My career has been a game of Frogger

In Frogger, you are a small frog trying to cross a busy multi-lane highway and then a fast-moving creek. You can hop one space to the left, right, forward or backwards at a time, but not fast enough to stay ahead of the fastest vehicles. And although you’re a frog, you can’t swim in the creek – you’ll drown. You have to hop across on the shells of turtles or on logs, and both the logs and the turtles keep submerging, so you have to keep moving quickly and thinking one or more steps ahead as you go.

To stay alive, you have to anticipate when a truck might squish you and move before it does. You have to predict when the log you’re riding on is about to submerge and have someplace to jump to before it does.

Playing well requires thinking fast while staying calm. Each level of the game accelerates the action and is designed to make you stop thinking and start panicking. You might still be OK if you make one panicked move, but moving in a panic will soon kill you.

(It’s more fun than it sounds, honestly!)

My career’s been like a game of Frogger because I’ve hopped my way across more than one industry, more than one profession, and more organisations than can fit on a LinkedIn page. Many times, I’ve wanted to stay in the profession or the organisation I was in, but I could see change coming and had to jump before I became a victim of that change.

Sometimes, I’ve been lucky enough to spot an opportunity that might be a great leap forward, and I’ve almost always been able to stay calm, think fast, and jump at it. Many times, those who stayed behind after I jumped were victims of the changes they didn’t believe would affect them – in the journalism, advertising, PR and corporate times in my career, especially.

When change happens, it happens very gradually at first, and then suddenly.

If you hadn’t noticed already, we are currently in a time of sudden, dramatic change. Populists are starting economic, cultural and ideological wars, demographic time bombs are creating vast wealth inequality where age rather than class determines your quality of life, and then there’s AI! The logs and trucks are moving fast now.

The positive thing to take from looking at your future career as a game of Frogger is to recognise that no job or startup or side-gig lasts forever, no matter how secure it might feel at any point along the way.

You should always be ready to jump forward, sideways or backwards into another job, another organisation or another industry.

If you don’t stay alert to signs that what you do has begun changing gradually, you may not be prepared when it changes suddenly, and you’ll be a victim of change rather than a beneficiary. Practice staying calm while thinking quickly, and be ready to hit the ‘up arrow’ a split second before everybody else.