Stop Chasing Opportunities. Become Someone They Chase.

The people getting the best offers, the best roles, the best deals — aren’t applying. They’re being found. Here’s what they built that you haven’t yet.

There’s a version of my career from two years ago that I’m not proud of — not because it was lazy, but because it was misdirected in a way I didn’t have the perspective to see at the time.

I was doing everything the advice said to do. Optimising the resume for each application, tailoring cover letters to specific job descriptions, tracking every submission in a spreadsheet like a project I was managing, setting LinkedIn to “Open to Work,” refreshing job boards on Sunday evenings with a cocktail of determination and quiet dread that felt productive but mostly just felt like dread.

And then I noticed something strange. The most interesting opportunities that came my way — the DM from someone I’d never met, the email referral, the introduction through someone I hadn’t formally networked with — came from none of that effort. They came from work I’d put in the world before anyone asked me to. Articles. Analysis. Thinking made public, sitting somewhere findable, doing work while I was on the metro.

The best thing that happened to my career wasn’t something I applied for. It was something that found me, because I’d built something worth finding.

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

Once I saw that clearly, the conventional advice stack started to look different. Not wrong exactly — just pointed in the wrong direction. Optimise your resume. Network harder. Apply to more jobs. All of that is motion. What I needed was gravity.

I. The broken model everyone is running on

Most career advice is built on a mental model from a different era.

The model goes like this: opportunities exist out there, in the hands of companies and hiring managers and gatekeepers. Your job is to find them and convince the people holding them to give one to you. You do this by presenting yourself as credibly as possible — the right credentials, the right resume format, the right cover letter tone, the right number of years of experience in the right areas.

This model worked well when information was scarce. When a hiring manager’s only way to understand what you could do was to read what you wrote about yourself on a piece of paper and interview you for an hour. When your reputation didn’t travel beyond the people who’d directly worked with you.

The information environment has completely changed. And the model hasn’t.

The person hiring a data analyst today doesn’t just have your resume. They have Google. They have LinkedIn. They have whatever digital trail you’ve left or failed to leave over the past few years. If you’ve published your thinking publicly — articles, analyses, opinions, observations, anything with your name on it that demonstrates how you think — they can evaluate you in fifteen minutes with more accuracy than a CV ever provided. If you haven’t published anything, you’re indistinguishable from every other candidate with a similar background and similar credentials.

Most people respond to this by trying to make their resume more impressive. That’s optimising the wrong variable.

The economist Michael Spence won a Nobel Prize for formalising what’s called signalling theory — the idea that in markets with information asymmetry, people invest in signals to credibly communicate their quality. For decades in the job market, degrees were the signal. Then experience at prestigious companies became the signal. The signals that actually cut through now are different: demonstrated thinking, public work, a reputation that precedes you.

You can’t fake a body of public work. You can’t fake a reputation built over twelve months of consistent writing or building. And because most people are still focused on the resume — which can be faked, polished, and optimised to the point of meaninglessness — the people doing the real work of building signal in public are operating in a space that’s still surprisingly uncrowded.

II. The difference between chasing and being chased

Let me describe two people with nearly identical skills, experience levels, and backgrounds. Same industry. Same general capability. Completely different relationship with opportunity.

Person A applies to jobs. They’re good at it — they customise each application, they research the company, they prepare well for interviews. They get callbacks at a reasonable rate and they convert some of those into offers. Every opportunity in their life comes through a process they initiate, a door they knock on, a conversation they start. When they’re not actively job-hunting, nothing is moving. The pipeline exists only when they’re pushing it.

Person B builds in public. Not constantly, not exhaustingly — a piece of work here, a published perspective there, a documented observation once a week. Over eighteen months, a small body of work accumulates with their name on it. People start to find it. Someone shares one piece with a colleague. A hiring manager reads it before reaching out. A founder comes across it and thinks: I want this person on my team. A brand sees the audience building and wonders about a collaboration.

Person B still applies for things sometimes. But they’re also receiving. The ratio of opportunities coming to them versus opportunities they’re pursuing has quietly shifted — not overnight, and not without real work, but meaningfully.

The difference between these two people isn’t intelligence or talent or even the amount of effort they’re putting in. It’s where the effort is going.

One person is investing in convincing — each application is effort that disappears into a black hole. If you get the job, great. If you don’t, it’s gone. There’s no compound return on a rejected application.

The other is investing in demonstrating. Every piece of work that exists publicly is still working months after it was made. Every article is findable. Every honest observation is building a cumulative picture of how that person thinks — one that gets more convincing and more discoverable the longer it exists.

III. What being “chased” actually requires you to build

This isn’t a post about personal branding. I want to be direct about that, because “personal branding” has become a phrase that means almost everything and therefore nothing — it conjures images of curated Instagram feeds and carefully optimised LinkedIn headlines that say things like “passionate about leveraging synergistic solutions.”

What I’m describing is different. It’s about building three specific things, and if you build them consistently over time, the opportunities follow as a byproduct rather than as a goal you’re chasing.

1. A visible record of how you think

This is the foundation. Not a record of what you’ve done — your job history, your accomplishments, your credentials. A record of how you think about problems.

There’s a reason the most interesting opportunities in any field tend to cluster around people who write or publish or speak about their work publicly: the people evaluating whether to work with them can evaluate actual thinking, not just claimed experience. They can tell whether this person sees problems the same way they do, whether their judgment aligns with what the organization needs, whether they’d be annoying or clarifying in a meeting.

