The Risk of Becoming Unknown Again
By Diana Lammerts
The biggest risk I ever took was not leaving a career. It was accepting that nobody would care what I had done before.
There is a line from Machel Montano’s Encore that stayed with me because every new room proves the same thing: nobody cares what you were. Only what you are now.
A line from Encore by Trinidadian Soca artist Machel Montano stayed with me because every new room proves the same thing: nobody cares what you were. Only what you are now.
For fifteen years, I worked in German radio journalism. Newsrooms, morning shows, live decisions under pressure. I built credibility, relationships, and a reputation. I was a news anchor, morning show producer, sidekick, and duty editor-in-chief. People recognized me in my hometown. I knew exactly where I stood.
Then I left. Not because I didn’t love my job, but because I saw where the media was heading before it fully changed. At 35, I decided to start over. I moved to the United States, and everything changed overnight. The skills and experience came with me. The identity did not. I became a beginner again. At the time, it felt like loss. Looking back, it was one of the most important resets of my life.
A few years later, I joined one of the largest animal welfare organizations in the country and moved into operations. Again, I was in unknown territory. When you are no longer the expert, you start seeing differently. You notice what others overlook. You ask questions that feel obvious to you but invisible to people inside the same system. Not because you are smarter. Because you are new.
That shift changed how I understand work, even across different industries.
Most problems do not begin as crises. They begin as friction: a communication gap, a process nobody questions, a decision that once made sense but no longer fits. By the time a problem becomes visible, it has usually been building for a long time.
I later returned to Germany through a personal decision that reset my life again. I had to rebuild from scratch, working from a couch at a friend’s place, this time with a clearer blueprint in my head.
Over the years, I worked with companies, earned publicity for them, helped scale operations, grew networks, and learned how business actually functions beyond theory.
After the pandemic, I moved to Mexico. Again, I became unknown. I had my network worldwide but not locally. No established credibility on the ground. Just the ability to create value and read what others were missing.
While consulting business owners, I kept seeing the same pattern. Leaders focused on what was visible while missing what caused it underneath. The response was always the same: “We never saw that.” Those four words stayed with me. Not because they were surprising, but because they were consistent. That experience reinforced something I first learned in the U.S.
Every new room asks the same question: can you do it again? Not once. Again and again. Can you solve problems without reputation? Create results without context?
Build trust without history doing the work for you? That realization changed how I work.
I stopped leading with titles. I stopped leading with achievements. I focused on the problem in front of me.
The real risk that changed everything was not moving countries or changing careers. It was accepting that nobody remembers who you were.
And building something clear enough that what people remember is who you became.
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