My Zigzag Career Was Never a Detour

BD3 Solutions
Jun 8
5 min read

Updated: Jun 22

By Nancy DeFina | BD3 Solutions

I want my career to have a through-line. A clear logic. A narrative arc that, when explained at a dinner party or a professional event, produces a knowing nod rather than a slightly confused expression.

I haven't managed it. Because, honestly, the clean version doesn't exist. Here is the actual version.

I have advanced art degrees. I trained as a museum curator and worked at the Guggenheim and the Whitney in New York. I’ve also run a dance school for preschoolers, designed furniture displays at IKEA, and led sales teams to the top. I’ve zigzagged around, starting over again and again.

Shortly after grad school, I left a museum career in New York to move across the country for love. I turned down a full-time position that paid $19,500 a year, not out of principle, but because it genuinely couldn't support two people. I spent years building a life in California that looked nothing like what I'd trained for, taking work that came available, learning things I hadn't planned to learn, becoming someone I hadn't planned to become.

For most of my adult life, I've been at a loss to explain my career and the pivots that didn't connect. Or how someone with my educational background would do all those things. The truth is, most people didn't even know about the educational background. I never led with it. A colleague I'd worked alongside for over a year was genuinely taken aback when she finally learned the full extent of my education, especially given that my degrees were in a field most people would consider a world away from sales. I'd spent so much energy managing which version of myself I presented in which room that the whole story never fully appeared in any of them.

I think about that a lot now. The point is this: direction was never a straight line toward a title I picked in advance. It was the quiet, repeated decision about what still belongs.

What I Got Wrong About My Own Story

The things that have been so challenging to explain: the lack of a clean trajectory, the sideways moves, the feeling of having just kind of fallen into things. Sound familiar? That uncomfortable inability to justify where you are is exactly what we see driving procrastination: the "should" emotion in disguise, applied not to a task but to an entire life.

I didn't understand that for a very long time.

What I've come to see is that every single one of those transitions—the museum to the dance school, the IKEA floor to the sales convention stage, the New York curator to the California everything-else—used the same skill. The same one I learned in graduate school, the one that defines a good curator.

I was looking clearly at what was in front of me: deciding what still belonged and what didn't, and making the next quiet decision about what to take down off the wall.

I've been curating my own life. I just didn't have the language for it until everyone started 'curating' their Instagram feeds, turning us all into museum directors of our own brunch photos.

The Curator's Move

When people come to see an exhibition, they see the pieces on the wall. What they don't see is what didn't make it: the dozens of works that were considered and set aside, the arrangements that were tried and abandoned, the things that would have been extraordinary in a different context but didn't belong in this one. A good exhibition isn't just what's included. It's what's been left out.

Every significant transition in my life has been the same decision, made at a different scale. Not a dramatic exit. I've never been a dramatic-exit kind of person. A quiet recognition that something had run its course, and the willingness to set it aside even when I didn't yet know what would hang in its place.

Moving to California meant leaving a professional identity I'd spent years building, without a plan for what came next. Turning down the Whitney meant trusting that something else would appear, without any evidence that it would. Running a dance school meant tapping (literally) a completely different side of myself. I’ve danced my whole life, but up until then, I’d never been an entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur, to my considerable surprise, was something I was good at, and that discovery ultimately led somewhere I hadn't expected.

None of my career moves made obvious sense from the outside. All of them made sense to me in the moment, in the way things make sense when you're looking clearly at what's actually there rather than at what you think should be there.

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The Zigzag Is the Trajectory

Now, I am teaching people how their brains actually work, alongside someone I've been building ideas with for years, inside a framework rooted in decades of Stanford behavioral science. This is what came after the Guggenheim, after the dance school, after IKEA, after leading sales teams, after all of it.

I didn't plan any of it. I couldn't have. The path from museum curator to behavior design doesn't exist on any career map I've ever seen.

But looking back, every piece was necessary. The curatorial training gave me the eye for what belongs and what doesn't: how to shape an experience from the moment someone walks in to the moment they leave. The dance school taught me to be an entrepreneur: how to build something from nothing, wear every hat, and make it work on sheer resourcefulness. IKEA taught me what it looks like to work with others toward a shared vision: to take something that exists only on paper and bring it to life with a team. And being a sales director taught me that the most important thing you can ever do for another person is help them believe in their own capability, and then get out of the way.

Here's what I know now: the story I kept trying to write (the one with the clean arc and the logical progression) wasn't a career summary, it was a Judgment: one of three Hidden Knots we've identified that keeps people tangled up and stuck. The inner voice insisting I should have a through-line. I should be able to explain this. That's the "should" emotion, and it doesn't just create procrastination around tasks. It can create procrastination around your whole life: the next step you don't take because you can't yet explain how it connects to the last one.

If you look at your own path and feel like I did: the sense that a zigzag means you should have had things more figured out, I want to offer you a different frame. The zigzag might be the evidence of someone who has been paying attention. Who has been willing to set down what no longer belongs, even without knowing yet what comes next. Who has been, in their own way, curating.

That's not a lack of direction. That's a different kind of rigor. And it leads somewhere. It always does.

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Next week: Andy's story and what pretzels have to do with procrastination.

Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.

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Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on models and methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.