Mapping what you actually have

I once spent three weeks brainstorming a pivot before realising I hadn't yet looked at what I already owned. Skills, network, savings, time, the patience of the woman I live with. The whole inventory was sitting there, unwritten down, and I was busy imagining new shapes for a man who didn't yet know what materials he was working with.

The imagination stage is fun. It's also where most pivots quietly die.

This module is the boring, unsexy step that has to come before the four shapes in the next one. The inventory. What you've actually accumulated by your mid-forties, written on one piece of paper, in numbers and names where possible.

The five things to count

Five inventories, in this order. Don't skip ahead.

1. The skills you can charge for tomorrow. Not the ones on your CV. The ones a former colleague would pay you for if they rang you on Tuesday. CV skills are general. Chargeable skills are specific. One pays. The other reads. Write a list of ten. If you can't get to ten, you've already learned something important.

2. The network you can actually call. Not LinkedIn connections. The people whose number you have, whose name you'd say in a hospital waiting room, whom you've had a real conversation with in the last three years. Write fifteen names. Then for each one, a single sentence: what they do now, the last time you spoke, what you might owe each other. Most men have five or six real names and two hundred phantom ones.

3. The capital position. Open the spreadsheet you've been avoiding. Five numbers, no decoration:

• Cash and offset, total.
• Mortgage owing.
• Super (or pension), combined household.
• Other investments at realisable value.
• Monthly fixed costs (mortgage, utilities, insurance, school fees, food, fuel).

That last one is the one that matters most for the runway question. Most men know the first four roughly and dramatically underestimate the fifth.

4. The family bandwidth. This isn't a number. It's a question. How much disruption can the people around you absorb in the next twelve months?

• Is your partner working? Full-time, part-time, or carrying everything at home?
• Are the kids in a settled school year or a transition year?
• Is anyone unwell, including parents on either side?
• Has the household just absorbed a big event?

Two or three of those green and your bandwidth for change is high. Two or three of those red and the pivot probably needs to wait six to twelve months. This is not a moral judgment. It's load-bearing wall analysis.

5. The runway, in months. Cash plus realisable savings, divided by your real monthly fixed costs. Not your current spend. Your skinnied-down spend if you cut the gym, the second car, the streaming services, the takeaway and the kids' weekend stuff. Most men in their mid-forties, on a senior corporate salary, with a mortgage and one or two kids, have somewhere between three and nine months of true runway. Not the year they imagine.

The thing you already have

When you've finished the five lists, you usually find one or two assets you'd forgotten you owned.

It might be:

• A side project from five years ago that quietly built a small audience.
• A consulting gig you turned down because you were employed at the time.
• A skill the market started paying twice as much for while you weren't looking.
• A friend running a business that has been short of someone like you for two years.
• A category of work you've been doing free inside your current job, that other companies pay actual money for.

This is the muscle you'd forgotten was there. The pivot often doesn't need a new skill. It needs you to charge for the one you've been giving away.

What this exercise is not

• It's not a CV. The CV is what you've been paid for. The inventory is what you're actually capable of.
• It's not a list of dreams. We're counting what's already here.
• It's not the time for false modesty. If you ran a thirty-person team for six years, that's a skill, not a job title.

A two-hour rule

Set aside two hours, on paper, on a Saturday morning. Coffee, no phone, no laptop. Write the five lists by hand. The handwriting matters; it slows the imagination down enough to be honest about what's there.

When you finish, you'll have a single page that does two things:

• Tells you what you can do tomorrow with the materials you already own.
• Tells you what you're missing, and therefore what the pivot has to add.

Most men want to skip to the missing list. Don't. The "what you have" list is longer than you think.

Count what's there. Then count what isn't. Build from the first list, not the second.

Further watching

• Myth Busting 5 Common Pieces of Advice About Switching Jobs | HBR Guide
• The Start-Up of YOU: 21st Century Career Strategy | Reid Hoffman | SXSW