Why 'I Can Do That' Is The Most Underrated Career Strategy You Have

They called it entrepreneurial bricolage. I call it the "I can do that" mindset.

Baker and Nelson identified this pattern in business owners who, when faced with constraints, limited budgets, shrinking markets, disappearing customer bases, didn't panic or pivot toward conventional solutions. They looked at what was already around them and asked: What can I build with this?

One of their subjects is unforgettable. He had spent years doing maintenance on coal mines. As mines began to close, his customer base was disappearing. He could have retrained for something else, relocated or folded.

Instead, he started buying those old contaminated mining properties, cheap. He studied environmental policy. Built relationships with regulatory officials. Learned environmental cleanup. Found that his cleanup process improved water quality on his properties to such high standards that he could now run a fish farm. The idea attracted national attention and won environmental awards, which gave him visibility and government contacts that led to a contract raising trout for the state's fisheries division. As he reclaimed more mines, he started farming the land. He moved so much earth he founded a trucking company.

From mine maintenance to fish farming to agriculture to trucking, not because he had a master plan, but because his response to every obstacle was the same: I can do that.

Baker and Nelson found a consistent cycle in people with this mindset: they committed to taking on a wide variety of tasks, which led to the accumulation of increasingly diverse skills and resources, which led to results that looked, from the outside, like reinvention.

The lesson for professionals isn't that you should become a bricoleur in the literal sense. It's that the resources available to you for reinvention are almost certainly more abundant than you think, and that most people dramatically underestimate their interpersonal and intellectual assets.

When I coach executives through career transitions, I start with what I call a comprehensive resource inventory. Physical resources, spaces, tools, equipment you're not using. Intellectual resources, skills and knowledge you've accumulated and aren't currently applying. Interpersonal resources, relationships you haven't engaged for new purposes.

The most common discovery? People have forgotten what they know how to do. Skills acquired years ago, in different roles or contexts, that feel irrelevant in the current moment but could be transformative in a different configuration.

The woman who ran operations for a manufacturing company before moving into HR has a systems thinking capacity that her current peers may lack entirely. The executive who spent three years in a startup before joining a Fortune 500 has an entrepreneurial fluency that's rare at her level. The leader who taught high school before entering the corporate world has a communication ability that most executives spend years trying to develop.

These aren't nostalgic credentials. They're untapped assets.

The next time you face a constraint, a shrinking budget, a changing market, a role that no longer fits, before asking what you need that you don't have, ask what you already have that you haven't used.

The answer might be the foundation for your next chapter.