Manage Your Career Before It Manages You ft Brad Maruca

It's easy to wake up one day and realize your career has simply... happened. Before long, ten years have passed, and you've spent more time reacting to opportunities than intentionally creating them. Brad Maruca, Managing Director in Deloitte's MedTech practice, believes that's one of the biggest mistakes professionals can make.

Too often, careers are built by circumstance rather than design. A promotion leads to another opportunity. A new role opens at the right time. A company changes direction. Before long, years have passed, and many professionals realize they've spent more time reacting to opportunities than actively shaping where they wanted to go.

As Travis Smith observed during their conversation, "Our career manages us rather than us managing our career."

For Brad, the turning point in his own career wasn't finding the perfect role. It was deliberately choosing difficult problems. Rather than avoiding struggling departments or complicated projects, he sought them out because they offered the greatest opportunity to learn.

"I was really attracted to solving problems," he explained.

Working in environments that needed to be fixed forced him to develop new skills, think strategically, and become comfortable navigating uncertainty. Those experiences didn't just build knowledge. They built expertise that made him increasingly valuable throughout his career.

That perspective also changed the way he thinks about passion. Many people believe they need to discover work they love before they can build a successful career. Brad argues that the opposite is often true.

"I do it, I develop competency, and then I start to really love it."

Mastery creates confidence. Confidence creates opportunity. As your expertise grows, so does your appreciation for the work itself. Passion is often the result of becoming exceptionally good at something, not the prerequisite for starting.
This mindset is especially valuable for professionals early in their careers.

Instead of focusing exclusively on finding the "perfect" position, it may be more beneficial to look for opportunities that stretch your abilities. The projects that seem the most difficult today are often the ones that develop the skills you'll rely on for decades.

Intentional career management also means periodically asking yourself difficult questions. Are you making career decisions based on where you want to be in five or ten years? Are you developing skills that differentiate you from others in your field? Or are you simply following the next opportunity without considering whether it aligns with your long-term goals?

There is rarely a straight path to expertise. It is built through a series of deliberate decisions to embrace challenges, solve meaningful problems, and continuously develop new capabilities.

Your career will always move in a direction. The question is whether you're the one steering it.

By intentionally choosing opportunities that challenge you, investing in your own growth, and building expertise over time, you put yourself in control of where your career goes next instead of letting it decide for you.

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