The goal of any professional in today’s economy is to never have to submit another resume ever again.
I swear this isn’t an original line, yet I can’t recall the person nor the setting in which I was told. Nevertheless, whether this was a lucid moment or not, it has been firmly etched into my pre-frontal cortex for years.
Building in public and growing under public scrutiny – be it on Twitter or a blog or another form of social media – is one of the best ways to build rapport and credibility. It’s a photograph. An imprint. Still, and in many ways, permanent. A record that you and others can revisit and reasonably objectify your personal growth. Those data points tell a story. Either you connect those dots personally, or often times, someone else connects them for you.
“We are all the unreliable narrators of each other’s stories.”
If you’ve been following my blog over the past few months, that line will carry a familiar scent. My favorite and the first line I heard from the best film I watched this year, In and Of Itself. When my buddy DJ recommended it to me, he told me only two things:
- It’s about identity.
- And, “we are all the unreliable narrators of each other’s stories.”
It’d be a travesty if I spoiled the plot now. The best way to watch it is, like most unforgettable experiences, going in blind. No summary, no trailer. If my word means anything, it’d be my answer to the question: What is the one movie you’d recommend someone who just time travelled 50 years from the past to catch up with the way people in 2021 think?
But I digress.
Street cred is built up not by what you say about yourself, but by what other people say about you. That street cred will benefit you much more than a sheet of paper that summarizes your entire career into a single pager with 12-point font. I wrote a blogpost recently on how a pitch deck fails to summarize the motivations, the story, the wins and the losses behind building a business. So, you should always be fundraising. Always be selling. Always be pitching. And as you build champions around you, they’ll tell your story – by referring you to investors, share your product on social media, and sell you for you to their friends. Analogously, a resume for a job seeker echoes the same shortcomings a pitch deck has for a founder. Job-seeking sucks. Just like how fundraising sucks.
If only life were simple
Every person has a story. If not multiple stories. We are each a product of more than one storyline. A narrative in hindsight, when we willingly choose to ignore 99% of the other facts.
One of my favorite internet writers, Max Nussenbaum, recently wrote something quite profound. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live, but our lives aren’t actually stories. If they were, they’d be poorly written ones: just a bunch of stuff that happens, with no coherent structure or consistent thematic underlines.”
There’d be far fewer cases of self-doubt and depression, if life was as straightforward as a movie script. But it’s not. And neither should it be. It’s messy. But that’s great. Because we can connect the dots however we want.
There are many ways to tell a story. And the best stories are told by others.
And yes, the goal of any professional in today’s economy is to never have to submit another resume ever again. Frankly, after a certain threshold of rapport, you won’t need to.
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.
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