The most underrated career move is staying.

Marketing careers reward motion. Eighteen months, a title bump, a new logo, repeat — and the industry reads that as ambition. But eighteen months is exactly long enough to launch something and leave before the results arrive.

Everything I actually know came from being present for the consequences. You cannot learn what a rebrand really costs, or whether your positioning survives contact with a market, if you’ve already moved on when the invoice lands.

I came back from London certain I’d start my own agency immediately. Instead I spent a decade working for other people — the least fashionable decision available — because of an old piece of Marwari advice about learning to follow before you lead. It cost me ten years of being my own boss.

It also bought the only thing that made the brand-side move possible. By the end I wasn’t thinking about campaigns at all; I was rebuilding a client’s business in my head. You don’t reach that by collecting logos. You reach it by staying somewhere long enough to see the whole loop.

The one exception worth noting: I did leave a company and return to it later, at a more senior level. Staying isn’t loyalty theatre. It’s judgement about where the learning still is.

The strongest counter, and I’ve watched it work: staying is only compounding if the place is still teaching you. Plenty of people mistake inertia for depth and spend six years in a role that stopped educating them in year two — while a peer who moved three times has seen three business models, three cultures, three ways of being wrong.

And there’s a pay argument I won’t pretend away: in most markets, moving is still the fastest way to get paid properly. Staying can be expensive loyalty. The test isn’t tenure — it’s whether you’re still learning faster here than you would there.