The Best Career Advice I’ve Ever Received Had Almost Nothing to Do With Work

By Molly McClure, Award-Winning Marketing Executive & Fractional CMO, DrugScreens.com

I’ve received a lot of career advice over the years. Some of it was brilliant. Some was completely forgettable. And some came from people who, in hindsight, probably should not have been giving career advice to anyone.

But six pieces have stayed with me.

None came from a famous CEO on a stage. I didn’t underline them in a leadership book or save them from an inspirational Instagram post featuring a mountain, a lion or a person inexplicably standing on the edge of a cliff.

They came from bosses, mentors and people who happened to say exactly what I needed to hear at exactly the right moment.

I can still remember almost every conversation.

1. “You either pissed someone off or it isn’t going to happen.”

Years ago, I was working for a major company where I had built a good career. I had been there quite a while, worked hard, delivered results and thought I was ready for the next promotion.

I didn’t get it.

Naturally, I did what ambitious people tend to do when something doesn’t go according to plan. I began conducting a full forensic investigation of my own career.

Should I work harder? Take on another project? Find another executive sponsor? Wait another year? Maybe if I became so indispensable that the building physically could not operate without me, someone would finally hand me the promotion.

A former boss listened to all of this and offered a considerably shorter analysis.

“You either pissed someone off or it isn’t going to happen.”

Well, thank you, Yoda.

But he was right.

I needed to stop assuming that more effort would automatically change the outcome. Sometimes you can do everything right and still reach the ceiling of what an organization is willing or able to give you.

He pushed me to leave. I did, and that decision changed the trajectory of my career.

We romanticize persistence in business. Stay the course. Put in the time. Keep proving yourself. There is certainly value in that, but there is also a point when persistence becomes expensive.

You can spend years trying to convince one company to see your value, or you can take that value somewhere that already does.

One of the hardest career skills is knowing the difference between keep going and go somewhere else.

2. “Be a chameleon in a room full of lizards.”

Yes, someone actually said this to me.

No, I don’t know why everyone else had to be a lizard.

But after all these years, I still remember it, so perhaps the strange reptile-based management philosophy worked.

What it meant was simple: learn to adapt.

I’ve been the only woman in a room full of men more times than I can count. I’ve been the youngest person in the room. I’ve been the marketer surrounded by salespeople, the person explaining brand to executives who wanted to know exactly how many sales Tuesday’s LinkedIn post produced, and the executive walking into a room where everyone had a different agenda.

You learn to adapt.

Not because you should become someone else. Quite the opposite. The trick is learning how to remain yourself while understanding the environment around you.

There is an important difference between adapting and shrinking.

Being a chameleon doesn’t mean agreeing with everyone. It doesn’t mean laughing at jokes that aren’t funny, keeping quiet when you have something to say or becoming whatever version of yourself you think the most powerful person in the room will like.

It means paying attention.

A CFO may need numbers. A CEO may want the answer in 30 seconds. A creative team may need room to explore. A sales leader may want to know how this helps close business. Your customer does not care about the 47 internal meetings it took to approve the campaign.

Same person. Same strategy. Different environment.

That ability becomes incredibly valuable as your career progresses because leadership is essentially an endless series of rooms you have to figure out.

Sometimes you’re leading the room. Sometimes you’re trying to influence it. Sometimes you’re wondering why this meeting needed 23 people.

Adaptability doesn’t make you less authentic.

It makes you more effective.

So yes, be the chameleon.

I’m still trying to figure out what the lizards did wrong.

3. “Never give up.”

This is easily the least original advice on this list. It belongs on coffee mugs, gym walls and approximately 14 million Pinterest boards.

Unfortunately, it is also true.

Careers look beautifully linear on LinkedIn. Someone starts as a manager, becomes a director, gets promoted to VP and eventually lands in the C-suite. Add a professional headshot and a paragraph about being “humbled and honored,” and the whole thing looks remarkably tidy.

Real life is not tidy.

Companies reorganize. Great bosses leave. Bad bosses arrive. Promotions don’t happen. Jobs disappear. Businesses struggle. People underestimate you. Sometimes you make the wrong decision entirely by yourself, which is especially irritating because there isn’t even anyone else to blame.

And while you’re busy managing your career, actual life keeps happening.

There will be stretches when everything seems to go your way and stretches when you begin to suspect the universe has added your name to some sort of special pilot program.

Keep going.

That doesn’t mean doing the same thing repeatedly and calling it perseverance. Sometimes “never give up” means changing direction. Sometimes it means leaving. Sometimes it means admitting something failed, figuring out why and starting over.

The important part is that you start over.

Shit happens. Life goes up and down, occasionally with the stability of a meme stock.

But it always goes on.

So should you.

4. “You only need one yes.”

I was in the final year of my MBA program and starting to panic because I didn’t have a full-time offer yet.

Other people did, which obviously improved my mental state tremendously.

There is nothing quite like worrying about your own career while watching a classmate announce that they have accepted some fabulous position with a signing bonus. You’re happy for them, of course.

Deeply, sincerely happy.

You would also like them to stop talking.

I remember complaining about my situation to a mentor. He listened and then said, “Molly, you only need one yes.”

It was one of the most refreshing things anyone could have told me.

I didn’t need every company to want me. I didn’t need ten offers. I didn’t need to win every interview or have every executive look at my résumé and immediately recognize the spectacular mistake their competitors would be making by not hiring me.

