Insights
The Risk of Not Taking a Risk: Why Capable People Become Forgettable
July 2, 2026
A new coaching client arrives with a career full of genuinely interesting work. They have solved difficult problems, operated in ridiculously complicated structure and built judgment that would be really valuable to their next employer.
Then they describe themselves in a way that makes all of that strangely difficult to see.
Their CV is sensible. Their LinkedIn profile follows “the rules”. Their interview answers are careful. The language is credible, but lacks character. Nothing is wrong exactly. No obvious mistakes. No glaring gaps.
But nothing quite catches the imagination.
When I ask why they’ve described themselves this way, the answer is usually some variation of the same instinct.
“I didn’t want to sound too narrow.”
“I didn’t want to overdo it.”
“I wanted to keep my options open.”
“I thought it was better to stay broad.”
That instinct is understandable. Almost no one wants to sound like the person who turns every normal meeting into a “strategic transformation journey” (well, almost no one – we can all think of a few). They have spent years in organisations where brand credibility matters and where grown-ups are expected to let the work speak for itself.
The problem is that the work rarely speaks for itself outside the organisation. It has to be translated. And when people translate their experience too cautiously, they often remove the very thing that made it valuable.
The prompt for outlining my thoughts was a meeting two weeks ago with a fantastic new client I will call Sophie. Her CV positioned her as a solid finance manager. Useful, credible, safe pair of hands. But in conversation, a different picture emerged. She had managed teams through wars, turned around a function where people were leaving almost as quickly as they arrived and led the people side of one of the most visible divestments in her sector, with scrutiny reaching all the way to the European Commission.
None of it appeared on her CV. My inner voice was screaming – Why?
Because she had learned to describe extraordinary work in ordinary language.
That is the risk of not taking a risk.
Not the risks you see in films – like throwing everything away to follow a dream in a camper van or putting your mortgage on red. Not reinventing yourself as a “thought leader” because someone on the internet told you authenticity drives engagement.
I’m referring to the hidden risk: the risk of smoothing every edge until nobody has a strong reason to remember you.
The Pull Towards the Middle
Standard Normal Distribution:
There is a force in professional life that nudges people towards the centre. You see it in companies. You see it in job descriptions. You see it in CV templates. You see it in how people talk about themselves when they are trying to sound credible.
The centre feels safe because it is where most people are, but it’s where people become interchangeable. This is dangerous because the centre is full of capable people. People with good employers on their CVs. People who can plausibly do the job. But it’s also where people become interchangeable, homogenised and indistinct.
In a crowded market, proving that you are capable is often not enough.
At the time of writing, the US Open golf tournament is concluding on the TV opposite me. The centre ground is like Par, making it around the course with the expected score. But that’s not going to win you the Championship.
Many people get stuck at the first stage. They believe that if they can show enough competence, enough experience and enough credibility, hiring managers will make the connection.
Having managed thousands of hiring processes, I can tell you that usually they don’t.
The market is slow and crowded. Hiring managers are distracted by hundreds of micro-problems and a few big ones. Recruiters are herding cats. Internal candidates already have trust. And now that more candidates can produce polished applications with AI, more people sound fluent, competent and vaguely aligned.
When everyone sounds polished, polish stops being the advantage and clarity becomes the differentiator.
Belonging and Difference
There is a helpful idea from social psychology called optimal distinctiveness.
In the early 1990s, Marilynn Brewer argued that people are pulled by two competing needs. We want to belong, but we also want to feel distinct. Similar enough to be accepted. Different enough to matter.
It’s not a career paper, but it is a very useful idea to apply because the job market creates the same tension.
If you are too different, you may seem risky, hard to place or difficult to trust. If you are not different enough, you become one more credible person in a long list of credible people.
The goal is useful distinctiveness:
• Familiar enough to be trusted
• Distinct enough to be remembered
• Relevant enough to be chosen
This is where many strong people misjudge the risk. They notice the risk of being too specific and underestimate the risk of being too generic.
Ironically, trying to keep every door open often leaves people standing outside all of them.
Why Sensible People Become Forgettable
Most of the people I work with, especially in Europe and Asia, tend to worry about standing out too much.
There is a bad version of differentiation. We see it regularly.
The crazy emails to hiring managers that make the team roll their eyes. The self-appointed “visionary leader” who has “driven impact” from the moment they wake ‘til the moment they sleep.
That is not the point I’m making. I am referring to the 90% who have genuine substance, but have made themselves too safe to be memorable.
