The Pick a Lane Predicament
- millsightuk
- Jun 16
- 6 min read
The Roundabout Rendition: Or, why every exit somehow looks like a good idea.
By Aisling (Ash) Mills
Founder of Millsight
I've spent most of my life being told to pick a lane.
School wanted subjects.
Employers wanted job titles.
Business advice says to find a niche.
Marketing experts tell you to specialise.
Social media gurus insist on consistency.
The message is always the same.
Pick a lane.
Stay in it.
Become known for one thing.
Which sounds sensible.
Until you realise some people aren't built that way.
Three weeks ago I was dealing with dog walking, licensing paperwork and trying to navigate the realities of running a business.
This week I've published more articles, built a website, featured local businesses, attended motocross, found myself fascinated by lighthouse metaphors and briefly wondered whether I should apply for a job as a columnist.
If this sounds chaotic, that's because it probably is.
At least from the outside.
The problem is that whenever somebody asks what I do, I genuinely don't know how to answer.
Dog walker?
Business owner?
Writer?
Community organiser?
Marketer?
Content creator?
Professional overthinker?
The answer seems to depend entirely on what day of the week you ask me.
And yet every piece of conventional advice suggests this is a problem.
The Lane Picking Fallacy
We're taught that success comes from focus.
Pick one thing.
Master it.
Become known for it.
Build your identity around it.
The clearer the lane, the easier it is to explain.
Simple.
Understandable.
Marketable.
But not everyone experiences life through a single lens.
Some people collect skills rather than titles.
A little writing.
A little business.
A little creativity.
A little psychology.
A little technology.
Individually, none of those things look particularly impressive.
Together, they create something difficult to describe.
The Specialist and Generalist Spectrum
To be clear, this isn't an argument against specialists.
The world needs specialists.
When my car breaks down, I don't want somebody who has watched three YouTube videos and once changed a tyre in 2017.
I want a mechanic.
When I need surgery, I don't want a general enthusiasm for medicine.
I want somebody who knows exactly what they're doing.
Specialists create depth.
They master their craft.
They become exceptionally good at one thing.
But generalists create connections.
They collect experiences.
They build bridges between ideas, industries and people.
Neither approach is better.
The challenge is that specialists can usually answer the question:
"What do you do?"
Generalists often need several paragraphs, a whiteboard and occasionally a flowchart.
The specialist becomes known for one thing.
The generalist becomes useful in places nobody expected.
Specialists collect depth.
Generalists collect connections.
They're simply following different maps.
And while society often celebrates depth, I've started to wonder whether we underestimate the value of connection.
The Roundabout Rendition
Most career advice assumes life is a motorway.
Choose a destination.
Stay in your lane.
Don't get distracted.
Keep moving forward.
My experience has been considerably closer to the Magic Roundabout.
For those unfamiliar, the Magic Roundabout appears to have been designed by somebody who lost an argument with a sat nav.
It's confusing.
Slightly terrifying.
A little exhilarating.
Nobody seems entirely certain who's meant to stop, who's meant to go, or how everybody isn't crashing into each other.
And yet, somehow, it works.
The more I look back on my own path, the more I realise it resembles the Magic Roundabout far more than a straight road.
Dog walking somehow led to community groups.
Community groups somehow led to Millsight.
Millsight somehow led to writing.
Writing somehow led to articles about roads, lighthouses and philosophical wormholes.
I couldn't have planned the route if I'd tried.
Yet each turn led naturally to the next.
Looking backwards, the journey makes perfect sense.
Looking forwards, it looks like chaos.
The Dog Walking Discovery
One of the most unexpected things dog walking taught me was how little labels actually tell us about people.
At first, I knew people through their dogs.
Then I started learning about the humans attached to them.
Their businesses.
Their hobbies.
Their dreams.
Their stories.
The more conversations I had, the harder it became to put anyone into a single box.
Aaron works in software but also sees the world through a camera lens.
Becca creates events, paints, connects people and channels her creativity in ways that don't fit neatly onto a business card.
The more people I meet, the more examples I find.
Business owners who are artists.
Artists who are organisers.
Entrepreneurs who are writers.
Parents building businesses.
Retirees starting entirely new adventures.
People quietly living lives far more interesting than the label on the form would suggest.
The Label Libel
The irony is that I do it too.
I meet somebody and immediately search for a label.
Dog owner.
Photographer.
Business owner.
Parent.
Writer.
It's efficient.
It helps my brain organise the world.
But the longer I know people, the more those labels start falling apart.
The labels aren't always wrong.
They're just incomplete.
They tell us what somebody does.
Rarely who they are.
Perhaps that's why "pick a lane" has never sat comfortably with me.
Because every interesting person I've met seems to be travelling in several directions at once.
Roads Between Lanes
For years I assumed this was a weakness.
A lack of focus.
An inability to commit.
Now I'm beginning to wonder whether it's simply a different way of navigating the world.
Maybe some people aren't supposed to stay in one lane.
Maybe some people are supposed to build roads between them.
Connecting people.
Connecting ideas.
Connecting communities.
Connecting opportunities.
Finding patterns that specialists might miss because they're focused on a single destination.
The more I think about it, the more Millsight feels less like a business and more like a navigation tool.
Part lighthouse.
Part signpost.
Part traffic light.
A way of shining a light on people, ideas and stories that deserve to be seen before everybody crashes into each other at the Magic Roundabout.
After all, the lighthouse doesn't tell ships where they should go.
It simply helps them avoid the rocks.
A Percy Protocol Intervention
At one point this article contained sections on identity, social constructs, psychology, labels, consciousness and whether humans naturally organise themselves into categories.
The Duggy Compass was having an absolute field day.
Fortunately, the Percy Protocol intervened and several paragraphs were removed before we accidentally transformed an article about career choices into a first-year philosophy degree.
The fact those ideas appeared at all is probably part of the point.
Every road seemed connected to another road.
Every answer led to another question.
Every lane appeared connected to something else.
At one stage, the Duggy Compass wandered off into a philosophical wormhole and had to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck by the Percy Protocol before we accidentally reinvented philosophy and started up a new religion.
Eventually you have to stop asking bigger questions and finish the article.
Final Thought
I still don't know what lane I'm in.
And for the first time in a long time, I think I'm okay with that.
Perhaps the problem isn't that some people can't pick a lane.
Perhaps they're not supposed to.
Perhaps they're busy building roads between them.
Or getting hopelessly lost on the magic roundabout.
And after spending the last year meeting people through dogs, businesses, communities and conversations, I'm beginning to suspect there are a lot more road builders out there than we realise.
They're just difficult to spot because society keeps asking them to choose one thing to put on the form.
Notes From The Lighthouse
If you've ever struggled to pick a lane, found yourself explaining your career with a whiteboard, or spent years wondering why everybody else seemed to have a clearer map than you, you're not alone.
The Millsight Journal is where I explore business, community, psychology, marketing, dogs, roundabouts and whatever else the Duggy Compass manages to drag into view before the Percy Protocol intervenes.
New articles are published regularly.
You can click on the 'Stay in the Loop' Button on the blog page to receive new Millsight Journal articles straight to your inbox should you so choose!
🌊💡
Comments