Lydia A. Lascola

The Career You Built vs. the Person You’re Becoming

There is a strange tension I've discovered as I begin to establish myself professionally. At this point, I have enough experience to know what I'm good at. I've built credibility, solved real problems, and developed capabilities I know I can bring into a room.

And yet, I'm still growing into the kind of work I ultimately want to do.

That makes positioning myself surprisingly complicated.

I want to be clear about what I can do without suggesting that what I've done so far is the limit of what I can become. I want to open doors without pretending I've already walked through them.

My own career doesn't tell a particularly linear story. I've moved between different roles, disciplines, and interests, following opportunities and questions as they've emerged. On paper, it can be difficult to explain.

But I'm beginning to wonder whether the goal of a career is actually to make perfect sense on paper.

Because there is another kind of career that can look remarkably coherent from the outside: the person who has spent 20 years at one company, moved steadily up the ladder, and built an impressive body of expertise along the way.

And yet, that person may be asking a very different question:

What if the career I've built no longer reflects the person I'm becoming?

Success Can Create Its Own Kind of Inertia

This isn't an argument against the traditional corporate path. There is tremendous value in staying somewhere long enough to develop real depth, earn trust, understand an organization intimately, and take on increasingly meaningful responsibility.

The danger is subtler.

You can become very good at something you no longer want to spend the next 10 years becoming better at. You can be promoted because you are excellent at a particular kind of work, only to discover that each promotion takes you further from the parts of your work you actually love.

You can develop interests and capabilities outside your formal role, but because your existing career is working, there is little external pressure to explore them.

Nothing is necessarily wrong. You are simply no longer asking whether the direction still fits. And because the change happens incrementally, there may never be a dramatic moment when you realize you've outgrown the path.

You just wake up one day and realize:

I built this career. But I don't know if I still want to become the person this career is making me.

My Career Has Taught Me to Follow the Question

My experience has been almost the reverse. I've moved around more than many people do, and some of those moves probably looked disconnected at the time. But I have noticed a pattern in how I work: I tend to follow the question underneath the question.

Operations led me toward systems. Working with AI led me beyond the technology and into questions about organizational design, governance, knowledge, decision-making, and human judgment.

That work eventually became what I'm now exploring as Organizational Intelligence. The methodology emerged precisely because solving one technical problem repeatedly exposed a deeper organizational one. What began as an AI initiative became a way of thinking about how an organization itself needs to change in order to work intelligently alongside AI.

But even that wasn't the beginning.

My personal Sub stack, Kingdom Civics, took me in another direction entirely—or so it seemed. I was writing about politics, culture, beauty, morality, and civilization. But those questions kept leading backward toward the person.

• What kind of person can govern himself?
• What forms that person?
• What happens when the people within a culture are poorly formed?
• What is “good”?

Eventually, the connection became difficult to ignore.

Organizations are made of people. Technology is used by people. Families form people. Cultures shape people. And the quality of the systems we build is inseparable from the quality of the human beings operating within them.

The AI work made me think about how we design organizations around human judgment. Kingdom Civics made me think about how we form the human being whose judgment we are designing around.

Now, as I begin experimenting and preparing to launch my YouTube channel, Lost Mama, I am bringing those questions even closer to home: the family, motherhood, and the ordinary life in which formation actually happens.

Different work. Different audiences. Different expressions.

But the underlying question is remarkably consistent:

What forms people, and what kind of environments help them become capable of living well?

I didn't choose that sentence as a career mission statement years ago. I discovered it by paying attention to the questions that kept following me.

Maybe Your Career Needs a Thread, Not a Label

This is where I think positioning can become particularly unhelpful. We are encouraged to find our niche, define our personal brand, and communicate a clear professional identity.

There is good reason for this. People need to understand what we can contribute. But a position should make your capabilities legible. It shouldn't make your future illegible.

Your current title describes something you have already become capable of doing. It does not necessarily describe the direction in which your capabilities are developing.

This matters whether your career has been highly nonlinear or remarkably stable.

If you've changed companies and disciplines repeatedly, you may need to learn how to articulate the thread connecting those experiences. If you've spent your entire career in one organization, you may need to discover the thread that exists beneath the job description.

In both cases, the question is the same:

What keeps pulling you forward?

Not what sounds impressive or what would make the best LinkedIn headline. Not necessarily what you would quit your job tomorrow to pursue.

But rather:

What problems do you repeatedly notice?

What kinds of work make you more curious rather than less?

What capabilities have you developed almost accidentally because you kept wanting to understand something more deeply?

What are people consistently coming to you for?

What would you like to become exceptionally good at that you aren't yet?

Those questions can reveal a trajectory long before they reveal a job title.

