Four weeks ago I shared that in my experience, in order to ‘Move Up Faster’ in our careers, we need to be authentic in all four areas of our life: Self, Family, Community and Business.

Here’s how I look at it, as four concentric circles, each of which is one of my ‘lives’:

If we want to succeed then we need to get our actions and our values in alignment across all our ‘lives’.

Today I would like to talk only about our Business ‘life’, in 2025.

Today, I never think of work as ‘work’. It’s never a ‘job’.

For me, my Business ‘life’ is… the best ‘university of life’.

Obviously it wasn’t always so. When I started allocating 40 to 60 of my “waking and productive” hours every week to ‘a job’ back in 1997, it was just that, a job. A means to an end.

Things started to change dramatically eight years later in 2005, when I was hired by Limited Brands, as a key member of the team that created bathandbodyworks.com. To my own surprise, the people there not only hired me but decided that I should project manage the transition of what was then a brochureware website, into a fully fledged e-commerce website (that later on ended up contributing several hundred million per year in revenue.)

In 2005, bathandbodyworks.com was a ‘brochure’: you could select the product you liked, print a page with it on, and then go to a physical store to buy it. Hard to believe, I get it. By late 2006, after our team selected the pick-and-pack logistics provider and back- and front-end platforms (GSI Commerce, today rebranded to eBay Enterprises), and after I almost botched the rollout of bathandbodyworks.com (I was saved by people more capable than me who were running the sister-brand VictoriasSecret.com), we re-launched bathandbodyworks.com.

A dear friend taught me that some experiences in life are ‘terra-citing’.  A cocktail made up of terrifying and exciting.

Launching bathandbodyworks.com was terrifying.

I was almost never excited.

Working 12+ hour days, alone in that proverbial empty apartment, sleeping on an air mattress, in Columbus Ohio, for almost two years.

Coming back to NYC every Friday evening only to leave again at 6am on a Monday… came as close to breaking my (today) 23-year relationship with my wife, as anything else.

Even so, I would do it all over again in a New York minute.

Why?

I felt alive. I mattered. What I did mattered.

I was hooked on digital marketing.

I’d discovered my very own ‘fire in the belly’, in my Business ‘life’.

Our Business ‘life’ is very different from our Self, Family and Community ‘lives’.

Work is seemingly transactional. We seem to trade our time for money.

We all have available to us those 95 “waking and productive” hours, every single week. And a big share of that time is at work … spent with strangers who won’t miss me when I die, because they don’t love me like my family loves me.

And yet this newsletter series is all about ‘Moving Up Faster’ in our Business ‘life’.

I don’t think we are born ‘pre-programmed’ wanting or not wanting to obsess about work. I believe it’s something we can choose to develop.

If being the best version of myself in my Business ‘life’ is important to me, the goal is always to create more Value. Yes, the Return on Marketing Career (RoMC) framework that I posited in my first post stands. To Move Up Faster at work, we always must create more Value.

How do we create Value? First, we need to get out of our Comfort Zone. Second, we need to lean into new Experiences, which lead to our Skill-set and Mindset growing. Third, armed with new knowledge, we can create more Value in our roles. Fourth, when we create more Value in our roles, we ‘Move Up Faster’, because those who go above and beyond in their pursuit of Value-creation are the ones considered for a promotion or a raise.

And yet none of this will happen if we think of our Business ‘life’ as a job. It must be a career.

A career is something we do for ourselves.

A career is a life-long pursuit of excellence.

Thank God Almighty that I’ve had the joy of spending most of my 25 working years, obsessed with my Business ‘life’ – starting with that first experience re-launching bathandbodyworks.com in 2005.

We all deserve, to be terra-cited in our Business ‘life’ with a healthy mix of terror and excitement coming from whatever new experiences we face.

And, as a side benefit, when lived to the fullest – at work – our Business ‘life’ can be that best ‘university of life’, bringing to the surface all of the dysfunctions from our Self, Family, and Community ‘lives’.

