There’s a version of career advice that often gets handed down: Find your passion early, specialize fast, build your personal brand. It’s tidy, and looks good on paper, but it bears almost no resemblance to how most successful careers actually unfold. Mine certainly didn’t go that way. What I’ve come to believe, after 25 years of leading technology companies through growth and transformation, is that the thing most likely to determine your trajectory isn’t your credentials or your clarity of vision. It’s your willingness to say yes, even before you feel ready.
I left school at 16 without a grand plan. I wasn’t particularly academic and, like most 16-year-olds, I didn’t have a carefully mapped career path. So, saying yes to jobs that presented themselves was my first priority, no matter what they entailed. My first job was on Romford Market [in Havering, a London borough], selling bananas from a small barrow next to a fruit and vegetable stall. The days were early, the weather was cold, and the work was repetitive; suffice it to say, I wanted to move on from there as quickly as possible.
Not long after, I said yes to a more exciting opportunity: taxi driver. I passed my driver’s test in the morning and was driving a taxi by the afternoon. In that role, I met every kind of person—happy people, angry people, distracted people, you name it. It was challenging work, but it taught me a skill that’s guided me throughout my life: how to build trust with someone in a very short amount of time.
Saying yes creates opportunity
At 21, I was driving taxis, had a young child, and wasn’t looking for a way out. Then one day, as I was driving a Ford executive to the airport, he asked me what I planned to do with my life. I told him I was planning on driving taxis. He asked whether I’d ever considered a career in computers. I didn’t have the background, the credentials, or the confidence to imagine myself in that world, but he gave me his card and told me to come see him. Eventually, I said yes.
That yes changed everything. It led to work with Ford’s communication network across Europe, starting with auditing screens and expanding into back-end systems, networking, and how information moved across teams and countries. None of it was part of a plan, but each opportunity gave me more context, and over time those experiences built something harder to manufacture than expertise: range.
Range comes before reputation
Range is especially important in a work culture that often pushes people to define their lane too quickly. In my view, the early stages of a career should be less about fine-tuning a narrow focus and more about understanding how businesses really work.
Some of the most valuable opportunities won’t look impressive at first. In fact, they may look inconvenient, messy, or beneath your job description. But I’ve found that the work nobody wants to do is often where the biggest learning lives. And it’s usually where problems are visible, urgency is high, and people notice who steps up.
Case in point: Earlier on in my career, newspapers needed to get from Essex to Paris [more than 300 miles by road], and, one day, the truck meant to deliver them broke down. This easily could have been treated as someone else’s problem. Instead, I offered to get a van and drive them there myself. Was that the most strategic-looking career move? Probably not. But people remembered it because it showed ownership, that when something mattered, I was willing to help solve it.
That kind of moment builds credibility. Not through heroics, but in demonstrating how you operate when the outcome matters more than optics.
Saying yes builds early knowledge
There’s another reason to say yes early: You can’t challenge a system that you don’t understand. I’ve seen plenty of smart, ambitious people form strong opinions before they have enough context. They want to disrupt the process, question the decision, or point out what leadership is getting wrong. Sometimes they’re right. But often, they’re missing the history, tradeoffs, constraints, and relationships that explain why things work the way they do.
Perspective comes from pattern recognition, and pattern recognition comes from repetition. The more you expose yourself to different parts of a business, the better you become at seeing what is truly happening. You start to understand the task and, more importantly, the entire system around it.
Strategic yes is not the same as people-pleasing
Of course, there is a limit. Saying yes to everything is not a strategy, and can be a fast path to burnout. Early-career professionals shouldn’t confuse growth with accepting every unreasonable request or tolerating poor treatment. The goal is not to become endlessly available, but to be deliberately open to work that teaches you something.
In my experience, a useful yes has at least one of three qualities: It provides exposure to a new part of the business; it places you closer to customers or real problems; and it stretches your skills in ways that expand what people can trust you to do next.
If an opportunity offers none of those things, it may not help you grow.
The best leaders learn when to say no
The shift from saying yes to knowing when to say no is one of the most important transitions in a career. Early on, yes helps you learn. Later, saying no helps you focus. Leaders are routinely tasked with making hard calls, setting priorities, and deciding which problems are worth solving. But those decisions are only as good as the conclusion behind them.
I didn’t know that selling bananas, driving taxis, fixing screens, taking exams, or driving newspapers across borders would connect into a successful career story. But every one of those roles put me in direct contact with people who had real problems that needed solving, and that proximity taught me a lot. The pain points are never loudest at the top; they surface in the work, and in the people closest to it.
So my advice, especially to people early in their careers, is to not be too precious too soon. Get close to the work and to customers, and treat that closeness as intelligence. The patterns you notice, the frustrations you hear repeatedly, and the gaps nobody seems to be fixing—this is the information that will make you a sharper, more grounded leader.
Then, when you eventually say no, it won’t come from ego or fear. It’ll come from clarity earned through everything you said yes to before it.