How to Write A Resume

Before I can get in to what I think makes a great resume I have to clarify what a resume’s purpose is. There are two main reasons for a resume. The first is to give your interviewer some material for questions they can use to learn you and in order to make an educated guess whether you’re a good fit or not. The second purpose is to garner interest from whomever has to read it (they will appreciate you making your resume good, very very much). Beyond that nobody gives a shit about it. To recap: give your potential employer some things to ask good questions around, make it at least a little interesting to read so you get that first phone call. Now on to how to write one.

Scream Out Your Achievements

If you only get one thing right on your resume is should be including your achievements. Achievements fill both the purposes mentioned above. They are interesting and they give a great jumping off point for your interviewer. What people often confuse for achievements are just a list of things you did. What you’ve done is peripheral to what you achieved and just as importantly how you achieved it. If you have a pulse, then we can all assume that you were “an active member of the team”. Saying you “refactored the codez” or “analyzed logs for business metrics” mean almost nothing. At the highest level what you’ve said is “I did stuff”.

Were all the things listed on your resume something that could’ve been listed in the original job description? Were they things that you were asked to do as part of your job or did you take initiative to go out and do them? There is a big difference between the two, and you should make it easy to distinguish things you initiated yourself versus what was asked of you on the team (as much stuff as possible that you put on your resume should something you did without being asked) In essence, your application has to show you have three things:

What They’re Really Looking For

1. Good judgement
2. Initiative
3. Potential, and at least some relevant experience

However companies choose to dress these up at their core its these three that are important. The question you need to be asking yourself is how are you going to succinctly demonstrate those three points on just a few pieces of paper. If reading your resume it sounds like a job description you need to fix it if you don’t want to get lost in the crowd. I have included a brief sample of how you can lay out your own application.

2010-Present Web Developer at MyCompany.co
Responsibilities
System architect for the main Node.js application.
Mentoring and onboarding new employees
Maintaining and extending documentation

Achievements
Designed and created a metrics portal which directly led to a new revenue stream
Hired and mentored six new employees within 9 months
Successfully switched my team to Kanban and Continuous Deployment, increasing velocity by 30% by eliminating operational overhead
Introduced Kaizen Day (improvement day) which resulted in 15 legacy bugs being fixed within 8 hours. Kaizens are now a quarterly activity.

If you can make your achievements section as close in size to your responsibilities as possible. It is a given that you’ll be required to have the skill and/or potential to do the job, so the responsibilities are there to make sure they understand you have some relevant experience. What will get you that phone call is the interesting stuff you said you did beyond your regular responsibilities.

What is Not On The Resume

What you don’t see on the application is anything about personal interests and hobbies. Nobody wants to know if you’re interested in photography and being outdoors. Your colleagues will get to know you after you get hired, not before. Keep everything on your resume relevant to the position, it demonstrates good judgement and that’s a Good Thing.

The last thing I suggest that is up for debate is the “objective” section. I’ve seen a lot of advice saying you should have one, but I have a hard time seeing why. The objective is to get the fucking job, to put food on your family and to, hopefully, work on something interesting. If you’re being interviewed it is very easy for them to ask you why you applied at that particular company, and at that time it is good to have a nice reason for wanting to make those cat picture widgets. But at the time of reading the resume it doesn’t add anything at all, and if your cover letter is good and specific to the advertised position then it speaks much louder than a bullshit token sentence about what you hope to get.

I hope you find the advice helpful, but feel free to disregard anything I’ve said. Obviously you may not always have a chance to customize the application as much as you’d like, there may be required sections, etc. Use at your own discretion. Next time I’ll be writing about how to do well during the interview after you’ve amazed them with your application.

Do You Yearn?

Do you ever yearn?

A common reason products fail is because they don’t evoke a sense of yearning (or in George’s case craving) to want to use it. It is neither good nor bad but “meh”, and nobody has the time or energy to start using it, inertia is working against you and you have no traction. I’ve merely stated the conventional wisdom of the day, nothing new here. But how to get people to yearn for your product? Ask anyone who’s managed to get traction and they’ll tell you their own special way that has worked for them, which on the high level will share a common framework with how countless others do it. The problem is that the devil is in the details and nobody else’s small details will work for you, once you’ve got the framework you’ve got to fill in the blanks yourself and there is not much you’re going to read to get you from that point to your first customers. And in that tradition I am going to drop a quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the Little Prince, on how he best motivates people to convert.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

I love this. Educate your potential users about all the wonders they’re missing. Not simply about the time they’ll save or the money in the bank, but find what they can learn to yearn for in your product or service. It just so happens that whatever they’re looking for is best reached by using what you have to offer, just as a ship is best when exploring the vast and endless sea. What are you teaching your customers to yearn about? What do you yearn for?

The other part to yearning and inflaming your customer’s passions, what are they afraid to lose that you’re going to make sure they don’t? i.e. Make sure there is some loss aversion in your value proposition. Turns out that people hate losing something they already have twice as much as gaining something new. Your new thing has to be Sliced Bread 2.0 or it could simply let them hold on to what they’ve already got. Making things easier is not a good goal. Nobody ever gets to retire because a task becomes easier, instead your user will now expected to do more in the same amount of time, so what else do they get out of it?

