Kinetic careers
Stay in motion long enough for skill and luck to collide.
The world rewards movement.
Not just effort. Not just talent.
Movement.
What I mean here is the ability to sustain forward motion before the path is clear, before the rewards are obvious, before anyone is paying attention.
The people I know with the most dynamic and interesting work are those who have what I’m calling kinetic careers. They don’t wait for certainty, confidence, approval or timing but instead simply find a way to get moving.
From them I’ve learned momentum isn’t something you build after success. The people who break through tend to be those who refuse to stop — action expands your surface area for opportunity, forces clarity where none existed and, with some luck, ideally compounds into what cannot be ignored.
Kinetic careers illustrate, too, that hesitation evaporates with movement.
I used to think success required careful planning. That careers unfolded in predictable sequences, like a puzzle coming together with set pieces.
Yet through my time at Business Insider and now running a startup, I’ve seen how executing a master vision looks less like a blueprint and more like a pencil sketch that only comes to life with a big eraser.
Indeed, momentum is subtle at first. It's hard to notice. The magic happens when the effort that once felt like a push starts to feel like a pull. It’s like the work starts working on you.
Opportunities appear not because you mapped everything in advance, but because movement creates its own gravity.
Getting there, of course, takes slogging through reps at a pace so incremental it feels static.
Kinetic careers, then, seem to require something like a tolerance for obscurity.
Since I quit my job last March, my long-standing aversion to stillness has deepened. For better or worse, I see movement as not just a career tactic but an existential strategy — one that solves problems before they fully form.
When in doubt professionally or personally, I move.
I focus on creating a kinetic career.
I’ll be the first to admit I could benefit from some downtime. That said, lately I’ve leaned hard into my instinct that tells me only through motion does one earn the right to reflect with any real authority.
Movement has become my default state because the alternative feels like decay.
On one hand I recognize the risk of making more mistakes than necessary by going fast. But the faster my work compounds, the more I learn. And the more I learn, the better my odds of shaping my own reality rather than falling into someone else’s.
Putting aside all this philosophizing, I know for certain that my body of work is growing faster than it was a year ago. That alone is reason enough for me to keep the cadence.
I know momentum alone doesn’t guarantee outsized results.
I also know that without it, the odds shrink to almost nothing.
My sense is that breaking through isn’t a question of talent or timing. It’s about staying in motion long enough for skill and luck to collide — and refusing to stand still until they do.
Talk to you soon,
Phil Rosen,
Co-founder & editor-in-chief, Opening Bell Daily