There’s a moment in every jazz performance where the musician steps beyond the written score, finding something entirely new in the spaces between the notes.

This same improvisational quality defines the most interesting career paths I’ve encountered over three decades of professional work.

My father died a year ago this week. His story illustrates career improvisation beautifully. Growing up in Katwijk, a Dutch coastal village where his family were master plasterers and members of a local band, he harboured musical dreams that seemed impossibly out of reach for a working-class boy.

Recognising talent where others see limitations

One summer, the Dutch army held exercises nearby, concluding with a concert by a military band. My twelve-year-old father, pushed forward by some combination of family pride and childlike courage, played for that year’s band conductor.

When asked about his music teacher, my father explained that lessons were beyond his family’s means. The conductor – recognising talent where others might have seen limitation – offered to pay for my father’s music lessons personally.

For six years, my father travelled by tram to Leiden, learning and dreaming. He eventually completed training at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and joined the band of the Dutch Royal Grenadiers, the musicians who march before the royal coach during state occasions.

This unexpected professional intervention – one person seeing possibility where others saw barriers – changed his entire career trajectory.

When excellence becomes the only acceptable standard

My brother and I learned contrasting but equally demanding lessons seated at that same family piano. Our father, by then an established musician, instilled in us an uncompromising pursuit of excellence that shaped our futures in profound ways.

For my father, there was no point in pursuing anything unless you could be truly world-class at it.

“Choirs are for people who are not good enough to be soloists,” he once told me when I expressed interest in casual singing, despite spending his own career as part of an orchestra.

This demanding philosophy meant he directed my brother, whom he saw as naturally gifted, towards serious piano training.

For me, his other son, it meant a typing course. This was not merely as a practical skill, but as something I might excel at rather than being mediocre in music.

Drive to be the absolute best

This mindset created in us both an incredible drive to be the absolute best at whatever we attempted. I wouldn’t enter any contest – even office bake-offs – unless I stood a realistic chance of winning.

When living in Somerset, I regularly entered village shows with submissions in 24 categories of baking and preserves, winning the trophy for most points across all categories of homecrafts year after year.

Yet career improvisation often begins precisely when we repurpose these exacting standards in unexpected ways.

Today, my brother performs with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Jazz Orchestra, a celebrated jazz pianist and recording artist creating music through pure improvisation.

Meanwhile, I became a Wall Street Journal-quoted business editor and a senior content designer for the Cabinet Office and other clients despite English not being my first language, navigating complex cultural landscapes, translating between worlds with the same perfectionist attention to detail and improvisational spirit.

In essence, we both became virtuosos, just playing on different stages. He composes with notes; I compose with words and ideas. Both of us finding our rhythm by responding to the unexpected, creating excellence in the spaces between conventional expectations.

Embracing career transitions as opportunities for mastery

The typing course my father chose for me – intended as a domain where I might achieve true excellence – ultimately became a gateway to journalism and content design.

Those skills became the foundation for a career spanning government corridors, international boardrooms and complex digital landscapes. Each role required new improvisation, each transition represented another opportunity to achieve mastery in a different context.

This is the true nature of professional growth. The most remarkable careers aren’t about following predetermined paths. They’re about bringing uncompromising standards to messy, complex situations, creating unexpected harmonies where others might see only chaos.

How support professionals embody excellence through improvisation

For knowledge workers – those who think for a living, whether their job title is journalist, accountant or executive assistant -, this combination of improvisational ability and pursuit of excellence represents our truest skill.

We are the masters of anticipation and adaptation, the ones who understand that professional success isn’t about rigid conformity.

It’s about listening carefully, responding creatively and executing flawlessly, finding human connection beneath bureaucratic structures.

Our professional value isn’t determined by the script others write for us. It’s created in those moments of unexpected connection, those instances where we step beyond the expected and create something entirely new with uncompromising attention to detail.

If someone has told you that you don’t quite fit the expected pattern, consider that your difference isn’t a limitation but potentially your most powerful professional instrument.

Play it boldly, play it with excellence.