651 - Why Your CV Does Not Tell the Full Story

Why Your CV Does Not Tell the Full Story

In 2019, I was on a train listening to a Seth Godin podcast. He was describing something that many people in organizations tend to do without realizing it. They spend their careers collecting dots. Positions, titles, responsibilities, lines on a CV. The question of whether those dots are connected to anything meaningful is rarely asked.

When I heard it, I recognized the pattern in myself.

There is a system that most professional environments quietly reinforce. Progress looks like accumulation. More direct reports, more scope, more visibility. The external signals of advancement are visible to everyone around you, making them easy to follow. Over time, the path becomes the goal. The collecting becomes the primary orientation. And the deeper question, where do I actually want to be and what do I actually want to do, gets deferred indefinitely.

That deferral does not announce itself. Careers continue. People perform well. But there is no through line connecting what someone has done to what they are capable of becoming. The dots are present. They have simply not been joined.

What shifted for me after that train ride was not a plan. It was a question I started carrying differently. Rather than asking what position came next, I started asking how everything I had done up to that point connected to one another. As a practical orientation, that is a different kind of work. Accumulation and alignment are not the same thing, and the professional environment rarely helps you see the difference.

That shift did not come from a long engagement or a formal process. It came from five minutes of listening on a train. The conditions for that kind of clarity are often already available. What they require is a moment of recognition.

Highlights:

00:00 Train Ride Epiphany

00:03 Collecting vs Connecting

00:34 Rethinking Career Goals

01:09 A Five Minute Shift

Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links