Corporate life trains people to speak and write in certain ways. You learn to say “stakeholder management” when what you really mean is “getting five people with competing incentives to stop blocking the work”. You say “cross-functional collaboration” when you mean “translating between groups who do not understand each other and stopping the whole thing from falling apart”.
Inside larger companies at the mid-level, this language, frustratingly, has a purpose. Outside the company, it hides what’s distinctive about a person.
A transformation manager, I will call Michael, had on his CV that he’d “managed cross-functional stakeholders to deliver operational improvements”. It’s true – he did. But it’s almost impossible to remember.
The real story this corporate-speak was built on was much more interesting.
He was sent to Siberia to consolidate two R&D sites, close one, modernise the other and turn a local facility – looking like one of the Soviet-era offices seen on HBO’s Chernobyl – into something more productive and fit for the 21st Century. It was minus 20 celsius. His pen stopped working outside. His fingers froze. Even worse, the local team did not want a new office. They liked what they were used to.
What appeared to be a construction project turned out to be a change management project.
That’s both a more memorable story and evidence.
The real edge is this: Michael could demonstrate that he can walk into an unfamiliar, resistant environment, understand that the formal project was not the real project and adjust his approach. He did not try to force a head office solution onto a far-away site. He used visuals from other projects, gave the local team choices and avoided the “HQ hammer” approach that would have probably failed, aside from forcing the smokers to head outside.
Nobody remembers “cross-functional transformation”.
They remember the pen not working because it was so cold.
The Earned Edge
An earned edge comes from evidence rather than coming up with a nice slogan.
It often comes from a combination of experiences. A scientist who understands the reality of commercial drug development. A CFO who has operated in private equity, family office and corporate environments. A regulatory specialist who understands not only the formal process, but how decisions actually move through regulators.
It might come from solving a difficult type of problem repeatedly. Turnarounds. Post-merger integration. Building a function from scratch. It might come from judgement. The things you now see that a less experienced person would miss.
This is often where senior people become most valuable, but least explicit. They describe their responsibilities. They list their scope. They mention the size of the team or budget. All of that may matter, but it is not always the interesting part.
Experienced people know when the strategy won’t be executed and why. They know how to read the politics. They know the real-world vs the theoretical. Accumulated judgement is often what a hiring manager really wants, without being able to articulate what that looks like themselves.
How To Find Yours
When I work on this with clients, I obsess over the generic statements and force the real story to the surface. Take this point from Sophie’s CV:
“Built stable, high-performing shared services teams”.
True, yet completely forgettable. Digging below the surface is where the gold is found. She was operating in a competitive market with more than 25 other local employers battling for talent. Workers would take a short-term view and leave for the smallest payrises. One-third of employees would leave every year. Instead of accepting churn as the way it was, she judged it as a top priority. She built a small cross-trained bench that could rotate into critical gaps, protecting output and quality while new hiring caught up. At the same time, she made internal career paths more visible, showing people the good things that would happen if they performed and stuck around. By the time she moved up into her next internal role, 75% of roles were being filled by employee referrals and attrition was below 10%.
The ability to stabilise a high churn service environment and turn it back into a reliable function.
In another part of her story, her team identified a tariff issue between two South American countries. The generic version said she “drove value creation across key markets”.
The real version is more useful. She challenged the team not to accept the cost as fixed, pushed them to find options with local authorities and helped recover millions in prepaid duties.
Not only that she can save money. That she does not passively accept the status quo just because the organisation has learned to live with it.
The Risk Worth Taking
Finding your earned edge does not require you to invent a time machine and change the past, rather presenting the most valuable parts of your experience with enough clarity that other people can recognise them. Many accomplished people become less distinctive as they become more experienced. Unless you’ve founded a billion-dollar business, bigger roles make identifying achievement harder when the box you now operate in is 10x wider than the one you started in. The adverse effect is to disguise the experiences that make someone valuable.
Sophie had described her experiences so abstractly that they blended into every other similar profile. Once we uncovered the stories underneath, the evidence became visible, yet the facts stayed the same.
I suspect the same is true for many people. The strongest part of your profile is often hiding in plain sight. It sits in the pattern running through your career, the difficult situations people trusted you to handle and the judgement you have accumulated over time.
Careers are built over years. Reputations are often formed in minutes. If your experience has given you a genuine edge, make it easy for the market to see it. Being remembered for something real is one of the few advantages that becomes more valuable with time.
About the Author
John Bowler is a Basel-based recruitment leader turned AI product developer and founder of The Basel Job Coach, supporting Professionals to secure roles at the leading global businesses.
Contiue reading