Are we more attuned to external advice than to our own?

If you're someone who is ambitious, you've probably asked yourself this question at some point: What does it take? How do I get from where I am today to where I want to be? What do I need to do? Who do I need to become to build the kind of career I imagine for myself?

Effort isn't the problem.

So you cling to every piece of advice from people who seem to have figured it out.

Be louder. Speak up. Take up space. Be more visible. Network. Stay consistent.

And frankly, you're too ambitious not to try. So you do.

But for some reason, it never quite looks on you the way it seems to look on everyone else. It doesn't feel natural. It doesn't create the momentum you thought it would.

And frankly, you deserve some momentum.

Somewhere along the way, it starts to feel like someone else is running your career.

You've become very good at doing all the things you're supposed to do. So good, in fact, that you've slowly lost sight of yourself in the process.

Maybe that's the career crisis so many millennials quietly find themselves in.

Not that we've chosen the wrong jobs.

Not even that we dislike the work.

But that we've spent a decade looking outside ourselves for the answer to a question nobody can really answer for us.

Because the truth is, nobody actually knows what it takes. People know what worked for them. That's what they share. And sometimes it works for you. Very often, it doesn't.

Because careers aren't formulas. They're deeply personal. It’s not that ambition doesn’t matter. Or visibility. Or confidence.

But we’ve somehow accepted one narrow interpretation of what those things are supposed to look like.

One version of ambition.

One version of confidence.

One version of visibility.

What if we’ve simply confused their importance in principle with one particular expression of it?

Somewhere along the way, many ambitious people stopped asking: What do I want? and started asking: Who do I need to become to get it?