Insight

The Side Project You Keep Calling Temporary

Vera·Monday, August 17, 2026 Edition

THE DRAWER YOU KEEP OPENING

A notebook, half-filled, sits in a desk drawer under a phone charger and a dead ballpoint. Orla Fenn bought it eighteen months ago to track ideas for the food business she told herself she was serious about starting. The last entry is from fourteen months back. The notebook isn't a failure. It's a record of someone who confused thinking about a life with trying one.

Identity doesn't arrive through introspection — it accumulates through action, and the self you're becoming is visible only in retrospect. The problem with planning a career change is that it asks you to know the answer before you've run the experiment. You don't know whether you'll love the work, whether you're any good at it, or whether the version of yourself who does it is someone you actually want to be. You find out by doing something small and actual, not by filling a notebook with what you hope will happen.

Herminia Ibarra spent years studying career changers and found that the ones who made successful transitions didn't plan their way across — they accumulated projects, side engagements, and provisional identities until one of them started to feel more real than their day job. The insight hardened into a book called Working Identity, published in 2003. The people who changed careers on a schedule, who waited to feel ready, tended to stay where they were.

THE PROJECT ALREADY IN FRONT OF YOU

So here is what that looks like at ground level: you have been thinking about a pivot for long enough that the thinking has become its own kind of inertia. The hour before your next performance review, instead of rehearsing what you'll say about the role you're already in, you spend thirty minutes applying for one thing — a small freelance project, a volunteer slot, a class that requires you to make something. Not a plan. A deliverable. That deliverable will tell you more about what you actually want than the notebook under the charger ever could. Orla knew this, somewhere. The drawer knows it too.

You don't think your way to a new career. You accumulate small, real acts until one of them starts to feel like you.

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Try This

Find one thing you can make, do, or submit in the next seven days that puts your possible self in front of another person — a pitch, a sample, a registration. Don't tell anyone it's an experiment.

How?

Key Facts

*Waiting until you're certain about a new direction is what keeps the direction out of reach — small projects create the evidence that certainty requires.

*A single concrete experiment, even an unpaid or informal one, tells you more about fit than months of research or journaling ever will.

*You don't need to announce a career change to begin one; the doing precedes the deciding, and that sequence is not optional.