🎯Career Pivot Playbooks · Real Stories Behind Modern Careers
This week’s playbooks feature Juan Salas-Romer (Build to Thrive), Pinkie (AI Meets Girlboss), and Sam Illingworth (Slow AI).
Part of the Career Pivot Playbooks, a public archive of modern career blueprints.
Most career pivots aren’t loud.
They don’t announce themselves as reinventions.
They unfold through experience, reflection, and quiet leverage.
These Career Pivot Playbooks show what that looks like in practice…
Juan Salas-Romer on Translating Lived Experience into Leverage
Build to Thrive
Juan’s career didn’t pivot once; it unfolded across countries, industries, and responsibility-heavy roles. Finance, real estate, hospitality, education, and entrepreneurship. Each chapter added systems and perspective, often shaped by disruption rather than choice.
Rather than branding himself as an expert, Juan began writing to make sense of nonlinear careers and forced change. Build to Thrive emerged as a place to translate lived experience into frameworks that compound.
→ Read Juan’s Career Pivot Playbook
Pinkie on Building Brands Through Creative Systems, Not Noise
AI Meets Girlboss
Pinkie’s pivot wasn’t into AI adoption; it was into strategic clarity about her offer, positioning, and value. Grounded in psychology, community-building, and branding leadership, she began using AI to extend how she already worked, refining ideas, shaping visual systems, and making creative output more repeatable.
Through writing in public, AI Meets Girlboss emerged as a space for visual systems, prompts, and collaboration, helping founders clarify their brand and visual identity.
→ Read Pinkie’s Career Pivot Playbook
Sam Illingworth on Expanding Expertise into Public Impact
Slow AI
Sam didn’t leave academia. He widened it.
A professor, poet, and science communicator, Sam uses Slow AI to extend critical AI literacy into public discourse… offering judgment, nuance, and reflection in a space often driven by speed.
→ Read Sam’s Career Pivot Playbook
The Shared Pattern
These pivots didn’t start with reinvention.
In each case, writing became a way to integrate experience, test ideas, and widen a career without starting over.
These playbooks don’t just offer advice.
They reveal how careers are actually evolving, not just in theory, but in practice.
→ Explore the Career Pivot Playbooks Archive
Inside the Playbook
Where the analysis happens.
A paid, career expert-led weekly briefing that extracts patterns from real career pivots and translates them into practical moves you can apply to your own career that are relevant for today.
Thanks again to the contributors for sharing their stories so openly, and thank you for being here and being part of this community.
I look forward to sharing with you the next edition.
— Katharine
Thanks so much for including me in this playbook along with two of my other favourite Substackers, Katharine! Juan and Pinkie are such inspirational creators.