedigree on one side, startup scrappiness on the other. If a calling ever appeared, I’d have the tools to execute on it. Fifteen years in, I felt like the next move would define the whole arc. So I took myself off the board for a bit, a few months to “think,” knowing full well that thinking had never been my problem.

Postponing the Inevitable

My inflection point arrived just as the world hit its own: AI. Wars. A tech bubble bursting. You know the rest.

The roles that matched my résumé led back to tracks I’d already outgrown, and the new ones didn’t make sense in a market unraveling by the week. So I did what I always do when I don’t know what comes next: I started working without locking in a final answer. Consulting on projects first to stay sharp, then to stay sane. They began to stack. Every new company crisis meant another team needed help, and I said yes, grateful for the distraction from a question I couldn't answer.

What surprised me wasn’t the trend itself. It was how people with careers like mine -corporate, varied, hard to summarize - were approaching it.

Something Only You Could Build

We weren’t simply parceling out old titles. Not “I used to be a CMO, now I do that fractionally,” although that is certainly happening.

The work that fell through the cracks - too broad for specialists, too tactical for consultants, too novel for the usual fractional model - became the space where people like me could operate. Fractional glue instead of fractional roles. At first that felt merely useful, but because we were operating less like consulting shops and more like disciplines shaped by our own imprints - hybrids of brand, product, ops, and strategy, specific to each builder - it felt genuinely new. “New” matters here.

For a long time it felt like innovation came with one personality: “Move fast and break things.” Thrilling, sometimes brilliant and we’ll always need that ambition. But it also bred a culture of build and dump: ship fast, sell early, move on before the cracks show. We come from a different tradition. We aren’t necessarily chasing the usual markers of leadership or scale, so the work feels more considered. In a moment exhausted by disruption, that kind of creation may be a useful counterweight. Fewer fireworks, but also fewer spectacular crashes.

The Claraty Method

Whatever I built had to earn its keep. That was true of both versions of me. The younger one who wanted to change things, and the older one who wanted the things she changed to work. When I started consulting, I worried about losing control of the outcome. I'd seen how often the smartest ideas in the room died by a thousand practical cuts.

In many ways, I'd been training for this without realizing it. Debate taught me to pressure test arguments until they survive real objections. Marketing taught me positioning is meaningless without action driving it forward. Years inside large organizations showed me how strategies lose their shape moving through a system.  Startups gave me the "figure it out" gene.

Eventually those experiences crystallized into a concrete business: The Claraty Method.

Most companies are excellent at deciding what they believe. What's harder is keeping that belief intact as it moves through the organization. One small decision at a time, one hand off at a time until the original idea is barely recognizable. The Claraty Method gets the thinking out of the deck and into the actual work, then builds it alongside the team until it sticks, internally and externally. None of this is particularly mysterious. One mentor noted it's "integrated marketing in action." What makes it mine is how the pieces fit together.

Even the symbols mattered. I chose the diamond deliberately - pressure and structure. Cut, color, contrast. A prism whose value is determined by its clarity. My name - clarity and light - in the geometry of the thing.

An Invitation

The moment feels manic.

Headlines swing violently between extremes: “The World is Your Oyster!” and “The World is Ending!” Quit your job. Hoard your job. Burn the boats. Hide the boats.

For people like me - who’ve spent our careers “circling back,” “aligning stakeholders,” and living somewhere in the middle - this moment may carry an unexpected advantage.

This moment forced me to do something unexpectedly romantic. Imagine.

And as it often happens with love - organically, without expectation, little by little and then all at once - I started to fall in love with my work again. A sense of purpose I thought I had traded away in pursuit of the next promotion found its way back to me.

For those of us still waiting for an answer, this may be the chance we never thought we’d get: the opportunity to build something we assumed we’d build someday later - when the calling finally dropped from the heavens, when it was safer, when we were sure.

Independence demands a level of self-trust that doesn’t come naturally to people like us. Sometimes that’s harder than the risk itself. We didn’t choose this shift. But if we see it as an invitation instead of a sentence, it may lead us to the most honest, and useful, work we ever do.

Independent work may be singular, but it is anything but a solo endeavor. A special thanks to Kristine Ki— our brand's creative director, right hand, and the reason any of this looks as good as it reads.