The muscle that is my brain has been overloaded lately. At night, I'm a zombie. By the time the day ends and I'm heading to bed, I have no energy left, nothing to give, and I'm at 1%. When I hit the pillow, there is about a five-second counter that starts, and I'm officially out.
In my new role, I'm leading Sales and Marketing, learning a new industry, learning software sales, new people, a new company, new operating mechanisms, and more. Every single day I learn something new, and I love it.
This is also my third industry. I spent the first ten years of my career in Media and the next ten in the proptech/real estate space. Now my third chapter is in healthcare software, and the learnings are vast.
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I truly believe that everyone should shift industries every 5-7 years. If anything, you get so much value out of challenging yourself to learn something new. I was bored in proptech/real estate after ten years. I knew the people, the leaders, the companies, the structures, and the way to do business, and while on one hand that is a good feeling, it also stops you from growing.
There is something incredibly comfortable about knowing your industry inside and out. You know how to solve problems, where to go for answers, who to call when you need something, and you have the experience to lean on when things get complicated. It's a great place to be, especially when you've spent years building that knowledge. But I think there is a point where comfort starts to work against you, and you don't even realize it because everything feels so familiar.
When I decided to make the jump into healthcare software, I knew I was going to be uncomfortable. I knew there would be conversations where I wouldn't understand half of what people were talking about. I knew I would have to ask questions that might make me sound like the least experienced person in the room. I also knew that I would have to spend a tremendous amount of time learning things that other people had spent their entire careers understanding. That was part of the attraction for me.
It's been two months now, and I can tell you that my brain is working harder than it has in years. I'm constantly connecting dots, asking questions, researching things, and trying to understand how everything fits together. There are days when I walk away from a meeting and realize I have about ten more things I need to learn. It's exhausting, but it's also incredibly rewarding. I can actually feel myself getting smarter about something that was completely foreign to me just a few months ago.
I think one of the biggest mistakes people make in their careers is believing that their experience is tied to the industry they work in. If you've spent fifteen years in financial services, you start to believe that financial services is all you know. If you've spent twenty years in retail, you convince yourself that nobody outside of retail would ever hire you. I've met so many talented people who have limited their career opportunities simply because they couldn't imagine taking their experience somewhere else.
Here's what I've learned. Leadership is leadership. Building teams, developing people, driving revenue, creating accountability, solving problems, and figuring out how to grow a business are skills that travel with you. The customers might be different, the products might be different, and the language might take some getting used to, but so much of what makes you successful in one industry can make you successful in another. You just have to be willing to go through the uncomfortable process of learning everything else.
You just have to be willing to go through the uncomfortable process of learning everything else.
There is also something valuable about bringing an outside perspective into an industry. When you've worked in the same space for twenty years, you tend to accept the way things are done because that's the way they've always been done. Someone coming from another industry might look at that same process and wonder why anyone would do it that way. I find myself asking those questions all the time now. Sometimes the answer makes perfect sense, and I learn something new. Other times, the question creates an opportunity to think differently about how we operate. Both outcomes are valuable.
So yes, I'm exhausted at the end of every day. My brain is fried, and I'm probably going to fall asleep five seconds after my head hits the pillow tonight. But I wouldn't trade this experience for the comfort of doing something I've already spent twenty years learning how to do. I want to keep challenging myself, learning new things, meeting new people, and figuring out what I'm capable of. If you've been sitting in the same industry for years and wondering whether you could make a change, I hope you'll consider it. You might have to start learning all over again, but that's exactly why you should do it.