Useful compounds. Important doesn't.

The people on the first track work on high-visibility programmes, sit on steering committees, present at all-hands, and optimise their career moves around promotion cycles. They end up in roles with impressive titles. The promotion process, as it's usually run, selects specifically for their behaviours. If you're measuring who spoke most at the board-level meeting, the important-track candidate wins reliably.

The people on the second track quietly solve problems, unblock others, and build systems other people depend on. They are often invisible in formal processes. They are also the ones whose departure would genuinely break something. When I sit down to plan a reorganisation, I can draw the list of truly irreplaceable people on one sheet of paper. That list almost never matches the formal organisational chart's hierarchy.

Why usefulness compounds

The economics of usefulness are better than the economics of visibility over long time horizons. A useful person's reputation travels through the people they've helped, whose trust they've earned, whose outcomes they've improved. These connections accumulate without active cultivation. When the useful person changes roles, the network comes with them. The next position is often negotiated informally before it's posted, because the people who benefited from their usefulness have already told their own networks.

Visibility, by contrast, has to be renewed constantly. A visible person who stops being visible fades from relevance within a few quarters. The network they built around their visibility is transactional rather than relational, and it doesn't travel with them as cleanly. This is why you see former executives - often highly-promoted, highly-visible - struggling to find their next role after leaving a big company, while former senior engineers who never optimised for visibility get three offers in the first week of their departure becoming public.

Where pure usefulness fails

The naive version of the advice - 'just be useful, the recognition will follow' - is not quite right. Pure usefulness without narrative is a specific trap. It's how engineers spend a decade as senior ICs, doing genuinely valuable work, without ever being considered for the next tier. The usefulness is real. The recognition isn't automatic. You still have to build the connection between your contribution and the people who decide on opportunities, and doing this well is not the same as political gamesmanship.

The healthy version of the advice is more like 'be mostly useful, with controlled visibility'. The specific calibration looks like: do the work, and also make sure one or two people with platforms understand what you did and can tell the story on your behalf. This isn't self-promotion. It's ensuring your contribution doesn't get lost in transmission. The people who do this well often don't talk about themselves at all - they talk about the work, and the work's narrative carries the attribution.

The diagnostic questions

If you want to know which track you're on, a few practical questions help. Do colleagues come to you with problems, or with ceremonies? The useful track gets problems. The important track gets ceremonies. Do you leave meetings with to-dos or with decisions? Useful-track people leave with to-dos - things to go away and fix. Important-track people leave with decisions they've negotiated. When you're out of the office for a week, does anyone notice specifically, or just generically? Useful-track people are specifically missed; important-track people are noticed as a general absence from meetings.

The diagnostic isn't about which is morally better. Both tracks can produce real value. The specific question is which one you're actually on, because mistaking your position - thinking you're on the useful track when you're actually on the important track, or vice versa - produces strategic errors in your career decisions that compound over years.

Useful-track people are specifically missed. Important-track people are generically noticed.

The organisational failure mode

Not every organisation rewards usefulness. Political organisations - where decisions are made on relationships, visibility, and perceived status rather than contribution - reward the important track more reliably. In these environments, the naive pursuit of usefulness produces a career that's stuck, not a career that compounds. The quality of the environment matters enormously.

Before you commit to a useful-track strategy, assess the organisation. Are the people being promoted to senior roles the ones you'd describe as useful, or the ones you'd describe as visible? If the ratio is consistently tilted toward visible, the system rewards visibility, and the useful strategy will underperform. Either accept that, switch tracks, or find an organisation with different incentives. There are more of the latter than there used to be, and the organisations with healthier reward structures tend to outperform over the long run - which is itself a reason for the useful-track population to concentrate there.

The retirement test

The cleanest long-horizon framing I've heard for this is the retirement test. When people leave the workforce - either at actual retirement or when they move to a new career phase - the ones who were on the important track are forgotten within a few months. The memos they wrote, the presentations they gave, the committees they chaired, all disappear from collective memory quickly. The ones who were on the useful track - who built systems, mentored people, solved specific problems - are remembered for decades, because their contributions remain embedded in the organisation's functioning.

The durability of contribution is the truest measure. Titles are ephemeral. Usefulness persists. You can sometimes tell which track a person has been on by visiting their old organisation five years after they've left. The useful-track person's name still comes up. The important-track person's name usually doesn't. That's not always a fair judgement, but it's the one the organisation actually makes, and it correlates with the underlying reality of contribution more reliably than any formal review process does.

The concrete advice

If you're early in your career and reading this: optimise for being useful, with some visibility, and find an organisation that rewards it. If you're mid-career and noticing you've drifted toward visibility without underlying utility, it's not too late to recalibrate - but it requires accepting that the correction takes a few years and the visible rewards will lag. If you're senior and have been on the important track the whole time, the question is whether the next chapter depends on continuing the visibility treadmill or on building something durable. Usefulness compounds. The compounding is slow and quiet, and it doesn't produce impressive press releases. It produces a career that doesn't require constant maintenance, which in the long run is what most people actually wanted in the first place.