The Zero-Based Resume
“This is the way.” - Mandalorian
I was let go a day before probation ended.
There was no way I could see it coming. In fact, I actually had a new contract in hand that I simply had to sign off and probation would have been actually waived a few days early.
I am…or I should say was… a VP in a real estate private equity firm. I’ve had over 20 years in the commercial real estate industry and now… I am the VP of Absolutely Nothing. One might think that this is the end of my story, but in reality, this is my moment.
I am finally free. I have to be here and there is no other place I really could be. I have a beautiful wife and a 2.5 year old who keeps me up at night and they are everything that pushes me forward. Coffee drives me and fuels my purpose, which starts off with a diaper change and bottle feed.
Everyone has that Sliding Doors moment at least once in their life. For me, stepping through that door meant doing the right thing that I was actually hired to do. The result was the train taking me away from a certain station in life called permanent employment, which everyone knows has a high degree of impermanence.
Most people try to cheer themselves up by saying, "When one door closes, another one opens!" but let's be honest, sometimes you just have to knock a hole in the wall and dig yourself out. Throughout most of my career, more doors were slammed in my face than were opened, so I was always of the mindset of being a door-kicker and going full tactical at any opportunity that presented itself.
This is the way.
I have been a manager, a director, a VP of this and that, and now I am a VP/SVP/EVP of Absolutely Nothing. Heck, maybe that's what I should name my new company: Absolutely Nothing Inc. and when people ask me what I do for a living and where I work, I can legitimately say, "I work for/at Absolutely Nothing" or "I'm the CEO of Absolutely Nothing".
"What's your greatest accomplishment in life?"
" Absolutely Nothing."
"Where is the bulk of your intellectual property or income generating assets?"
"In Absolutely Nothing."
"What do you aspire to bequeath to your children when you die?"
"Absolutely Nothing."
"What do you spend the bulk of your time doing?"
"Working on Absolutely Nothing."
"What does working on Absolutely Nothing get you?"
"Freedom. Time. My life back. In fact, doing Absolutely Nothing is everything to me even though it may seem like it's just nothing to you."
"That's really brave of you to do Absolutely Nothing. Most people can't."
"You're right. I'm the only person in this country who can work at Absolutely Nothing for as long as I want."
"You sound really happy working at Absolutely Nothing."
"Yep."
Imagine being able to say all of that with a straight face and to one day pay taxes for starting and operating Absolutely Nothing. It's absolute genius.
Now why would I be happy working for Absolutely Nothing and starting my life over at Absolutely Nothing? When you reinvent yourself and this blog's name is Reinventing Dad, you start with a blank slate.
People say I’ve always had a flair for writing and teaching and I think it’s time I wrote my own script to get to my own finish line, rather than write a script that ultimately lined someone else’s bottom line if executed properly.
To completely reinvent myself is something I’ve always wanted to do as a father and a husband. Reaching out to people who are tired of the corporate rat race and want something different, weird or off the beaten track is something that calls to me.
Being a cog in a never-ending corporate machine, is simply... pain. You wake up every morning, drink your double-espresso, commute to work, turn on your computer, make another double espresso and spend your day in Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook. If you have any kind of office job, more than half your day is spent inside a Microsoft Office application.
After the fifth Teams video conference call of the day where you only spoke five sentences in five hours, you instant message your colleague and ask:
“What was the point of all that?”
The answer is always, "Absolutely Nothing."
Let that sink in for a moment. Every Monday through Friday, between 9am and 5pm, some evenings and weekends, you do "Absolutely Nothing" in exchange for a salary and bonus that can be pulled from you at a moment's notice. If you're lucky, you get some kind of severance package or notice period but the end result is the same. Someone else is pulling your strings.
How about the "meeting after the meeting"? This where the real agenda items are discussed by a smaller subset of people. Again, what was the point of the first meeting then? Then after Round #2, you have the 1-on-1, "let's take this offline" conversation held between the boss and each of his underlings.
Is it any wonder that the Great Resignation is well under way because the average worker is just tired of these antics?
So doing "Absolutely Nothing" gets you back to ground zero where you start from scratch. If you really thing about it, you never left ground zero because you weren't doing anything really useful to begin with.
If you recently lost your job or quit your job, then you are now faced with the existential question of "What next?" to which there are two possible outcomes:
Keep doing what you've been doing all along expecting a different set of results this time around, which is the definition of insanity OR
Do something else.
If you've made it this far, would I be wrong to say you've wanted Door #2 all along?
STARTING OVER
The first thing you must do is print out a copy of your resume in its existing form. Don't bother to update it to reflect your most recent job. Just print it out.
Now shred the paper.
It's a purely psychological move. You're not actually going to delete your word document because some of that content is still useful. Or, you just want to keep it for posterity. The point that I'm trying to make is to not be married to your past jobs and let that define who you are. If you allow your resume to define who you are, then by definition you can't change and do anything else differently because it's "written in stone".
Let’s be clear on something. This doesn’t mean you’re walking away from everything you’ve ever known or done permanently. It simply means disconnecting from it such that you’re not bound to it while retaining the option to continue down that path if you choose to. The issue is choice.
The second-hardest part of this exercise of starting with a near-blank sheet of paper is figuring out what you want to “import from your old life.” Perhaps it’s your education, or the odd certification you have. It could be that one job where you learned something you didn’t intend to learn.
The hardest part of this exercise is coming to terms that what you did in the past may not matter at all to what you want to do in the future.