Finding Your Purpose in Your Résumé
As someone who likes to seek new inspirations and ideas, I love to watch inspirational and technical talks. The purpose of watching such video is to keep improving myself both in hard, technical skills and in soft skills.
One of the more interesting talk I found is the TED Talk titled “Should you live for your résumé ... or your eulogy?” by David Brooks, right here:
In summary, David Brooks talk about how there’s two parts of us:
- one which strives to chase the “worldly” desire like success, money, etc, and
- another part of us which is the “humble” part who wants love, redemption, etc.
In David’s talk, he said we know that our first self will be remembered by our résumé, and the second part will be remembered by our eulogy. Most of us would agree that the second one is more important, but it is not necessarily the one we think about the most. Our society also values the first personality much more than the second. A lot of us then fell into the trap of working too much to satisfy our worldly desire while forgetting that we also have a great eulogy to build. A lot of us lost our way and got trapped in mediocrity where we found out our desired self is not as great as our actual self. This is how most of us lost our way; our purpose.
Personally, I agree with David’s talk and ideas, but one that’s bugging me is this: why can’t we, as a society and as a person, tries to satisfy both part of ourselves. Why can’t we, as a society, enables its people to build a great résumé that will also make their eulogy shines? Why are we forcing ourselves to choose one or another to the point where a lot of us live a life with no purpose?
I know a lot of people will say that it can’t be fixed, but I ask “why not?”
I believe what what’s written in both our résumé and our eulogy are only as good as how much effort we put into both. A lot of people can only have one polished because most of us spent a third of our day on work. And all that time we spent on working and achieving result ended up getting in our way to build an awesome eulogy. Or vice versa. Those of us who spends too much on building a beautiful eulogy failed to climb up to the top of Mt. Success and left the world with no great achievement.
My idea of having both great résumé and eulogy is simple: polish our eulogy while we’re working too. Be a nice guy to your co-worker. Be a helpful and cooperative guy. See your work as a place to build both your résumé and your eulogy. Instead of throwing away your life chasing only worldly desire, try your best to also left a mark on the people that you work with. Ideally, you will also want to find a workplace which facilitates it all. A place with a culture in which you and your co-workers are pushed to work-together instead of kill-each-other on your way to success. A place where the employers are conditioned to work as comrades - Nakama if you will. That is the place where you want to work - a place that guides you to find your purpose and continue to grow with you.