You Don't Have to Leave to Start Becoming

This is perhaps the lesson I would most want to give someone who feels caught between the career they've built and the person they are becoming.

Don't assume the only options are stay exactly where you are or walk away and start over.

• Experiment.
• Take on the project outside your normal lane.
• Learn the thing you've been curious about.
• Mentor someone.
• Teach.
• Write.
• Build something small.
• Volunteer your expertise somewhere it isn't normally used.
• Find opportunities to exercise the capabilities you suspect you want to develop.

You don't have to abandon the career you've built in order to gather evidence about where you might go next.

And sometimes those experiments won't lead anywhere. That's useful, too.

The goal isn't to manufacture a dramatic career pivot. It is to keep your career responsive to your own development and your character.

Because your résumé should be a record of where you've been.

It should not become a prescription for where you are allowed to go.

Positioning Is a Doorway

I still care about positioning. I want people to understand my professional capabilities. I want the right opportunities to find me. I want to be taken seriously for the work I am capable of doing now while I continue building toward the work I want to do more of.

But I'm becoming less interested in finding one sentence that contains everything.

Perhaps that's because I am beginning to see a career differently.

A position is a doorway. It tells people which room they might want to enter with you. It doesn't have to contain the whole house.

So whether your résumé looks beautifully linear or completely unexpected, perhaps the question worth asking isn't simply:

Does my career make sense?

Ask instead:

Does the direction of my career still make sense for the person I am becoming?

If it does, keep building.

If it doesn't, you don't necessarily need to burn it down. You may just need to start building in another direction.

A successful career isn't necessarily the one that looks most coherent from the outside.

Perhaps it is the one in which the person you are becoming and the work you are doing continue to move toward one another.

CALLING ISN'T ALWAYS A DESTINATION: SOMETIMES, IT'S A DIRECTION

For most of my career, I knew one thing with surprising certainty: I wanted to work on something I cared about. The problem was that I had no idea what that was.

I learned over time, by stepping outside my comfort zone, what I didn't want, along with which environments energized me and which ones drained me. I learned that I liked learning, solving problems, teaching, organizing, and understanding why things worked the way they did. So I kept trying things.

I took different roles. I worked across industries. I developed new skills. I discovered things I was good at and things I was not. I learned what I enjoyed, what I tolerated, and what I never wanted to do again. I also learned when I had reached the limit of a role and when it was time to pivot because there was no clear path for advancement.

For a long time, it felt like I was wandering. Now, I think of it more as becoming capable. That distinction has changed how I understand calling.

Calling Is Not the Same Thing as Desire

Our culture has given us plenty of career advice:

Follow your passion.

Do what you love.

Be yourself.

There is truth in these ideas, but they often leave something important undefined. They tell us to ask what we want. They do not necessarily teach us to ask what we are for. Those are very different questions.

I have come to think of calling as more than the thing that makes us feel fulfilled. It is a direction toward a good that our particular gifts, experiences, and developing abilities can increasingly serve. Your career is not simply an opportunity for self-expression. It is one place where your abilities can be directed toward something beyond yourself.

This is where the older understanding of vocation gives us something our modern language of self-discovery often lacks. We are not merely asking, What do I want to do?

We should also be asking:

What have I been given? What am I becoming capable of? And where can those things be put toward something good?

Capability Often Comes Before Clarity

For years, I thought my problem was that I hadn't found my thing. I now think I had the problem backward. I was still building and developing a skill set. I was in the process of becoming capable.

Every role gave me another piece of information. Some experiences developed skills I would later need. Others showed me what I did not want. Some introduced me to problems I found fascinating. Others gave me enough contrast to recognize what actually mattered to me. None of those experiences were wasted simply because they weren't the answer. They were building capability. And as I've discovered, capability is different from calling.

Capability is what you can do. Calling is what you are increasingly oriented toward doing well and for a reason.

This is why I have become skeptical of the idea that we must discover our passion before we begin. How do you know what you are passionate about if you haven't encountered enough of the world to discover what captures your attention? How do you know what you are good at if you haven't tried enough things to develop your abilities? How do you know which problems are worth spending your life solving if you haven't spent enough time solving problems to recognize which ones matter to you?

Sometimes clarity isn't the prerequisite for action. Action becomes the catalyst for clarity.

The Detours May Be Part of the Formation

We often evaluate our past according to whether it directly advanced us toward our eventual destination. However, I've found that this mindset creates unnecessary anxiety.

I spent three years doing that. Was it a waste?

I changed industries. Did I get off track?

I developed all these skills, but I don't use them now. Why did I bother?

But capability compounds even when job titles don't. A skill learned in one environment can become an instrument in another. A problem you learned to solve in one industry can teach you how to recognize the same underlying structure somewhere completely different. Even discovering what you don't want has incredible value. Sometimes you need to experience enough of the wrong thing to recognize the right one.

