***Disclaimer*** This post is meant to tell my story from my perspective for how I got where I am today. It is not meant to reflect negatively on any workplace or institution, but should be considered a lesson in overcoming unexpected circumstances and adversity and rise victorious on the other side, even if the destination is different from where the journey started.
In 2021, the process I’d oriented years of my life around finally ran — and my name wasn’t on the list.
I’d positioned myself for many years to enter into our training division with hopes of one day running the police academy. At our department, that wasn’t a job you just applied for. Tradition said you earned it in stages: put in your time as a patrol sergeant on nights first, then move up. It was a ladder, and I was prepared to climb every rung of it. So when the training sergeant process opened, I expected it to run the way it always had.
It didn’t. For the first time — the only time, before or since — officers who weren’t yet sergeants were allowed into the process. The rules I’d built my plan on were applied in a way they’d never been applied. And when the results came back, I wasn’t selected.
That stung in a way I don’t think I fully understood at the time. It wasn’t just a missed promotion. It was the moment the entire premise of my plan came apart.
There are two Greek words for what happened next. I picked them up the way a lot of people did, listening to Mike Rowe — he credits a college classics professor for drilling them into him, and they trace back to Aristotle.
The first is peripeteia. A reversal. The sudden turn where a situation flips to the opposite of what a person expected — the point where the story you thought you were living becomes a different story.
The second is anagnorisis. Discovery. Not learning a fact — recognition. The moment you finally see something that was true the whole time, but hidden from you.
2021 was my peripeteia. What it eventually taught me was my anagnorisis. It took me a while to tell the two apart.
Back up to 2017, because that’s where the plan was born.
That year I got my first explosives detection K9, Zeus. I started a master’s degree in adult education. I stepped back from traveling with the basketball team for a season to make room for all of it. Every one of those moves pointed the same direction: I was going to get into our academy as a sergeant and build a career in training. Night-shift sergeant, then training sergeant. I knew the path. I’d put real weight on it — on the rank and the trajectory.
So in 2021, when the path closed, I didn’t just lose a job I wanted. I lost the map.
Here’s the part I used to leave out when I told this story: what I did next was a choice. Several choices.
I could tell it like it all happened to me — like COVID delayed me and a broken process rejected me and life just carried me somewhere new. That’s the easy version, and it’s a lie. The truth is I pivoted, on purpose, more than once.
I finished the first master’s. Then I immediately started a second one, this time in finance — not because anyone told me to, but because I’d decided I wanted to build something of my own, on the side of a career I was no longer sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life inside. I finished that degree in May 2025. I launched my business in April 2026. None of that was fate. All of it was me deciding where to put my next step when the map I’d been handed turned out to be wrong.
For a long time I downplayed that. I think a lot of us do — it feels more humble to say the universe worked it out. But it wasn’t the universe. It was work.
Which brings me to the recognition — the anagnorisis.
I had rooted my identity and my sense of impact in something the department controlled. A rank. A process. An outcome someone else got to hand me or withhold. And the day they withheld it, I discovered how much of myself I’d staked on a thing I couldn’t control.
Losing it forced me to go find impact and identity somewhere else — in my own objectives, my own goals, the outcomes I could actually own. That’s the whole lesson, and I want to be careful about how I say it, because it’s easy to get wrong.
It is not: don’t pay your dues. You absolutely have to pay your dues. There is no version of this where you skip the work.
It’s this: pay your dues for the right things, and never trade who you are to get somewhere. Focus on what you can control. Impact everything you touch, positively, whether or not there’s a title telling you to. I don’t chase outcomes the way I used to. I’m far more selective about what I’ll even apply for now — I ask a hundred questions first, because I know my own worth and what I’m capable of, and I won’t take a role where I can’t have as much impact as I already have. If rank comes someday, I’ll take it on my own terms. As a bonus. Not as a toll I’m paying to become someone I’m not.
The old version of me would have taken a job I didn’t want in order to get a job I did. I’ll never do that again.
And here’s the strange part. I did land somewhere.
Not through a promotion. Through people. Every relationship I built across the department and the university, every bond I made without a title requiring me to — those are what put me in the special events role I’m in now, where I’m genuinely empowered to make an impact. I didn’t plan this seat. But I can see, clearly, that every choice and every relationship that got me here was mine.
It’s not where I set out to go. Looking at it honestly — not as destiny, but as recognition — it may be exactly where I do my best work.
The reversal broke my plan. The recognition gave me a better one. And I’m the one who walked the distance between them.
That distance — between where you planned to be and where you actually are — is the work I help people do now.
At The Shield Finance, I work with people navigating their own version of that moment. A plan that no longer fits. A transition they didn’t choose. The realization that they’ve built their financial security on outcomes other people get to hand them. My job isn’t to give them a new map. It’s to help them build one they actually own.
If that’s where you are — or you’re just starting to ask those questions — that conversation is always free.
-Ryan
