We Grow Between the (Resume) Lines
I was not born this way; I grew into the person, the husband, the military officer, the leader, the Harvard Law student I am now. Years of work and training provided me the necessary repetitions to improve as I aged. Every so often, I have needed to apply to a job or a school that required the obligatory update to a simple 8.5x11 piece of paper highlighting my milestones along the way. These resumes or the more en vogue (certainly more Latin) curriculum vitae (CV) display the shiny pennies and brass rings of our personal history. They reveal to the reader all the cool places I’ve been, the machines I’ve flown, and the books I’ve probably read. Ultimately, these documents are mere snapshots that eliminate the element most critical to my growth, those that truly reveal who I have become: my failures.
And why would they? We all spend hours on our resumes trying to convince an HR department or admissions committee that the only mistake we’ve made is not applying sooner! That we’ve only learned through the sweet taste of victory, and excellence is our default state of being. Go us! However, the truth about my highlights is that each of them punctuates some failure or shortcoming that occurred somewhere between the lines. And in those gaps lie the real reason I am proud of my resume. My bullet points represent a willingness to continually learn and achieve through setbacks. All of them put together tell an even more important message. They acknowledge that at no stage in my life was I ever talented enough to completely avoid failure. At best, I have only ever been good enough to get somewhere; requiring that I needed to learn enough to stay, and eventually progress.
I was a good enough Air Force Academy cadet to be selected for pilot training, during which I needed to fail forward into being a real aviator, learning hard lessons but pushing onward to the next task all the same. I was a good enough pilot trainee to earn a slot as an F-22 Raptor pilot, after which I failed forward plenty on my way to becoming a Mission Commander and instructor pilot. Now, I’m sitting on the lawn in front of Langdell Hall—the Harvard Law School library—failing terrifically towards my law degree. I am here ready to find out what I don’t know and what I am not yet capable of.
All I am sure of is that today I am not good enough to meet the challenges my life will impose tomorrow. Neither are you. But the aim is to be resilient enough to get good enough as fast as possible. ‘Good enough’ can mean a lot though. Some days it can mean better skills. Others, it can mean toughness or grit. Most days, it means getting better at figuring out exactly what people or tasks need from you, and how to get that to them expeditiously. Whatever the definition, I assure you that you will lack a necessary ‘it’ when you need it. That is the tragedy and beauty of our fallible existence.
Prepare yourself for this inevitability. Prepare yourself by anticipating your shortfalls. Endeavor to fortify your weaknesses. But understand if your weaknesses are tested before you get them all battened down, then failure—or at least struggle—is imminent … and that’s okay.
Now for the ‘how’. It’s simple: introspection. Introspection the only path to success. You must have a consistent internal check-in in order to know exactly where your next challenge will come. Further, for you to flourish at introspection, you must have two things: peace and quiet. Turn off the radio, your phone, and Love Island (not judging, I love it too). Walk somewhere quiet, sit down, and think. Think about a failure or a close call with failure. As you think about that event, try to recall what you were attempting to do, whether you did it or not, and why that result occurred. Your ‘why’—maybe you were too shy, or the plan wasn’t equal to the task, etc.—might be rooted in a personal weakness.
Consider that weakness and begin reviewing how others strengthen similar weaknesses in themselves, then start experimenting with solutions. My weakness at the Air Force Academy was time management. To strengthen it, I surveyed my friends and tried their methods until I found a few that worked. I transferred that habit—crowdsourcing approaches to success—to pilot training, making me a better student and quicker learner. This technique allowed me to focus on other weaknesses more closely associated with flying. I love my friends for teaching me those lessons.
All in all, this cycle allowed me to grow into a man eager and willing to grow some more. That’s it. And that’s all I want to be able to do. To me, that’s all any of us can do. Grow. But if done right, there will come a day when you must jot your professional life down into a neat bulleted background paper, and the highlights will write themselves, hopefully earning you the right to fail gloriously onward and upward once again.