Writing Your Life Résumé

I've spoken before about how HR departments cracked the meaning of life and success by optimizing professional growth within their organizations. In there, I linked to the life résumé template for folks to create their own. Today, I'd like to talk a little bit about when, how, and why you should create your own "life résumé" to plan your own success.

Let's start with why: why should you create a life résumé? Three use cases:

• You want to plan out everything that you need to do to be successful in your life
• You want to build belief in what you have done that makes you capable of future success
• You want to identify new directions and where to go from here

In the first case, you are working back from your desired outcome—in résumé parlance, an Objective—to the experiences you need to have to work up from it. Most résumés are in reverse-chronological order, so it's a nice way to work back from where you want to be in 5, 10, 20, or 30 years and trace back experiences to where you are now. However, you can work from where you are up to the outcome—either way works.

In the second case, you take your ultimate goal or objective and then document the experiences that you have already had that make you qualified and capable of achieving your goal (similar to what a real résumé aims to do). This allows you to feel like you are progressing toward your goals and will shake off feelings of frustration and depression if you are not feeling like you're making progress.

The third use case helps you focus on what's next from where you are in the mid-point. It will likely build off of the second use case, as once you work from where you started to where you are, you then want to figure out what to do next—i.e., what is the most logical next step.

The "how" to do this was hinted at in the above explanation of why, but the approach is near-identical every time:

• Objective: A résumé often has a stated objective as to what the goal of your career is or your objective for the position you're applying for. Here, you're putting in your desired outcome(s) in life.
  
• Experience: This is where you would put experiences you've had (if you've started toward the goal or have made related progress to date) and then experiences you'll need to have had to succeed (since this is an exercise to help you visualize your path and not an actual résumé, you can insert future experiences).
• Education: You don't need to separate this like most real-world résumés do, but you're welcome to document qualifications here like degrees, licenses, etc.
• Skills: Here, you'll want to document whatever skills you'll need to have to be effective.
• Accomplishments: Best for the belief-building use case, you can list things you have done that show that you are capable of succeeding going forward, but you can also use this to list future milestones you'll want to have on your road to success if mapping out your future path.

When you define your goals, experiences, skills, and milestones, you'll have a nice roadmap of how to get from where you are/were to where you want to be in your life.

Finally, the "when" you should do this:

• If you are lost and know that you won't proceed until you have it all figured out, this is a great way to come up with a definite aim and a concrete roadmap.
• If you believe that something is impossible and so you know that you'll give up before you even try, this will change your beliefs to be more supportive and constructive.
• If you have made progress but either experienced a setback or ran into trouble, this will help you to reassess how far you've come and where you need to go from here to get around these problems.

If you decide to complete this "life résumé" exercise, then hopefully this guide will help you as you try to make the most of it. It'll help you understand what you can get out of the exercise and how each element helps you to figure out your life direction. If you were wondering when it might come in handy, the details on the use cases might provide guidance as to times in your life where this exercise could be useful.

Remember that the goal in your life is always to continue growing and improving as a person toward better outcomes for yourself and your loved ones. All this exercise does is reinforce what you already know that you have to do, but it is useful when you are uncertain of the direction of that growth and improvement. It can be easy to lose your way when setbacks, problems, and adversity come into your life. This will hopefully help you to respond and continue forward toward success, happiness, and fulfillment.