I needed one.

One company. One hiring manager. One person willing to take the chance.

That advice has followed me far beyond job hunting.

If you’re pitching an idea, looking for an investor, trying to land a customer, submitting an article, asking for a meeting or attempting something new, rejection can feel enormous because human beings have an unfortunate tendency to count every no.

Most opportunities don’t require unanimous approval.

They require one yes.

Forty-nine people can say no and the 50th can completely change your life.

The scoreboard resets remarkably quickly when the right person says yes.

5. “Resilience is sexy.”

I’m paraphrasing this one slightly, but the sentiment has become increasingly important to me as I’ve gotten older.

Resilience is sexy.

Not performative toughness. Not pretending nothing bothers you. And definitely not the corporate version where someone survives six rounds of layoffs, inherits three departments and gets rewarded with a company-branded Yeti.

I mean the ability to get knocked down, process it and get moving again.

I have very little patience anymore for people who turn every setback into a permanent residence.

We all get disappointed. We all get angry. Have the bad day. Call your friend. Complain to your spouse. Say a few words that would prevent you from being invited onto morning television. Order the expensive bottle of wine if necessary.

Then figure out what you’re going to do about it.

The people I most want around me, professionally and personally, are the ones who recover quickly. They don’t pretend the setback didn’t happen. They don’t slap a motivational quote over it and call it growth.

They deal with it.

Then they move.

That quality becomes even more important the higher you go because leadership guarantees disappointment. A strategy will fail. A great employee will leave. A hire won’t work out. A competitor will beat you. Someone will kill the idea you spent three months building, possibly five minutes after seeing it for the first time.

Your team is watching what happens next.

Resilience isn’t about never falling apart. It’s about not unpacking your furniture and living there.

6. “The most important decision you’ll ever make is who you marry.”

This one technically isn’t career advice. Except I think it might be the most important career advice on this list.

I hit the jackpot with my husband.

He is bulletproof in the best possible way. Life can get messy, plans can fall apart, jobs can change, people can disappoint you, and somehow he remains remarkably steady through all of it.

That steadiness has made me more resilient.

There is enormous freedom in knowing someone always has your back. Not because they think you’re right about everything. My husband would laugh at that sentence. But because even when you’re wrong, struggling, taking a risk or figuring out what comes next, you know you aren’t doing it alone.

He has also always let me be me.

That sounds simple. It isn’t.

I’m ambitious. I’m opinionated. I work a lot. I get excited about ideas and occasionally decide we should pursue something that probably sounded considerably less complicated when I first explained it.

He has never needed me to become smaller so he could feel bigger.

That’s a gift.

And somewhere along the way, I adopted a pretty firm rule for the rest of my life too: I refuse to be around people who don’t support me.

Support, however, does not mean agreement.

In fact, stay away from people who can’t hear a differing opinion without treating it like a personal attack. You should be able to disagree with someone you love, respect or work with and still want good things for them.

Some of the people I trust most are the quickest to tell me I’m wrong. That’s healthy. I don’t need a cheering section. I need people who can challenge me without rooting against me.

There is a big difference.

The older I get, the less interested I am in relationships where every conversation requires an ideological background check before someone decides whether you’re still a good person.

We can disagree. We can debate. You might even change my mind. Miracles happen.

But respect has to survive disagreement.

Life is hard enough without voluntarily surrounding yourself with people who are secretly rooting against you or who only support the version of you that agrees with them.

I don’t have the time or the interest.

The person you marry influences nearly every part of your life, including your career. They can make risk feel possible or terrifying. They can give you confidence or slowly take it away. They can celebrate your ambition or resent it. They can be the person you call after the worst meeting of your life and somehow have you laughing about it 20 minutes later.

Success is much easier to carry when someone genuinely wants you to have it.

And failure is considerably easier to survive when you know you’re going home to someone who doesn’t measure your worth by your title, paycheck or whether the presentation went well.

We talk endlessly about mentors, sponsors, bosses and professional networks when we talk about successful careers. They’re all important.

But we rarely talk about the person waiting at home.

Choose that person carefully.

Actually, choose all your people carefully.

One of the greatest competitive advantages I’ve ever had is knowing that whatever happens out there, I’ve got someone at home who is completely, unquestionably in my corner.

I hit the jackpot.

And he still lets me be me.

Which, depending on the day, may be his most impressive accomplishment.

The Advice That Actually Lasts

Looking back, the best career advice I’ve received has surprisingly little to do with résumés, networking, personal brands or climbing the corporate ladder.

It’s mostly about judgment.

Know when to stay and when to leave. Learn how to adapt without losing yourself. Keep moving when life knocks you sideways. Remember that rejection doesn’t have to be unanimous. Build the resilience to get back up. And choose the people beside you very carefully.

Careers are long. You will get some things spectacularly right and others spectacularly wrong. You’ll work for people who change your life and probably a few who make you reconsider every decision that led you to accepting their meeting invitation.

That’s part of it.

Maybe the real lesson is that a career isn’t built only by what happens at work. It’s shaped by the people who push you, the people who believe in you, the rooms you learn to navigate and the person you come home to when one of those rooms goes spectacularly sideways.

And when things aren’t going your way, remember one of the simplest pieces of advice anyone ever gave me:

You only need one yes.

Sometimes that one is enough to change everything.