Career Quakes: The Moments That Shake You, Make You Part 1
How to use AI to be your own career Intelligence Officer
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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Captain Shelly Roodâs job was to know things that other people didnât.
As a tactical all-source intelligence officer in the United States Army, she ran teams of analysts across multiple intelligence disciplines:
Image intelligence
Human intelligence
Signals intelligence
âI could tell you, but Iâd have to hurt youâ intelligence
Captain Shellyâs job was to take the raw data flowing in from every source and synthesize it into a coherent picture. Sheâd brief the decision-maker with the clearest, most accurate reading of reality she could construct.
What was happening? So what does it mean? Now what do we do?
In every intel brief, an area will exist called âanalyst note,â and thatâs where the true expert gets to share their read on the situation to the decision maker, possibly in an attempt to sway the briefing outcome. Analystsâ notes are the âhears what that meansâ portion of the briefing.
She briefed full-bird colonels, one-star to three-star generals. She gave intel briefings ten stories underground in a bunker in South Korea. She led covert briefings overseas and ran security programs for 4,000 soldiers.
Captain Shelly was exceptionally good at reading situations.
We could all use an intelligence officer for our lives.
Especially when we face life quakes.
Whatâs a life quake?
Letâs ask Bruce Feiler, the Category King of Life Quakes.
Pirate Bruce spent years crisscrossing America collecting hundreds of life stories for what he called the Life Story Project. He coded those stories for dozens of variables and published his findings in Life Is in the Transitions.
His core discovery: we experience a disruption (a meaningful life change) every 12 to 18 months. Most of those we navigate with relative ease. But about one in ten becomes what Feiler calls a âlifequakeâ.
A massive, forceful burst of change that leads to a period of upheaval, transition, and renewal.
His research found that the average person goes through three to five of these in their adult life, and the average transition takes about five years.
Do the math.
That means we spend roughly half our adult lives in an unsettled state. Feiler identified 52 distinct types of disruptors across five categories (body, love, work, identity, and beliefs) and found that the transitions they trigger donât follow the neat, linear stages that a century of psychology promised us. Life, he argued, is nonlinear.
And the transitions that reshape life are nonlinear, too.
Captain Shelly was no stranger to life quakes.
She married her ROTC sweetheart right out of college.
Endured infidelity, excess drinking, and abuse/violence.
She divorced her ex-husband when her son was four.
But she also endured Career Quakes.
Targeted by insecure male superiors who saw her competence as a threat.
Falsely accused of plagiarism because her intel work was âtoo goodâ.
The chain of command that often put inferior leaders above her.
Every time she outperformed a weak boss, she got punished for it.
Make no mistake, Captain Shelly is no pushover.
She was captain of the rifle team. The best shot in her unit. A five-foot fireball who won awards for feats of strength in her sorority, before she chose the uniform over the Greek letters. Distinguished Military Graduate at WMU.
She grew up swinging hammers on rooftops in Detroit for her grandfatherâs construction companyâa third-generation business at Seven Mile and Van Dyke, the same neighborhood where 8 Mile was filmed.
Donât mess with Captain Shelly.
How did she respond to these life and career quakes?
She became her own intelligence analyst.
She left the military
She went to seminary.
She became a chaplain.
She built a course on intimate partner violence.
She built a series of cohorts to help female military vets.
She built intellectual property on 8 âWildflowerâ profiles of female veterans.
She just launched her own Substack and created the Pirate Shelly AI bot!
Captain Shelly became a Creator Capitalist.
Today, Shelly is remarried.
She has two more children. She says sheâs the best sheâs ever been. Sheâs a chaplain, a podcast host, a broadcast television executive, the founder of a community called Others Over Self with 154 members and 1,600 conversations in 2025 alone, and the creator of the stateâs official Woman Veteran Peer Support Program in Michigan, going nationwide. She teaches courses on moral injury and intimate partner violence based on lived experience.
Pirate Shelly is a successful business owner and federal contractor getting ready to celebrate the ten year mark.
The problem she is solving is that the military has more Iron Man (playboy, rule breakers) than Captain Americas (ethical and physically strong). That leaves many women veterans without a narrative of their own.
Her Superpower is exactly what it always was.
She just does it now for a different mission.
She reads situations, synthesizes data, constructs narratives, and briefs decision-makers. But this time, she is briefing the military women who disproportionately are the caretakers of aging parents, struggling friends and more. Because if we take care of these military women, everyone wins.
This mini-book is about how to use AI to have your own Career Intelligence Officer as you navigate Career Quakes.
Because career quakes are coming.
For some of you, theyâre already here. AI is the biggest quake in a generation. It might be the biggest quake ever.
Entire categories, industries, and societies are being reshaped. Companies are restructuring. Re-starting with AI as their co-founder.
And somewhere in your life, a personal quake is going to collide with all of it.
We speak with more experience on this than weâd like.
The question isnât whether youâll face career quakes. You will. The question is whether youâll be wise enough to let them build you.