A CV tells you what someone has done. Public thinking tells you what someone is. Those are genuinely different things, and the second one is much harder to fake.

The practical version of this doesn’t have to be dramatic. One honest article per week. One published observation about something you noticed in your work that week. One piece of analysis that demonstrates you understand not just how to run the query but what the result actually means for a business decision. Over twelve months, that’s fifty pieces of work with your name on them. That’s a record of mind that a resume can’t replicate.

2. A specific perspective — not just information

Anyone can share information. AI can share information. The internet is drowning in information.

What cuts through is perspective: a specific, defensible, slightly uncomfortable position on something that matters in your field. The willingness to say: I think most people in this industry are wrong about X, and here’s why. Or: everyone is optimising for Y, but the thing that actually matters is Z, and most people haven’t noticed the difference yet.

This is harder than it sounds. Most people have been trained — by school, by performance reviews, by social dynamics — to present balanced views and avoid saying anything that might be wrong. Taking a position feels risky. What if someone disagrees? What if you’re wrong?

Here’s what’s actually true: being disagreed with is fine. Being wrong publicly is recoverable. Being forgettable is not.

The people being found by interesting opportunities are almost never the ones with the most perfectly balanced, inoffensive takes. They’re the people who’ve staked out a position clearly enough that someone can decide they want that person specifically, rather than any of the twenty other reasonably competent people who also applied.

Niche specificity compounds. The person who has a clear, documented perspective on why data analysts are undervalued because they’re optimising for output over decision quality is more findable, more memorable, and more valuable than the person who is generally good at data analytics with no specific angle.

3. Proof that compounds, not credentials that depreciate

Here’s something the traditional career advice model gets backwards: most credentials depreciate over time. A degree from five years ago is less impressive than a degree from five years ago plus five years of interesting work. A certification you got last year will be table stakes next year and irrelevant in three.

Proof compounds. A body of work that documents how your thinking has evolved, that shows you getting progressively more interesting and more sophisticated in your perspective, that demonstrates you’re someone who keeps building and keeps showing up — that’s an asset that grows every month it exists, not one that decays.

This is why I’d rather publish one honest, specific, slightly imperfect piece of thinking per week than spend that same time on another certification. The certification gets added to a list. The article gets found by someone who needed exactly that perspective, at a moment when they’re looking for exactly that person.

IV. The shift in how you spend your time

Everything above is directional. Here’s what it actually looks like in practice.

The people I know who consistently get found by good opportunities — not just any opportunities, but the interesting ones — share a handful of habits that most people skip.

They create before they consume. Every day, before they open their feed, before they read the news, before they check what’s trending — they make something. Even something small. A paragraph. A drafted observation. A question they’re going to spend the day thinking about. The act of creating first means that their default relationship with their own mind is generative, not reactive.

They publish imperfectly and often. Not when they feel ready. Not when the piece is perfect. The people building real signal over time are the ones who’ve learned that the cost of not publishing — the compound cost of all the weeks where nothing went out and nothing could be found — is much higher than the cost of publishing something that isn’t quite as polished as it could be.

They document what they actually learned this week, not what they already know. The most interesting public thinking is rarely a polished explanation of something the person has mastered. It’s the honest, slightly uncertain documentation of something they’re figuring out right now. “I’ve been working through this problem all week and here’s what I’ve noticed so far” is more interesting and more human than “here are five things you should know about X.” The first one invites conversation. The second one invites scrolling past.

They narrow rather than broaden. The instinct when you’re trying to reach people is to cover as much territory as possible — maximum relevance to maximum people. The reality is the opposite. The narrower and more specific your published perspective, the more intensely the right people respond to it, and those are exactly the people who represent the best opportunities. Broad attracts browsers. Specific attracts people who want you specifically.

The honest close

The conventional career advice is to chase harder, apply to more things, network more aggressively, optimise your resume to better match job descriptions.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that. But if you’re doing only that — if your entire strategy for career advancement is to be a better applicant — you’re playing a game where the best outcome is getting something you successfully convinced someone to give you.

There’s a different game where the outcome is being wanted specifically — where the message comes in because someone read something you wrote six months ago and thought about you, and finally had an opening that seemed right, and reached out hoping you weren’t already gone.

That second game is slower to start. The first six months of publishing to an audience of twelve people who include your mum and two colleagues is not glamorous. The compounding doesn’t feel real until suddenly it does, and then it feels completely different from everything that came before it.

You don’t have to stop applying. You just have to start building.

Here’s where to start this week:

Step 1 — Write one honest thing about something you actually noticed this week. Not a listicle. Not a summary of someone else’s thinking. Something you observed, in your own work, in your own field, that struck you as true or wrong or underappreciated. Two hundred words. Put it somewhere with your name on it.

Step 2 — Define your one specific angle. The thing you believe about your field that most people don’t say clearly. Write it in one sentence. If you can’t, you haven’t found it yet — that’s what you’re looking for.

Step 3 — Publish something once a week for four weeks without checking how it performs. The habit matters more than the metrics at the start. You’re building a record, not chasing a viral hit.

The opportunities that change your life rarely arrive through the front door you’ve been knocking on.

They find the side door you built — the one made of consistent, honest, public work that proves you’re exactly who the right person is looking for.

Build the door.

I write about AI, data, and careers in plain language. Follow for more.