Let's start. So hello, everybody. Hi there.I'm Luchka, and I lead product and data strategy at Springer Nature, which is nearly 200 years old scientific publisher trying to move at the speed of AI. And most days, that goes as well as it sounds. But I didn't start in publishing. I started in the lab doing some pretty weird but pretty cool stuff. And throughout my career, I've been told that my path is too messy, that it's too out there, and that it's too complex, you know, to put on the slide. And some of you might know that feeling, that sense that maybe, you know, your story doesn't fit neatly into a single title or a single lane. But what I kept learning is that career zigzags are actually the most valuable things you have.

And before I show you how my first zig started, let me maybe ask you a little question. So how many of you are afraid of spiders? Maybe drop an emoji or a little comment in the chat. Anything goes really. Okay. I got some fun reactions. Okay. Yeah. And I'm I'm with you, actually, because I was pretty terrified of spiders as well, which was unfortunate because I spent four years of my doctorate research milking tarantulas. Essentially, what I was doing was extracting venom to develop new painkillers. And the chemistry was super exciting, but the spiders? Less so. So part of my job was to pick this big, hairy, and crazy fast tarantulas. So the one you can see up here is called Charlie. Alright? So I have to hold Charlie in my left hand, and with my right hand, I have to attach a tiny vial over its fangs.

And then with my left thumb, I had to poke Charlie very gently in its butt. Right? And then somehow, I had to convince a tarantula to inject a venom in a relaxed and cool way. So it took me a year just to approach them without wanting to faint. A full year of daily practice on, you know, learning how to sit inside the discomfort and do the work anyway. But here's what I didn't expect to learn from my tarantula. So the most valuable thing I ever built wasn't a PhD and wasn't any product or wasn't any credential that I picked up along the way.

It was actually my relationship with uncertainty. So I made discomfort my default setting, and that operating system, it actually turned out to be the most important thing I've ever built. So that operating system got quite a serious workout because while I was still in the lab, I cofounded a virtual reality game that translated my spider research into a virtual pain experience. And with another biotech startup, we won the national entrepreneurship competition in The UK that year. And then I choose to leave academia, and I join startups. I join digital health, ad tech, and eventually enterprises and scientific publishing where where I work now. But, you know, all not all of those transition worked. Some failed quite phenomenally, but every transition looked a little wild from the outside because my academic colleagues thought I was leaving the right path.

Business colleagues thought, oh, she doesn't quite speak her language. And, you know, tech colleagues, bless them, they thought that publishing was where innovation went to quietly retire. So for a long time, I tried to make my story sound simpler because I thought that clarity meant removing complexity, but that was wrong. So long before any of those colleagues had opinions, there was already this conversation that kept happening, you know, back when I was still in the lab with my supervisors, with my mentors, with people who genuinely wanted the best for me. You know? They would look at my side project. So virtual reality game, the writing, the questions that didn't quite fit the lab, and they would say, Lucha, choose a lane. Just be a scientist. And every time I would think, oh, okay. But that can mean 100 things. You know? It can mean lab bench. It can mean communication.

It can mean industry, or it can mean building something. Why was I being asked to pick one and forget the rest? I never told them any of this because, you know, back then, I usually just nodded. And then I quietly did the opposite. So years later, after I already transitioned, I worked with an engineer who had trained as a musician. She was playing first violin in an orchestra for over a decade. And eight years into her engineering career, she told me she can hear when a data pipeline is broken. And not because the numbers tell her, but because she said the beat is wrong. So she also didn't pick a lane. She very much kept the musician and the musician is the engineer she is.

So the parts of you that didn't fit the job description are actually the parts of you that turn out to do the job better. And I still think about those tarantulas sometimes. You know? I I think about how spider moves across empty space and how it anchors one threat at a time and trust that the structure will hold before it's finished. And there's no template, really. The pattern emerges from the making. Those spiders, they don't climb. They weave. Right? So I was told to choose a lane, and maybe you were too. Maybe not in the those words, but, you know, pick a function. Stick with it. But the latter that we were told to raise up, well, it's wobbling. You know?

Last year, I I watched an AI tool, replicate in fifty minutes what took my team two months to build. The single lane specialist, so the person who does one thing well, is exactly who AI replaces first. So going up that ladder doesn't take us where we need to go anymore. It's it's time to start weaving. But then the question is, what to weave with? So AI can copy almost everything you put on CV, almost. But it cannot copy the specific weird zigzagging pattern that is you, the one that you keep having to explain. So your career isn't confusing. It's actually your proprietary dataset. You know?

And the the question for the next decade isn't whose credentials are sharpest or whose you know, it's more about whose web is actually wide enough to catch what's coming. So maybe here's a little something to try this week. You know, think of three threats in your life that look like a zigzag. Maybe you had once a creative gig, a side project, the year you took off, you know, the things you've been editing out of your whole story. And and then ask yourself, what if those detours are not the noise? What if they're the signal? And sure, it it might feel a little uncomfortable at first, and then that's all good. You know, that's just your operating system loading. Because those threats, those are your web. So let's start weaving. Okay. So thank you so much for everybody listening. So I'm Luchka, also known as Spider Woman.

And if any of that resonates, come find me on LinkedIn. I'm super curious what you're weaving.