When I left school I was a farm cadet, learning how to be a dairy farmer. Getting from early mornings in the milking shed to the boardroom of some big media businesses isn’t what you’d call a straight line.
Take a look at my LinkedIn profile and you’d never guess where it started. Group Head of this, Executive Producer of that. Looks like I had some kind of plan, a map of deliberate steps on a road to a well-curated career.
Trust me, there was no real plan for most of it, pretty much like everyone’s path through their work life.
The path only looks obvious backwards
A CV or a LinkedIn profile is a story we tell at networking events or at a bbq about how we’ve successfully managed our careers. The thing is, it’s a story written backwards. You know how it turns out. You then try and make it make sense, or try to find a thread that explains it all. Then you tell yourself that was the plan all along.
There most likely wasn’t a thought-out plan. People don’t choose a sensible job because it’s part of a grand plan. They pick it because there’s a mortgage to be paid or school fees due. Author Ken Robinson used to make this point about life being organic, not linear. You don’t grow in a straight line any more than a tree does. You just look back and draw the line in afterwards, because the alternative, admitting it was mostly improvisation, feels less impressive on a profile.
The alternative, admitting it was mostly improvisation, feels less impressive on a profile.
The talent you left behind
Somewhere back on the path, before you got all buttoned up and sensible, there was something you were good at and loved doing. You probably left it because there were more “important” things you needed to be doing.
Ken Robinson used to tell a story about this. He was talking to Paul McCartney, who said his school music teacher never spotted any talent in him. George Harrison was in the same class, taught by the same teacher a few years later, and when Robinson asked, the answer was the same: no talent spotted there either. One teacher, half the Beatles sitting in front of him, and he missed it completely, twice. If a trained teacher can miss that, you can forgive yourself for missing it in you.
I got into media at a video duplication plant, having left the farm gig. A pretty inauspicious entry point. As I’ve mentioned in the past, my mates and I made music videos for our other mates’ bands for nothing. A few years later I’m in London working as a videotape editor cutting news, and on the side with friends I made a documentary called London Where’s the Beach about New Zealanders living there. Always unpaid, always wanting to make the thing and see what happened. All the while in my day job building a sensible career in broadcasting.
Reversioning isn’t about fixing your profile so it looks more honest. It’s about looking through your past for what you dropped too early, because that’s the clue to what’s next.
Reversioning isn’t about fixing your profile so it looks more honest.
Going back for it
That’s what happened to the creative theme in my own career. I’ve spent much of the last couple of decades building management skills: budgets, teams, transformation plans, all the serious work of broadcasting. I was good at it and most days I enjoyed it. But it was a growing number of steps away from the creative work.
Faark I Hope It’s Not Too Late is me reaching back into my past. A newsletter and a podcast are about as hands-on as it gets: I write it, I record it, I edit it, I publish it, same as the kid who made music videos and documentaries with his mates.
Try this
Go back through your CV or LinkedIn profile and look for the things you’ve left out. The things that didn’t fit the narrative of a perfectly planned out career path. Look for the things you were good at but dropped, right before you started doing something else for the money.
Revisit it. Is it something you could pick up again as part of your reversioned self?
Wrap it up
Your LinkedIn isn’t lying because it’s dishonest. It’s lying because it’s tidy, and nothing that actually happened to you was tidy.
Go find the untidy bit. It might be part of the reversioned you.
Stop planning the big leap. Make a small bet.
Most of the people I’ve interviewed on the podcast didn’t reinvent themselves in one dramatic move. They started a small thing on the side, and one day they looked up and it had become their actual job.
That’s a small bet, and I’ve built a kit to help you make one.
It’s five short lessons, a worksheet, and a coach you can talk to that asks the awkward questions and shrinks your idea until it’s embarrassingly small. Two weeks, one real first move, no quitting your job required.
It’s US$15. No hustle, no 5am alarms, and nobody telling you to bet the house.
[Get the Small Bet Kit] → https://generalistalan.eden.so/small-bet-kit
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