Cliff's Blog
A feel-good morning microblog of 10-second takeaways offering advice, insights, and inspiration to brighten your outlook and give you a lift.
The Gift of Confines
Resume-writing as a profession has taught me that you can distill anything down to 1-2 lines of text.
When you’re working within the confines of 1-2 pages, that’s all you have… to share a single achievement, to explain how a company was acquired and then divested, to convince someone that a sabbatical with a dying family member was pivotal in making a career transition into dog-training, to encapsulate the scrumptious fruit of uniqueness in one’s personality…
If you can’t factor a statement down to 1 or 2 sentences, it’s not that it’s too complicated or unique of a story to tell; it’s that you don’t yet have a full grasp of the point of the story. You haven’t captured the unicorn yet.
It’s worth your time to figure it out. After years of fitting big thoughts into pithy statements (single-spaced with .8-inch margins), it’s the short statement that will make the point and be remembered. Not the long story.
So, take the time and thought required for proper distillation. Work at condensing your story. It’s worth it, not just for the resume, but because the person for whom this painstakingly precision-crafted point will hit the hardest – the primary unwrapper of the gift, the one to get the first glimpse of the unicorn – is going to be you.