 

 

Bring Back the Gill-People

When I was 12 I was a full-time competitive swimmer and became obsessed with being underwater. I also was very much in to science, particularly genetics, and I envisioned putting gills on people (this was pre-Waterworld in case you’re wondering). It was an ambitious idea, probably one of the most ambitious I’ve ever thought of. Since then I’ve succumbed to the “rational though” that becomes the normal mode of thinking in our adult lives. Now my big dreams consist of things that are completely unambitious and boring: learning a new language, starting my own business, going on vacation, getting tubed on a wave in Tahiti, blah blah blah.

It is a sad thing to think that I am almost incapable of big ideas, or maybe more correctly, that I feel they are not worth the effort. Nothing I aspire to is remarkable and when I think about that it is a bit shocking. Someday soon I’m going to be dead, I often wonder what it is I should be looking in to, learning or loving. Would I be happier living on the edge of ridiculous rather than the middling choices I’ve made? If I were Jon Snow Ygrite would tell me that I know nothing, and she’d be right. So I leave the question to you, what do you know? Where do you draw the line at ridiculous, and how close are you to it?

Daily Meditation – Just #*?! Do It Already

I mentioned earlier that over 100 days ago I used the principle of loss-aversion to set a challenge to myself to do at least 20 minutes of sitting meditation everyday for a month. After committing to something that would punish me for not doing it rather than the usual trying to think about the rewards, the challenge was easily met and so successful that I have continued well past my original plan. Here I want to talk briefly about the benefits I’ve felt since I started, rather than the technique I used to get here.

The amount of stress I feel day to day is incredibly lowered from before. For example, I used to feel kind of agitated from time to time feeling that I should be doing something productive e.g. learning Japanese, exercising, working on a coding project, etc, while at the same time wanting to do absolutely nothing because the rest of my time is so busy. Now I still feel it from time to time but it has lost its edge and it rarely comes as often, or as intensely.

I find it much more difficult to get mad. As a cyclist I often see idiocy on the road (plenty of it from other cyclists, too). A few times drivers have deliberately provoked me for no reason and I have lost my temper to the point I that was spitting at their car. It was almost a frightening amount of rage. Now I still feel a bit of something when someone drives past me and they swear in my ear, but I just can’t seem to really get mad about it. It’s actually a very strange experience almost like I knew I should’ve been mad but wasn’t really capable of holding on to it.

My willpower is incredible. I am a notorious procrastinator, and doing chores and paperwork, etc, often caused me a lot of anxiety as I tried to avoid thinking about it. I am still a procrastinator, I’m not sure I’ll ever totally get over that, but I have a much much easier time getting myself to do things that were before a lot more unpleasant. As a result I also have a tendency to be more ok doing only one thing at a time; instead of putting on the tv in the background when I clean or cook, I can easily just concentrate on what I’m doing rather than working in a new distraction. Doing the dishes before bed is that much easier, etc.

Now that I’m on a role I can’t seem to stop. And I’m afraid if I just take a day off for no reason that I’ll never get back to it and I’ll stop as I have so many times before. By doing it everyday I have actually made everything easier because there is no decision or discussion in my head about whether I feel like doing it or not. That’s when it comes down to your will power, when you have to decide if you’re going to be good or not. This is especially true after a long day and you’re dog tired. Trying to overcome decision fatigue is very difficult and should be avoided at all costs. So remove the decision and simply commit to make your good habits daily, you’ll be glad you did.

The Power of Loss Aversion

Three months ago my brother told me about an experiment he read about in Nudge, a book on behavioral economics. The gist of it was that the threat of losing even a small thing to a cause you don’t benefit from, is a lot more motivating than the possibility of gaining something huge. The idea intrigued me a lot and I spent the next two days thinking about the implications of knowing this. I hit upon the idea that I should use this as motivation to do something I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to. I decided on doing at least 20 minutes of sitting meditation everyday for a month.

But what should I use as punishment if I didn’t hit my target? Doing nothing by half measure I figured that bigger was better and came up with the idea of giving $100 to my friend for every day that I missed would make this commitment extremely serious and practically guarantee I’ll make it (which was the point).

When I told my brother my plan he exclaimed that I missed the point of the study and that the money I put on the line was way too much. I shrugged and said that I was going to do it my way and I figured that this was going to work. I was right. I made the 30 days easily and continued on, only missing one day while on a trip of the last 100. The effects of doing daily meditation have been amazing, but I am going to leave that for another post.

Even though a $100 per missed session is pretty harsh I knew that this was achievable under threat but infinitely more difficult out of sheer “will power”. Of course if a natural or family disaster had hit I would’ve excused myself for not meeting my commitments for the day, this was not about seeing how strict I could be, but to make sure I avoided the temptation of simply wimping out. So unforeseen circumstance notwithstanding, I was forced to complete my daily goal.

My point is this: the benefits of daily meditation, of which there are many, were not enough to get me to be as consistent as I’ve always hoped. However I hate the idea of giving away already earned money so much that I could use it as leverage in order to achieve this difficult goal. I already mentioned that I have continued my mediation practice even though I don’t have to, and now I am starting to look around at what else I can get myself to do that I have been putting off. And I came up with empire building, aka stacking the bricks, for 20 minutes everyday.

I am always pushing myself to do new things and I am going to use loss aversion to my advantage to create new good habits. One of my goals has always been to learn a second language, so I am going to set some small punishments if I do not make my milestones for studying German.

FREE BOOK NOTICE

PS Nudge is an awesome book, and since it’s Christmas and all, I will send the first person who wants to do a similar Loss Aversion powered 30-day challenge, and even better if you’re willing to share a few sentences on the outcome via dopezart or your own blog