Shelly was. Hereâs how.
P.S. Quakes create the most growth. Because they force you to grow.
The Three Rings to Rule Them All
Your career doesnât exist in a vacuum.
It sits at the center of three concentric rings. Each one is capable of remaking your life (or wrecking it) in ways you never saw coming.
Ring one: Global quakes. What happens around us matters. War, economic shifts, and rising inflation on the price of carbondigulators. We are not alone in the world.
Ring two: Organizational quakes. Who runs the company? Who controls the budget? Who gets into the meeting? Whoever decides if youâre in or out?
Ring three: Personal quakes. Your relationships. Your sense of purpose. The stuff the therapist asks about.
Most career advice picks one ring and pretends the other two donât exist.
The business books obsess over global change. As if knowing a trend is coming makes you ready for it.
The leadership books obsess over promotions and organizational chess. As if climbing the ladder matters. Especially a ladder learning on the status quo building, which is already on fire.
The self-help books obsess over purpose and connection. As if your inner life is separate from the category quake happening around you.
The rings donât move independently.
They interact. They amplify each other. They collide.
And the interaction effects (the place where category transformation meets organizational chaos meets personal upheaval, at the same time), thatâs where people get built.
Or crushed.
Especially if they were only watching one ring.
Letâs go deeper.
Ring 1: Global Quakes
Seven world quakes you will face.
These are forces you canât control and didnât choose. They can cascade downward. A pandemic triggers remote work, which reshapes capital flows, which rocks industries, and which forces your company to restructure.
One quake.
Seven layers deep.
Geopolitical: Wars, pandemics, geopolitical change.
Demographic: Birth rates, aging populations, migration shifts.
Technology: Steam engine. Assembly line. Internet. AI.
Economy: Recessions, booms, interest rates, and capital markets.
Regulatory: One law, one signature, one ruling.
Industry: Category violence and Category Design.
Cultural: Social movements, generational value shifts, the zeitgeist.
To say nothing about the potential impact of meteors, aliens, or your weird neighbor Jim.
Each of the 7 quakes in the global ring can be a tailwind or a headwind.
These are not forces you can overpower, outmaneuver, or outrun. But you do have the power to choose your lens. To reframe your perception of them entirely.
Many legendary breakthroughs are forged in crisis.
Ring 2: Organizational Quakes
Seven category quakes reshaping work, and what theyâre doing to you.
These happen inside the walls of your professional life. Theyâre more personal than global quakes but still largely done TO you by the organization, the boss, or the structure youâre operating in.
Or at least thatâs how it can feel.
But just like the global quakes, a green and positive quake isnât always a blessing. A red and negative quake isnât always a burden.
Promotion: Too fast and youâre in over your head. Too slow and resentment breeds.
Compensation: More money isnât always a blessing. Less money always stings. How you get paid shapes the outcomes that build your reputation capital.
Leadership: A great boss accelerates your career by a decade. A terrible one sets it back farther.
Role & Responsibility: Too much authority without clarity sets you up to fail. Wrong-fit jobs can turn a career you love into dread.
Transition: The lateral move. The industry jump. The step down you take to eventually go up. The step back to become a parent.
Change in Control: Merger, acquisition, IPO, bankruptcy. Life-changing wealth or wipeout, decided above your pay grade.
Betrayal & Blessing: Youâll be stolen from and screwed over. Youâll also receive credit you didnât fully earn. Be prepared for both.
Ring 3: Personal Quakes
Seven quakes life does to you.
âLife is fired at us point-blank.â -JosĂŠ Ortega y Gasset
These are the original lifequakes (the legendary) Bruce Feiler studiedâand they belong in any honest career framework. Because the idea that your career exists separately from your life is one of the most damaging lies the professional world tells.
Love: Your spouse is the highest-ROI career decision youâll ever make. Divorce is experienced as something close to death.
Children: Having them changes every calculation. Not having them is its own quake. Children can multiply the highs and lows of your career.
Family: The unexpected phone call or the slow march of caregiving hugely impacts your career. Family can be the sanctuary from the storm.
Health: The wealth of health is almost always taken for granted. Until it is slowly or suddenly taken away.
Peace & Violence: Peace isnât the absence of conflict. Itâs the foundation you stand on for everything. If evil violently attacks you or someone you love, you will experience a seminal before/after in your life. Violence (or fear of it) changes everything. Peace changes everything, too.
Relationships: Humans need each other desperately. The right people are worth more than any credential. The wrong ones are deadly to your soul.
Purpose: You hit the goal, get the title, and feel not-so-satisfied. Or purpose finds you. And doesnât let go. Work can be a means or an end in itself.
Pirate zebra whole:
When work shiftsâŚ
FROM: being the thing you do.
TO: the thing you were designed to do and only you can uniquely do.
You win.
And the world wins too.
Seven Core Truths About Quakes
Here is what we believe to be trueâbased on our own careers, on the data, on the hundreds of career stories weâve studied, and on the three military stories in this book.