The best career advice for senior professionals helps them climb faster. My 2020 book was built on exactly that premise. I now disagree with it.”
It is a good book. It has helped a lot of people move faster in their careers, get better roles, earn more, and build stronger professional reputations. I know this because they write to me and tell me.
I still recommend it.
And I now disagree with its central premise.
The book is built on a simple idea: most professionals are not strategic enough about their careers. They work hard but don’t work smart. They don’t manage their visibility; they don’t build the right relationships; they don’t position themselves for advancement. With the right approach, you can move twice as fast with half the wasted effort.
This is true. The advice is sound. The frameworks work.
What the book doesn’t ask and what I didn’t think to ask when I wrote it is whether moving faster is the right goal.
I wrote it at a particular moment in my life.
I was still inside corporate HR. I was proficient at my job. I was moving forward. And somewhere in the background, a question was forming that I wasn’t ready to look at directly: what am I actually moving toward?
The book helped people climb the ladder more efficiently.
What it didn’t do and what I wasn’t equipped to do at the time was to ask whether the ladder was leaning against the right wall.
I have since sat across from hundreds of senior professionals who followed exactly the kind of advice in that book. They climbed efficiently. They got the titles, the compensation, the teams, the respect.
And somewhere between 42 and 52, they found themselves at the top of a very well-climbed ladder, looking out at a view they hadn’t chosen, wondering how they got so far from where they actually wanted to be.
Not all of them. Some people climb exactly the right ladder and arrive exactly where they want. Those people don’t come to Viram. They don’t book Clarity Calls. They are genuinely content.
But the ones who do come, and frankly, there are many of them, are often people who took career advice seriously. Who were strategic. Who moved efficiently.
They did exactly what books like mine told them to do.
And it got them somewhere they didn’t entirely want to be.
Here is what I understand now that I didn’t then.
What Career Advice for Senior Professionals Gets Wrong
Career advice, all of it, and that includes mine too, operates inside a set of assumptions that it never questions. The assumption that advancement is the goal. That more responsibility, more income, and more seniority are the direction. That efficiency in climbing is what you need to optimize for.
These assumptions are so embedded in how we talk about work that most people never notice them. They feel like facts rather than choices.
But they are choices. And they are not the right choices for everyone.
The question I should have asked, the question the book should have started with, is this:
What are you optimizing your career for?
Not which company. Not which role. And not how fast. But what for? What end? What life.
Most people have never seriously answered that question. They have inherited an answer: success, security, status, and the next level without examining whether it is actually theirs.
I know this because I was one of them. I was climbing efficiently for years before I stopped to ask what I was climbing toward. And when I finally stopped and looked at the painting I made in 2013, I realized I had been running in roughly the right direction but without the clarity that would have made every step more intentional.
I don’t regret writing Double Promotion Half the Effort.
I regret that I wasn’t ready to write the chapter that it was missing. The chapter that starts with “Before you optimize anything, figure out what you’re optimizing for.”
That chapter became The Missing Blueprint, the book I published in 2026, six years and one major life transition later.
It is a different kind of book. It doesn’t tell you how to climb faster. It asks you to sit with a harder question first. And then, once you have an answer, to build a career and a life around that answer rather than around the inherited assumptions of what success is supposed to look like.
If you have read Double Promotion Half the Effort, read The Missing Blueprint next.
Not because the first book was wrong. Because the second book asks the question the first one forgot to ask.
And if you haven’t read either, start with The Missing Blueprint. It is the better starting point. The other one assumes you already know what you’re building toward. Most people don’t. Most people need to figure that out first.
The Clarity Call is where that conversation often starts. Thirty minutes, free, no pitch. Most people leave with a clearer sense of the question they’ve been avoiding.
Book it. Or don’t. But ask the question.
What are you optimizing your career for?