There is an image I keep coming back to: Two funnels. One narrow, filtering out almost everything. One wide open, collecting opportunities from every direction.  I chose the wide-open funnel and do things.

Stay in your lane versus you can do things.

Most professionals choose the narrow funnel without realising it. They wait for permission and define themselves by their job title, industry, or degree. They assume opportunities belong to others—those with the right background, network, or timing. In doing so, they shrink their own possibilities before anyone else can.

I started as a Mechanical Engineer in Lebanon and studied my Master's in France.

Later, I went on to deliver a $1. B+ project in Oman, lead commercial strategy at GE, Siemens, Baker Hughes, Exterran and Veolia across the Middle East, Africa, India and the Caspian — and eventually became a Chartered Project Professional and Fellow of the APM.

None of that followed a straight line. None of it was planned in a single sitting. It was built through deliberate movement, calculated risk and a consistent refusal to be defined by where I started.

As I wrote in Myths Holding Young Professionals on The Liberum: careers are not linear. They are built through momentum, reflection, and serendipity — not perfect planning. The professionals who advance the furthest are rarely the ones who stayed in their lane. They are the ones who moved, experimented, and expanded their funnel.

Harvard Business Review research consistently confirms this. In a landmark study on career pivots, researchers found that the most successful career transitions were driven not by careful planning, but by action — testing, doing, learning, adjusting.

The people who waited until conditions were perfect rarely moved at all. Readiness, it turns out, is not a prerequisite for action. It is a consequence of it.

So how do you actively expand your opportunities?

• Build depth and breadth simultaneously. Specialisation gets you in the room. Versatility keeps you there. Throughout my career, deep technical knowledge opened doors. Still, the ability to move across sectors — from gas compression to water treatment to combustion systems — and across geographies — from Algeria to Kazakhstan to India — is what created sustained relevance. The professionals who thrive in the long term are not the deepest specialists or the broadest generalists. They are the ones who master both, deliberately and without apology.
  
• Credentials signal commitment, not competence. A ChPP, an MBA, a Six Sigma belt — none of these guarantee career growth on their own. What they do is demonstrate a pattern of deliberate investment in yourself. Employers and clients read that signal clearly. Pair credentials with delivered results and the combination becomes very powerful. The credential opens the conversation. The track record closes it.
  
• Visibility is not self-promotion — it is service. Writing, speaking, mentoring, contributing to professional networks like the APM — these are not vanity activities. They are how you build a reputation that works for you when you are not in the room. Opportunities do not find passive people. They find people who show up consistently, share what they know, and demonstrate credibility over time.

Now, about that wide funnel. Most people think opportunity is scarce — that there are a fixed number of doors and most of them are locked. That is the wrong mental model entirely.

Opportunities are not scarce. Awareness of them is. The professional who stays rigidly within their defined lane does not see the adjacent doors because they have never looked sideways. They have optimised their vision for a single corridor and called it "focus".

Widening your view on opportunities is not about chasing everything. It is about staying genuinely curious — about adjacent industries, emerging markets, transferable skills, and the problems that no one in your field has thought to solve yet. It is about asking, regularly and honestly: what else could I do, where else could I contribute, and what assumptions am I carrying that are quietly limiting my range?

The professionals I have worked alongside who built truly exceptional careers shared one quiet habit. They kept asking questions that were slightly outside their brief. They read broadly, connected across disciplines, and resisted the comfort of being known for just one thing. They did not wait for the lane to widen. They stepped outside it, and discovered the road was far wider than anyone had told them.

The wide funnel does not happen by accident. It is built — decision by decision, role by role, year by year — by professionals who chose to act rather than wait for permission.

Curiosity is the strategy. Action is the method. And the willingness to look beyond your current lane is, without question, the highest-return investment you will ever make in your career.

Your lane is whatever you make it. Make it wide. Make it yours.