Trust the process. But nobody tells you the process doesn't go in a straight line

A few months ago I found myself starting again. Another redundancy, another blank page, another business to build from scratch. I sat with my laptop open, a fresh company name typed into a domain search bar, and a very specific thought landed hard: shouldn't I be further along than this by now?

I'm in my forties. On paper, that's meant to be the stretch where things settle or at the very least, on a higher pedestal than the last one, and within reach of the next pedestal. A steady role, a clear specialism, a career that reads in a straight line when someone asks what you do.

Mine doesn't read like that at all. For a long time, I thought that was the problem.

Where the phrase actually earns its keep

"Trust the process" gets said so often it barely means anything any more. It's on gym walls, in LinkedIn captions, in team meetings where nobody quite knows what the process actually is.

I've come to it in a different way. I've read The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday's* daily meditations pulled from the ancient Stoics, every day for eight years now. Stoicism doesn't really talk about "the process" as a concept, but it talks endlessly about the space between what you can control and what you can't, and about showing up properly for the part that's yours.

That's closer to what I actually mean when I say it. Less of a motivational sticker, but more of a discipline I've had to practise on purpose, particularly on the mornings it felt like a lie.

The career that never drew a straight line

If you'd asked me at twenty-two how my career would go, I'd have given you something tidy: go to two universities, get a job, steady promotions, done. What actually happened was university, then a job in sports marketing, then a shift into SEO for local businesses.

This follows with a year living in Berlin doing digital marketing, mostly because I wanted to know what my work looked like outside the UK. Back to the UK, back into SEO, and from there into work I hadn't planned for at all: digital experience and accessibility, first as something I did on the side, then as something I couldn't stop thinking about.

None of that reads as a plan. At the time, each move felt like a slight departure from whatever I'd decided the year before. Looking back, I thought I could see a pattern, but nobody hands you that clarity while you're living it. There's no textbook answer to how any of this is supposed to go.

But the suggested and traditional process that has existed for centuries (graduate > get a job > climb the career ladder) is flawed in today's environment.

What was happening underneath the CV

Some of those career moves weren't really about ambition. A couple of the jobs I went back into were in workplaces with genuinely difficult leadership, the kind that wears you down slowly enough that you don't notice until you're already exhausted.

Underneath all of it, my wife and I were going through fertility struggles, and experienced child losses twice within a couple of years. That period derailed far more than my career plans. It affected my mind, lost another job in the process, and I was later diagnosed with depression. I went on medication and started therapy, and then "started over" again.

I've kept that part brief on purpose. It isn't only my story to tell, and the point here isn't the detail, it's what it did to my sense of direction. When your foundation shifts like that, the career questions stop feeling important in the way they used to.

Then, once things settle a little, they come back louder than before.

Starting again, and again

When I felt ready to build something again, I started my own accessibility business, partly because the day job I'd gone back to had stopped offering any real ambition or growth, and partly because accessibility had become the thing I actually cared about plus also experienced every single day of my life on the account of deafness. It didn't work out. I had to close it. Not long after, I was made redundant from the role I'd taken alongside it.

That's two endings back to back. If I'm being properly honest, there was a period where I watched people my age, and people younger than me, who looked further ahead than I felt. I know comparison isn't a fair measure of anything. Knowing that didn't stop it stinging.

The barrier nobody puts on a slide

There's another layer to this that rarely gets said out loud. I'm hard of hearing, in a professional world that's still largely built around people who aren't.

So much of career progression runs on things that happen in rooms, at volume, in groups: the corridor conversation, the networking event, the quick chat that turns into an opportunity. Relationships open doors in ways CVs don't, and relationships are harder to build when you're working twice as hard just to follow what's being said.

I don't say that as a complaint. I say it because it's a real variable in why my path looks the way it does, and it deserves to be named rather than folded quietly into "non-linear career" as if that's the whole explanation.

And I'm quietly confident it didn't help in previous jobs, where if I don't attend a noisy environment that is focused on cramming people in a room, and then have a social event in a drinking environment afterwards, it will subconsciously be held against me.

A quiet word on faith

I was also brought up to trust in God, and I'm a practising Muslim. That's not the core of what I mean by trusting the process, but it sits underneath it, the same way it sits underneath most of how I try to live. It's also worth saying plainly that the world isn't always built with people who are Black and Muslim in mind either. I won't unpack that here, only note that it's part of the picture.

That said, being part of the Muslim in Tech community, and speaking at one of their events, has brought real opportunities. But the challenge still remains, as I still couldn't follow every conversation in a noisy room.

Breadth versus depth

Somewhere in all of this, I stopped trying to specialise. I didn't stay in SEO. I broadened into digital experience, wider technology, accessibility, and eventually the full mess of running a business: the tech, the admin, the operations, all of it. David Epstein's book Range* makes a version of this argument well, that generalists often do better in complex, unpredictable fields precisely because they've built the habit of connecting things specialists tend to miss.

"A diverse group of specialists cannot fully replace the contributions of broad individuals." — David Epstein, 'Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World'

I believe that. Being a generalist has genuinely been my strength, not a compromise and there seems be to more awareness about it. But I'd be lying if I said the world always agrees.

Plenty of hiring processes, plenty of LinkedIn bios, still reward the person who can say one clear thing about what they do. Breadth can cost you opportunities in a world set up for depth, and that's a real trade-off worth naming rather than smoothing over.

I feel like that has happened to me. Not only does it feel like it has limited my opportunities for myself, but I can count more than one job positions where the company has fully taken advantage of that breadth of skills, but to their benefits and not my own.

Think when there is no one in the company that has a specific skill set to fix a problem. But because I've done it in the past, I'm brought in, even though it's not in my job title. For example, I'm not a cyber security expert or a web developer, but I'm the guy who is brought in to speak the languages and fix those problems when problems arise.

The turn

All of that, the winding path, the setbacks, the breadth, is why starting Untangli feels different to the businesses before it. Untangli is a digital operations business: I build the systems and processes, so businesses never needs untangling. It's built entirely on the idea that things work better when there's a proper process underneath them.

I want to believe this is the right direction, not as a hope but as a decision, because it actually typifies who I am. I like structure. I like untangling a mess into something that works. I like focusing energy on making things more efficient, using technology properly without losing the personal touch.

Fifteen years of a career that never went in a straight line has given me a wider foundation to draw on than a straight line ever would have.

What this means for the clients I work with

That belief doesn't stay personal any more either. When I sit with a client whose business feels chaotic, whose systems are held together with WhatsApp messages, spreadsheet everywhere, and workflows that sit in the owner's head, the thing I'm actually offering them is the same conviction I've had to build for myself: that a proper process, trusted and followed through, gets you somewhere better than chaos does, even when it doesn't feel like it in the middle of it.

There's no textbook version of how to build a career, or a life. Mine has had redundancies, challenging work environments, businesses I had to close, losses I still carry, facing discrimination and a fair few mornings where trusting the process felt like a phrase I was repeating rather than believing.

I'm choosing to believe it properly now, not because the doubt has gone, but because I've decided it's a more useful place to stand than the alternative.
If your own path hasn't gone in a straight line either, I don't think that's the problem you've been telling yourself it is.