John Maynard Keynes wrote in The General Theory (1936) that "worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally." I wish someone had pinned that line to my desk twenty years ago, because it would have saved me from signing a contract I didn't know existed.

I'm not talking about an employment contract. Those I read carefully, every clause, every non-compete, every notice period. I'm talking about the other one, the invisible contract attached to every promotion you accept. Nobody prints it, nobody signs it, and nobody discusses it until its terms have already reshaped your life.

I signed it dozens of times across thirty years in corporate, at IBM, Qantas Airways, S&P Global and Standard Chartered Bank. Each time I moved up, I told myself I was moving forward. More money, bigger scope, a better title and a wider remit gave me every signal that I was winning.

What I never tracked was what I was handing over in return, and the terms got steeper with every level.

The contract nobody talks about

In 1949 the career counsellor William J. Reilly wrote a short book called How to Avoid Work. In it he uses the old analogy of a frog in a pot of water on the stove. Raise the temperature slowly enough and the frog feels uncomfortable, but never uncomfortable enough to jump out.

That is how the invisible promotion contract works. The temperature rises so slowly that you adjust to each new normal without questioning it. The first few promotions feel like genuine progress, and in many ways they are. You're learning, growing, and building skills and credibility that will serve you for decades. I would not trade my corporate career, because it built the expertise and leadership instincts that made everything I've done since possible.

But somewhere along the way, the contract starts taking more than it gives. Because the increments are small, you don't feel each one. You just wake up one morning and realise the terms have changed dramatically since you started.

The contract has three clauses. I lived all three, and I suspect you will recognise them too.

Clause one: your time is no longer yours

The first thing the contract takes is your time, and it does it so gradually that you barely notice.

Early in your career you have clear boundaries. You work your hours, you go home, and your evenings and weekends belong to you. Each promotion chips away at those edges. The first senior role adds a few evening calls. The next adds weekend prep for Monday board papers. The one after that puts you on a plane every other week.

I remember sitting on a flight over the Bay of Bengal, somewhere between Singapore and London, staring out at nothing but ocean. My phone had no signal, my laptop was closed, and for the first time in months I had a quiet moment to think. What struck me wasn't some grand revelation. It was a simple question: when was the last time I'd had dinner with Kazzie on a weeknight without checking my phone?

I couldn't remember, and that was the problem.

The contract doesn't take your time in one dramatic move. It takes it in five-minute increments across years. It might be a Sunday afternoon reviewing a deck, a 6am call with London, or a "quick check" of email at 10pm that turns into forty-five minutes of replies. Each one feels minor on its own, but added together they hand your discretionary time to your employer.

By the time you're a Group CISO or in the C-suite, the expectation of total availability isn't even stated anymore. It's just understood. You've absorbed it so completely that you police yourself. Nobody needs to tell you to check email on a Saturday morning. You do it automatically, because the contract trained you to.

Clause two: your identity becomes the role

The second clause is subtler and, in my experience, far more dangerous than the first.

When someone asked me at a dinner party what I did, I didn't say "I work in cybersecurity." I said "I'm the Group CISO at Standard Chartered Bank." The role wasn't something I did. It was something I was. My identity and my job title had merged so completely that I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

I see the same thing in many of the senior executives I work with. The higher you climb, the more your sense of self gets tangled up with your position. Your network knows you as "the CISO", "the CFO" or "the MD". Your dinner-party introduction, your LinkedIn headline and the way you see yourself in the mirror all point back to the role.

The problem isn't pride or ego. The problem is dependency. When your identity is fused to a position someone else controls, you have a single point of failure. If the role disappears through a restructure, a board decision or simply the passage of time, what's left?

I've watched former colleagues go through this. Executives who were sharp, confident and decisive while they had the title became visibly lost within months of leaving, not because they lacked capability but because they had no answer to the question "who am I without this role?"

The invisible contract encourages this merger, and every promotion reinforces it. The bigger the title, the more your world organises itself around it, and the harder it becomes to imagine functioning without it.

Clause three: your options narrow

The third clause is the one that locks the other two in place.

With each promotion your options narrow rather than expand. That sounds backwards, because a bigger role should open more doors. In practice the opposite happens:

You end up in what I call a spacious cage. It's comfortable, well furnished, and you chose to walk into it. But the door only opens from the outside, and the number of people willing to open it for you shrinks every year.

This is where the golden handcuffs conversation usually starts, and most people misunderstand what the handcuffs are made of. Everyone assumes the trap is the money: the package, the equity, the bonus, the pension contributions. I thought so too, for years. I looked at those numbers and saw proof that the system valued me.

But the salary is not the trap. The trap is what the salary has done to your dependency. It has made you reliant on a single income you don't control, while leaving you no time to build anything else and no identity outside the role that pays you.

The P&L trap

There's a useful way to think about this that I wish someone had explained to me in my thirties.

Most executives run their finances like a P&L statement. Revenue comes in (your salary), expenses go out (your life), and if the gap is positive you're doing well. The entire focus is on income.

But wealth isn't built on the P&L. It's built on the balance sheet: the assets you own that create value whether you show up to work or not. Property, intellectual property, a business, a course, a book, a brand, an audience. These sit on your balance sheet and compound over time. I go deeper on this in Your Salary Is Not Wealth.

The invisible contract keeps you fixated on the P&L. It rewards deeper commitment with higher income, while consuming exactly the time and energy you'd need to build balance-sheet assets. It's a brilliant design if you're the employer. Every promotion makes the executive more productive and more trapped at the same time.

After thirty years in corporate, I had an impressive P&L. But my balance sheet, the assets I owned independently of any employer, was thin. I'd spent three decades optimising the wrong line.

What the contract doesn't tell you

None of this means the corporate career was a mistake, and I need to be clear about that. The message is not "corporate is bad." Thirty years in corporate gave me deep expertise, leadership under genuine pressure, a global network, and the credibility behind everything I do today. I would recommend a corporate career to anyone with the talent and drive to pursue one.

But I would also recommend reading the invisible contract before you sign it. Understand what each promotion is really asking for, the full cost as well as the upside. Track what you're trading as carefully as you track what you're earning.

Most importantly, start building your balance sheet while you still have the income, the energy and the options to do it. The best time is before the contract has fully closed around you. The second-best time is now. If you want a structure for the first three months, I set one out in How to Build a Business in 90 Days Without Quitting Your Job.

AI is adding urgency to this. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 estimates that between 2025 and 2030, new jobs created and jobs displaced will together equal 22% of today's formal jobs, with technology among the biggest drivers. A senior title was never real job security, and in a market where whole functions can be reshaped in a few years, building independent assets is no longer a theoretical exercise. How you plan for that depends on your runway, which is why planning an exit at 40 looks different from planning one at 55.

So how do you renegotiate the contract?

The first step is an honest assessment of where you are in the contract right now. Ask yourself three questions:

  1. How much of your time is genuinely yours each week?
  2. How tangled up is your identity with your current role?
  3. How many realistic options would you have if that role disappeared tomorrow?

I built a free assessment that scores exactly this. It takes about five minutes, covers seven areas from income streams to identity and health, and shows your score on screen as soon as you finish.