Full Life Expedition

Serendipity doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It doesn’t send you a message. It doesn’t warn you that you’re about to understand something important about your professional life.
It shows up disguised as an ordinary Tuesday morning, with coffee on the desk and a document open on the screen. No dramatic music. No slow-motion moment of clarity. Just you, a screen, and the quiet realization that everything you thought was scattered was actually being stored.
This is a story about that moment. But more than that, it’s a story about what happens when you stop apologizing for the path you took and start recognizing it for what it actually is, a competitive advantage that nobody else can replicate, because nobody else lived it.

When Two Worlds Finally Speak to Each Other
When my partner and I opened the company, there was no manual for dividing the roles. There was work to be done, and someone had to do it. Over time I coordinated staff, followed the company’s growth, and touched almost every operational are: administration, technical office, marketing, tenders, compliance. Not by conscious choice or grand strategy. By necessity, the kind that teaches you things in a way you never forget, because you lived them from the inside, with real responsibilities and real consequences attached.

Back in high school I had studied computer science and programming. The basic, that way of thinking in instructions, conditions, expected output, which seemed miles away from daily business operations and yet had quietly kept running underneath everything for years. Like a background program you can’t see but that never stops.
For a long time these two worlds had stayed separate. Parallel tracks that never crossed. The technical foundation on one side, the accumulated internal knowledge of the company on the other. I never thought of combining them. I never thought I needed to.
Then AI arrived. And the tracks crossed.

What Serendipity Actually Looks Like in Practice
I took courses, LLMs, AI agents, custom GPTs. I learned to navigate the tools, understood how they worked, where they were strong and where they fell short. And at some point, almost without noticing, I started building prompts.
Not abstract prompts designed to demonstrate technical sophistication. Prompts for specific people, with specific problems, in offices I knew from the inside, offices I had sat in, whose workflows I had watched slow down and speed up, whose frustrations I had heard repeated in the same words across different months and different quarters.
That’s where the strange thing happened, the thing you can only recognize in retrospect as serendipity. Not an epic moment. Not a revelation with a timestamp you can point to. Just the quiet, precise feeling of being in exactly the right place with exactly the right tool, and realizing you got there through a path you hadn’t planned, but that had its own logic all along.

This is what I mean when I say serendipity isn’t luck. It isn’t a benevolent force reshuffling the cards and landing you in the right place by pure chance. It’s the moment when two threads you’ve been weaving separately — without knowing they would ever meet — finally find themselves at the same point. And you’re there. Ready, even though you didn’t know it.

The Structural Limit of Outside Expertise
Before I go further, I want to be clear about something, because this isn’t a critique, and I don’t want it to read as one.
Prompt engineers are serious professionals with technical skills I don’t have and don’t claim to have. They understand the architecture of these tools at a level of depth that I simply don’t. Their work is real, valuable, and necessary. If you need someone to build complex AI pipelines or optimize model performance, you hire an expert. Full stop.
But there’s a structural limit to what any outside expert can gras, even the best ones, even with the most thorough onboarding process.

You don’t know what people say after the consultant leaves the room. You don’t know which problem nobody names explicitly in a meeting but that quietly slows everything down. You don’t know where the real bottleneck lives, because often the people experiencing it can’t even articulate it clearly, they just feel it, every day, in the way certain tasks take three times longer than they should.
A prompt engineer builds something technically correct. Someone who has lived inside the company builds something that solves a problem people actually feel. That’s a different thing entirely, and it’s not a distinction you can bridge with more technical training. It requires time, presence, and the kind of accumulated context that only comes from being on the inside.

I didn’t have that boundary. I was on the inside. And when AI arrived, that turned out to matter more than I had anticipated.

The Tender Office: Where It Became Real
The tender office was the most immediate case, and the clearest example of what I mean.
Opening a tender document often means facing eighty, a hundred pages of dense administrative language. Qualification requirements buried in the middle of the text. Criteria to cross-reference with the company’s own profile, without margin for error, under deadline pressure. Sections that are critical and sections that are essentially filler, but you only know which is which if you’ve done it before.
Same with complex supplier registry applications: fragmented documentation spread across multiple attachments, fields that change format every time, submission requirements that seem designed to exhaust rather than inform.
I had watched that frustration play out enough times to recognize it immediately. I knew the problem wasn’t the volume of the document, it was the time lost navigating it before you could even assess whether the opportunity was worth pursuing. Finding the qualification requirements fast, checking whether they matched ours, flagging the critical gaps before anyone invested hours in a bid that was never viable, that was the real task.
The prompt I built wasn’t the most technically elegant solution. But it was precise in a way that mattered: it addressed the actual friction, in the actual workflow, for the actual people experiencing it. And I could only build it that way because I had lived that friction from the inside.
That’s the difference context makes. Not a small difference, a fundamental one.

Why Your Non-Linear Path Is an Asset, Not a Liability
Here’s what I understood in that period, and keep understanding every time I return to it.

For a long time I had looked at my professional path the way you look at a drawer that won’t close properly — too much in it, nothing quite where it should be, no clean line from start to finish. The professional world rewards specialization, depth, the ability to say “I have always done this and I am very good at it.” Those of us who have moved across different roles, different industries, different contexts learn early to apologize for it. To frame it as adaptability rather than restlessness, hoping the listener is generous.
It’s a trap. And it’s a hard trap to see from inside it, because it looks so much like honest self-assessment.
What I couldn’t see — what took years and one specific Tuesday morning to understand — is that every environment I had moved through had deposited something. A way of reading a room. A vocabulary. A understanding of how a particular type of problem presents itself, what it feels like from the inside, what actually needs to change versus what just looks like the problem from the outside. None of it visible on a resume. All of it present, layered, waiting.
The transversal path I had built out of necessity turned out — without warning, without planning — to be a rare skill in a moment when rare skills were suddenly very useful. Not because I was the most technically advanced. Because I knew what to ask. And more importantly, I knew who to ask, and why it mattered to them specifically.
This is the heart of professional serendipity: not preparing for a specific destination, but accumulating with care and curiosity, trusting that the pieces have a logic even when you can’t see it yet. And then, on some ordinary day, finding yourself recognizing the territory — and realizing you’ve been building toward this moment without knowing it.
Nothing is wasted. Not even the years when you couldn’t see the design.

The Question Worth Sitting With
If you’re reading this and your own path looks more like a collection of detours than a straight line, if you’ve moved across roles, industries, or contexts and still feel like you need to justify that to someone, I want to offer a different frame.
You haven’t been scattered. You’ve been building a map.
The question isn’t whether your experience adds up to something. It’s whether you’re looking at it with the right eyes. The tools to start doing that are here, and if you want to go deeper on how to build a life that holds all of you without forcing you to choose, this piece is a good place to start.
Your non-linear path isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a reserve, still being discovered.
What’s the knowledge you’ve accumulated out of necessity — not by choice — that might turn out to be your most unexpected advantage? I’d genuinely like to know.

If this resonates, the newsletter is where I go deeper, one insight, one tool, one behind-the-scenes look at building a full life without choosing between the parts of yourself that matter.