Your Life Resumé

Let’s run through a quick exercise to take stock of your life: building your life resume. It’s like a professional resume, except with this one, you’re not submitting it for an employer to review. You’re going to judge and evaluate it yourself; you are the employer, as well as the employee. Here are six quick steps that will help you:

• Reveal to yourself what you value.

• Reflect on all you’ve contributed to the world.

• Recognize what you are yet to accomplish.

Step 1: Write a Summary

Write a short biography of your life: who you are, your interests, and what you seek.

A professional summary often offers something vague, for example: searching for high-growth opportunities at the intersection of technology and medicine. If you can get specific - seeking to lead a sales team - definitely do so.

You can write this in two easy sentences. Here are some examples:

• Son, brother, friend, and lover of life, seeking meaning in my relationships and purpose in my goals. The last of my kind, tenaciously achieving and creating.

• Student of art, resilient optimist, zealous storyteller, and an empathic, caring soul. Seeking a long life rich with daring adventure.

• Passionate lover, fighter of the good fight, yearning to create a life intensely-lived. Confronting challenges with grit and vigor; hoping to inspire others.

If your summary has to be vague, so be it - just start somewhere, and make sure you’re aiming upward with what you seek.

Step 2: Write a Mission Statement

What is my life’s purpose? A mission statement is your life’s main task at the moment: what you are currently doing and why.

This should be specific and actionable. My current purpose is to make $100,000 so I can buy a house and a ring. Your mission statement can easily be determined by asking yourself the following questions:

1. What do I do?

2. Who do I do it for?

Here are some examples. My mission is to:

• Spend quality time with my friends and those I care about before I move.

• Gain 15 pounds this off-season so I can be a better player and teammate.

• Create memories with my elderly mother before she passes.

• Save $10,000 dollars so I can quit my job and pursue beach photography, to encourage viewers to chill the hell out and relax.

• Study every day to pass the LSAT and serve others as a public defender.

Your mission will change as your circumstances change, in the same way the meaning of your life isn’t always the same across time. Right now, my mission is to write as much as I can to prove to myself that I am a writer. In college, it was to create a myriad of memories and friendships before I graduated. Months ago, it was to make enough money to allow myself to pursue writing all summer. In a year, it could be anything. The point is to state the purpose you’re following right now, and to ensure there is some purposeful action in your life right now.

Step 3: Develop a Vision Statement

How do I imagine my future? A vision statement answers who you want to become. It is forward-looking, motivational, and often lofty and abstract.

When I was a college student imagining my future, my mind always painted an idealistic picture of me relentlessly working on the highest floor of a tall building wearing nice clothes. I never had a specific job attached to this ideal, but I assumed I would be working on something important and meaningful, positively impacting the world at scale.

You may share similar imaginative portraits in your head: ringing the NYSE Bell, endless margaritas on the beach, riding off into the sunset on horseback, or a life of ease listening to morning birds in the countryside. You shouldn’t get hung up on an ideal - I ended up fulfilling that tall building dream this past year and not being the biggest fan. But, these flashes of long-term desire are important: they reveal to you what you yearn for, and compel you to ask yourself why.

Who do you want to be and why? Your vision statement should be the reply to this question. Here are some examples, I aim to:

• Be the world’s most trusted friend and confidant to the people I care about.

• Grow into a strong father and role model for my children, because I care about the future of my family and community.

• Develop into a passionate and empowering leader that inspires positive change in others.

• Be responsible and dependable, by taking extreme ownership of all of my actions, from my thoughts, to my speech, to my deeds.

• Reach expert-level competency in a specific field of medicine to heal as much disease as humanly possible.

Here is the one I wrote in August of 2021: “Find the heaviest burden I can bear, and bear it. Improve the world, increasingly as I improve. Make my family on Earth and in heaven proud.”

What does that mean, finding the heaviest burden I can bear? It can manifest as one million different tasks and responsibilities, and that’s the point. I don’t know when and how life will call me, but I want to bear the burden when it does.

Your vision statement should include your aspirations, provide a long-term direction, and state (as vaguely as necessary) who you want to be.

Step 4: Determine Your Top Three

If you were to remove every accomplishment from your life, except for three, which would you choose, and why?

This may not directly parallel to a professional resume, but in a job interview I was asked: "if you were to remove everything from your resume except one line, which would you keep?” I stole that idea and applied it here.

Your Top Three are the three most important accomplishments of this career called life - they may even define you and contribute to your identity. Ranking your Top Three reveals to you what you value the most. I’m gonna use my boy Anthony Abruzzo as an example. His Top Three includes:

1. Saving an unknown life by donating stem cells, which required self-injecting blood thinner every day for weeks.

2. Winning a bronze medal in 2018 as a member of the USA Ball Hockey Men’s National Team.

3. Being trusted as a groomsman in six weddings in the past year.

Why are these his Top Three? I’m not sure what he’d tell you, but to me it indicates:

1. His willingness to sacrifice for others, caring about people he’ll never even meet.

2. His drive and determination to succeed, honor his teammates and positively represent our country.

3. He’s a damn good friend.

These are accomplishments that, more than anything, reveal your character and what you value as important. Determining these and reflecting on why you chose them should encourage you to take similar actions and accomplish more of what you find important and meaningful.

Step 5: Add Everything Else

You did most of the heavy-lifting already. Writing a short autobiography, determining your current purpose, envisioning your ideal future and determining your top three most important accomplishments should allow you to effectively reflect on the good you’ve put into the world. This next step is just to boost your own ego, which - sometimes - is an important and necessary exercise. 

The title of this step is self-explanatory, just rattle off everything else that you - yes, you - are proud to have done. The way that a professional resume has all relevant work experience, you should list all relevant life experience:

• Read 100 books

• Graduated college

• Adopted a dog

• Gave my grandfather’s eulogy

• Was the best man at my best friend’s wedding

• Caught a whale shark

• Wrestled an alligator

• Got knocked out in an amateur boxing match

• Bombed my first stand-up set

• Made the crowd die laughing the second attempt

No one else really cares about your grandfather’s eulogy? Other people don’t see getting knocked out as a positive? It doesn’t matter, just like the Top Three, these are the accomplishments that make you proud to be you. 

Aaron Judge watches his own highlights before every game, to remind himself what he’s accomplished, what he’s capable of accomplishing, and what he should expect from himself. Everyone knows that Aaron Judge hits home runs, but he still has to zoom out and remind himself: I’m Aaron Judge, I hit home runs. This is what I do. It’s important to refresh your memory and reflect on what you’re proud of, and to not give a damn about anyone else’s opinion.

Step 6: Evaluate What’s Missing

Am I impressed with this? You should be, it’s your life - your mission, vision, and Top Three - all of which are decided by you.

However, if you’re unimpressed with your resume, it may be time to add to it. What’s cool about the life resume, as opposed to a professional resume, is it’s mostly permissionless. In many cases, someone has to give you a job. No one has to give you a marathon to run or an opportunity to learn to dance. You simply choose it for yourself. If there’s something missing, consider adding a What I’m Yet To Do section.

It’s natural for us to focus on the day-to-day, urgent and immediate tasks so intensely that we fail to reflect on our mission, vision, and accomplishments. We’re not wondering if we’re living right, we’re just livin’, and doing it the best we know how.

Hopefully this exercise provides you with clearer direction, confidence in what you’ve achieved, and helps you recognize that the most important accomplishments don’t always show up on the scorecard or the stat sheet.

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