Looking backward, I can see that this is what happened to me. I spent years becoming proficient in many different things without knowing exactly where those capabilities would eventually lead.

I left a master's degree program one semester short of graduation because I realized, ethically, that I did not align with its philosophy.

I earned a Certificate in Project Management to broaden my skill set and expand my credibility, but I never pursued an official job title in that field.

I drove an hour in one direction for a company I simply found interesting, despite management not agreeing on what my actual role would be.

I served as a Direct Support Professional at a school for children severely affected by autism. Despite getting paid peanuts, I changed the diapers of 16-year-olds twice my size, knowing they needed me and knowing I could set and stretch a budget.

None of these experiences followed a neat career plan. Yet each one taught me something. Each one added another skill, another perspective, another piece of understanding.

Now I find myself in a very different position. I am highly capable in many areas, and I have also become increasingly clear about the questions I actually care about.

I don't say this to boast, but simply to emphasize that hard work pays off, and time invested in learning skills—even without a clear direction—is still a worthwhile pursuit.

My calling has become clearer, even though its final form has not. And that has been liberating.

A Calling Can Be Clear Before Its Form Is

We put enormous pressure on ourselves to know the title, industry, job description, and five-year plan. But sometimes what becomes clear first is not the form. It is the direction.

I know that I care deeply about human formation. I want to understand how people become the kind of people who can live, work, govern, and build well. I am increasingly interested in the structures and systems that shape human behavior rather than merely reacting to its outcomes.

All the while, I don't yet know exactly what that becomes.

Research? Education? Writing? Organizational work? Something I haven't encountered yet?

I don't know.

But I don't think that uncertainty means I lack a calling. It may simply mean that the calling is ahead of the form.

In the meantime, I can continue developing the capabilities that allow me to explore it further. This is where AI architecture has become particularly interesting to me.

I didn't begin my career thinking, I am going to become an AI architect so that someday I can study human formation. The path was much less linear than that. But I can now see how the capability connects to the calling.

AI architecture requires me to think about systems, structures, governance, decision-making, human-AI interaction, organizational knowledge, constraints, and the conditions under which complex systems behave well.

The technical capability does not define my calling. It gives me another instrument with which to pursue it.

I am beginning to understand that the calling is not the position itself, but the good I am trying to serve through whatever position I occupy.

We Don't Have to Know Everything Before We Begin

Maybe the better career question isn't simply:

"What am I called to do?"

Perhaps we should also ask:

• What am I becoming capable of?
• What am I consistently drawn toward understanding or building?
• What problems seem worth solving even when they are difficult?
• What have my experiences taught me about where I flourish?
• Where might my growing capabilities be put toward something genuinely good?

The answers may not give you a five-year plan, but they may give you direction—and a first step.

I'd argue that's better.

Perhaps calling is not a destination we discover fully formed. Perhaps it is something we become increasingly able to recognize as our capabilities, experiences, responsibilities, loves, and understanding mature.

We don't need to see the finished picture before we begin painting. We need to be faithful with the colors we've been given.

Perhaps the work of a career is not simply discovering the one thing we were born to do, but becoming the kind of person capable of faithfully using what we've been given when the opportunity to serve something greater arrives.

Every Season Comes With Expectations

Every season of life seems to come with an unspoken expectation. Our careers should be accelerating, our homes should be Pinterest-worthy, our outfits should coordinate with our children's, who are expected to charm everyone they meet, and our marriages should flourish with each passing year. Our Saturdays should include brunch with our girlfriends. We should be able to dedicate at least an hour to working out while our bank accounts comfortably support nourishing food. And if one area slows down, we quietly wonder whether we've fallen behind.

It's an exhausting way to live.

All of these things are good. Perhaps, for some, the expectations are a bit high, but the intention behind them reflects the ideal—the white-picket-fence, all-American dream. It's also a tremendous amount of pressure because we've come to believe that every good thing should reach its fullest expression at the same time.

I'm beginning to wonder if that's the lie.

Not long ago, I found myself apologizing for the changes in my life and feeling as though I couldn't keep up.

"I haven't been writing much."

"All I do is wash dishes."

"I'm too tired to go out tonight—sorry."

None of those statements were complaints. They were simply true. Yet somehow they always felt as though they required an explanation, as if a slower season needed a defense.

This Season of My Life

This season of my life looks very different from the one before it. My days are filled with chasing little feet, diaper changes, laundry, bedtime routines, and the thousand small moments that make up family life. Another baby is on the way, and my calendar no longer belongs entirely to me.

Honestly, I'm grateful for that and wouldn't have it any other way.

I chose this season. But choosing one thing inevitably means saying no to another. That's true for all of us.

