Ok, friends. It’s Rohan and I’m back with another edition of Coached. It’s your personal mentorship email that takes a few minutes to read, but speeds up your career by years.
In today’s edition, I cover a short story on re-invention I found inspiring. I think you’ll enjoy it. Later on, I cover some useful career hacks — including one in case you’re job searching.
Estimated read time: 2 minutes 5 seconds
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📈 Mentor's Corner
Insights put together by me. One practical lesson a week that will make a measurable impact on your career, delivered right to you — for $0.
A short story about reinvention…
One person I think is cool is Mario Ancic.
He was the number 7 tennis player in the world. Beat Federer on grass. Made the Wimbledon semifinals. Then mononucleosis forced him to end his career at 26.
Instead of becoming another ex-athlete who got stuck in their identity and now commentate or coach, he went to Columbia Law School. Passed the bar. Rose up the ranks at different law firms. Then he switched into finance. Now, he's a principal at a major private equity firm.
What's cool:
His LinkedIn doesn't mention tennis. Not in his headline. Not in his bio. Only a tiny mention hidden if you drill into all his work experiences.
That's the part that gets me. Most people who achieve something significant spend the rest of their lives reminding everyone about it. They become prisoners of their best achievement.
Ancic just moved on. Started over as a law student. Then again as a junior associate. Then again in private equity. Each time accepting being the beginner in the room despite having been world-class at something else.
Some takeaways from his story:
Reinvention is hard, but it's possible. Just because you've spent years becoming great at one field doesn't mean you can't excel at something completely different.
Letting go of old achievements makes life more interesting. You get to be a beginner again, learn new things, meet different people.
Growth requires being bad at something again.
When moving fields, you might feel you're losing years of experience. But you're not. Your skills are more transferrable than you think. But you only get to use those skills if you're willing to let go of the identity first.
I LOVE inspiring stories like this that go against the norm. Most people think you always need to stay in your lane…but it’s nice to see that even wild reinventions are possible. And your current chapter doesn’t always need to be your final one.
Btw:
Whether you're thinking about a change or just want to understand yourself better, it’s useful to know…what are your patterns and limiting beliefs? What are the stories you tell yourself?
One thing I’d recommend is our 20-minute impact assessment that we built with actual PhDs and career coaches. It reveals how you truly operate — your hidden patterns, what motivates you, why you work the way you do. These deep personality insights typically run $50-100, but it's free for you as a Coached reader.
If you haven’t tried it yet, you really should. People who've taken it keep saying things like "this explained everything" and "I wish I had this years ago." It'll genuinely help you make better career moves. Takes less time than your commute (unless you work from home). Try the Coached Impact Assessment now .
📈 A career hack
A 30-second bite-sized lesson to make you a stronger leader.
Introduce yourself differently.
Most people introduce themselves the exact same way: "Hi, I'm [name] and I work at [company] as a [title]."
Boring. Forgettable. Just like everyone else.
You want your story to be original.
❌ Bad: "I moved to NYC for work, and I'm a data scientist at Resume Worded." That story's boring because EVERYONE in New York moved there for work.
✅ Good: "I'm a bit of a third culture kid. Grew up in Singapore and London, which explains my funny accent. Decided to move to New York for the energy and ended up falling in love with data science."
The second version gives people multiple connection points and makes you memorable.
I wrote a whole essay on introducing yourself well — and differently. People found it helpful.
….PSA
Want to get ahead? Follow my career advice on LinkedIn.
I write short actionable stuff through the week. Stuff that will truly benefit your career in measurable ways: strategies you can steal, email scripts you can copy/paste, AI prompts for your career, etc. And I’m constantly replying to your questions there in the comments.
Join the 32k people who've already gotten ahead using these tactics — See you there.
🔎 Speed Up Your Job Search
One actionable piece of advice to help you hack your job search.
How to target your resume to a job
Some people say you should make a new resume for each job you apply to. If you had all the time in the world, then, yes, that’s a good idea.
But most of us don’t and want to be more efficient. If that’s you, do these two things instead:
✴ If you don’t have a lot of time, edit just your skills section
This is the quickest way to target your resume. Look at the job description you apply to and update your skills section with key ones. This helps you get past the ATS.
It’s time consuming, I know, so use a tool like Targeted Resume to automatically find which core ATS skills you’re missing (based on the job you're applying to), as well as show you how to add them in naturally.
⚡ Create 3-5 resume versions for the sub-fields you are targeting
Create one for each 'job type' you are applying for. For example, if you’re applying for marketing roles, you might have a resume:
targeting sales and account management roles, highlighting your experience speaking to customers
aimed at branding and design roles, highlighting your creative experience and tools you’ve used like Canva and Photoshop
targeting more user acquisition or media buying roles
🎯 By the way, if you haven't yet used Score My Resume to get an instant resume review, do that first. The tool will scan your resume for key things hiring managers look for and tell you where it falls short.
Stop applying to jobs with a bad resume!
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🤭 In all unseriousness
🫵 Before we wrap up
What'd you think of today's edition?
🤢 You didn't bring enough value.
And if you did enjoy reading this email…
(I don’t ask you for a lot….rather, these emails are expensive to send out, yet I keep them free and don’t paywall the best parts)
All I want in return is one small favor. Just do any of these:
1. Know someone on a job search? Tell them about Resume Worded.
It’ll make their job search a lot shorter. They can get a free resume review at resumeworded.com/free-resume-review
2. Got a smart friend who LOVES getting better? Tell them about Coached.
I love seeing them reach people who want more out of their careers. If you want to share this essay with a friend, or colleague, here’s a link to it: https://coached.com/essays/reinvention/ - I promise to keep the quality of my emails high so they love you for it.
Here are some reviews of my last email. Leave one here. You’ll be in good company :-)
If you missed it last week, see it here.
And if you’re new here, join at Coached.com to get the next one
Until next time,
Rohan
Founder at Coached & Resume Worded