We ‘Move Up Faster’ when we face those dysfunctions, and make sense of our past, our today, and our future. That way, we never stop getting better.

Here is how I think about how we all can align our actions around our Business ‘life’ in 2025, with a healthy mix of terror and excitement (aka terra-citement), as the unlock to a more rewarding career.

(btw, this framework follows my Return on Marketing Career post – yes, this RoMC framework isn’t just about my Business ‘life’, it also directly relates to my Personal, my Family and my Community ‘lives’ too.)

Step 1, Get Out of Your Comfort Zone: When do you feel ‘terra-cited’ at work? This may require a dash of authenticity and vulnerability to work through. What are those moments, at work, that are neither boring, nor overwhelming, when you experience what psychologists call ‘the flow’?

Step 2, Develop a New Skill: What if you embraced that it’s actually necessary to seek that sense of flow in your Business ‘life’? That flow is what it takes to get real fulfillment. What if it was ok to never stop until you found what you are good at, what pays well, and what the world needs – with terra-citement and flow mixed in?

Step 3, Create more Value: When we do what we are really damn good at, we aren’t just often in ‘flow’ - we automatically create move Value in the context of our role. Why? Because when I’m in flow, I am simply most engaged, creative, and productive.

Step 4: Move Up Faster: Marketers who move up faster find deep meaning in what they do. They experience moments of flow, interrupting a regular oscillation between underwhelming boredom and overwhelming stress. They feel terror, and excitement, at different times and even at the same time. They have a fulfilling career in marketing, while creating Value for themselves, their team, and the customer.

What does my philosophy of ‘terra-citement’ point me towards in the context of my own Business ‘life’ in 2025?

Step 1, Where will I Get Out of MY Comfort Zone? I’m in the midst of transitioning from a nutty Entrepreneur to a maturing CEO. I am told that many people can’t do it – both roles require vastly different strengths. I have been pushing myself hard over the past eight years, spending typically two hours a week (often in very early mornings, to not interfere with my face time with my team), on learning how to make sense of my own demons, and leaving my own dysfunctions behind.

Step 2, How will I Develop a New Skill? I don’t plan to ever stop becoming a better leader of marketers. I will forever be a lifelong learner of leadership and organizations. I don’t foresee ever not investing those two hours a week on my own professional development. That’s how I will keep on developing new skills in my Business ‘life’ - by consistently investing in my own professional development, week by week.

Step 3, How will I Create More Value? When I push myself to consistently lean out of my own Comfort Zone, when I follow the RoMC framework, I gather new Skills, upgrade my Mindset, and deliver more Value in my role.

Step 4: How can I Move Up Faster? By being fully engaged at work, and in flow. I will maximize my chance of success, my team will have a higher likelihood of success, and our customers will get more exceptional Value, when I never stop getting better in my Business ‘life’. For me, that journey of Moving Up Faster on my professional trajectory gives deep meaning to all my ‘lives’.

Many entrepreneurs talk about how their Business ‘life’ acted as a ‘University of Life’ that helped them Move Up Faster. Elon Musk in particular feels that he benefitted particularly from real-world business challenges from the very start of his entrepreneurial career.

The first big company Musk helped to grow – online city guide firm Zip 2 – gave him valuable insights into managing a business and dealing with investors, conflict and setbacks. The sale of Zip 2 to Compaq in 1999 is thought by many to mark Musk’s arrival as a serious entrepreneur.

Repeated experience of failure in his Business ‘life’ – for example with the first three SpaceX rocket launches crashing and almost leading the company to bankruptcy – have strengthened Musk’s resilience and determination.

His appetite for risk and his desire to avoid the restraints inherent in conventional approaches to business – not unlike Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ – is a trait that has been enhanced at the ‘University of Life’ rather than at an Ivy League school. It’s now about to be applied to the bureaucracy of the US Federal Government through Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE).

If you’d like to discuss your career journey with me one-to-one, please feel free to email me at [email protected] or message me on LinkedIn.

Thank you for reading.

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