Whether you're leading a company, building a business, caring for aging parents, raising young children, pursuing graduate school, or navigating an unexpected hardship, life eventually confronts us with competing goods.

I've come to believe life is less about choosing between good and bad and more about choosing between good and good.

The difficult question isn't, "What do I value?" It's, "What deserves my fullest attention right now?"

Good Versus Good

For a while, I assumed one of the sacrifices this season required was my intellectual life. Before motherhood, I spent hours after work reading and journaling. My time was my own, and it was flexible.

I can't say the same anymore.

Instead of waking to an alarm set according to my own schedule, my son's cries determine when it's time to hit the ground running—and it's usually long before I would have set that alarm.

It didn't take long after becoming a mother to realize the life I once knew was quickly disappearing. With it, I imagined my endless ideas piling up somewhere beyond reach, waiting patiently for a future version of me with uninterrupted afternoons and quiet mornings once again.

Nearly two years later, that future has yet to arrive. Interruption has become the rhythm of my days.

Then something shifted.

I began using artificial intelligence.

Not to become more productive or to work faster. Honestly, my output probably hasn't changed much at all.

What changed was something much harder to measure.

I no longer felt like I was losing the thread.

I could hold on to my imagination even while dishes piled up in the sink. Ideas that once would have disappeared into the chaos of an interrupted day could be picked back up days later. Questions could remain open. Conversations could continue. Curiosity no longer depended on having three uninterrupted hours and a clean desk.

The technology didn't remove the interruptions.

It simply helped me remain in conversation with my ideas until I could return to them.

A Story About Stewardship

That may sound like a small thing.

To me, it has felt like a gift.

The more I've reflected on it, the more I've realized this isn't really a story about artificial intelligence.

It's a story about stewardship.

We often think of stewardship as making the most of our time, money, or talents. I'm beginning to think it also means receiving the season we've been given with gratitude instead of constantly wishing we were living another one.

Through my transition from climbing the corporate ladder to choosing to stay home with my children, I've realized that life moves through many seasons and rhythms.

You may be graduating from college and preparing to enter the workforce. You may be buying your first home, knowing it will require countless repairs. Or perhaps you've reached the height of your career and find yourself wondering, What's next?

Regardless of our vocation, the principle remains the same.

There are seasons for building, learning, leading, and caregiving. Seasons of quiet faithfulness that no one applauds, and seasons when we're called to stand on the stage.

For me, even with the newfound ability to preserve ideas that once felt fleeting, I realized it wasn't really about the ideas themselves.

It was about what they represented.

As they accumulated, they became evidence that I was still me.

Motherhood hadn't replaced the woman who loved philosophy, writing, and long conversations. It had simply reordered my days.

Those parts of me hadn't disappeared.

They had simply grown quieter for a season.

Perhaps that's true for many of us.

Carrying the Same Self

We often speak about seasons as though they require us to become someone new.

But I wonder if maturity is less about reinventing ourselves than faithfully carrying the same self through changing responsibilities.

The person I was before motherhood isn't gone.

She's simply becoming a mother.

And when this season changes again, I won't have to rediscover myself.

I'll still be here.

I'll simply be better prepared to continue building my story in a new season.

As it turns out, a meaningful life isn't one in which every part of us grows at the same pace.

It's one in which our priorities are ordered well enough that we can give ourselves fully to what matters most today without believing we've lost ourselves—or what will matter tomorrow.

Perhaps that's why I've become so interested in the relationship between people and technology.

I didn't build my career in AI because I believe technology can help us do everything. I'm the first to admit it cannot.

For starters, it cannot eliminate the sacrifices every meaningful life requires.

Yet every meaningful life still requires choosing.

What technology can do, when we use it wisely, is help us make different sacrifices.

In my case, it has preserved the thread until I had the capacity to pick it up again.

I don't see AI—or any technology—as an escape from the limits of being human. Rather, I see it as a support that allows us to inhabit those limits more faithfully.

Whatever Your Season

Whatever your season, I hope you know this:

Not everything meaningful has to be growing at the same rate to be considered successful.

Some parts of our lives lead for a season while others wait patiently in the background.

That isn't failure.

It's rhythm.

Perhaps wisdom is less about trying to become everything all at once and more about learning to recognize what this season is asking of us, then trusting that what is planted deeply today will still be there when tomorrow asks something different.

Maybe that's what we're really hoping for.

Not lives where every dream unfolds at once, but lives that remain whole through every season.

Where ambition gives way to caregiving without resentment, and caregiving gives way to leadership without regret.

Where learning never ends, even when it slows.

Where the thread of who we are is never broken, only woven into something richer with time.

In the end, I don't think the goal is to have it all.

I think it's to become someone integrated and whole—someone who can faithfully carry what matters most through every season they're given.