When we wish there was more progress to brag about

One of my friends spent the past five years building two software apps.

She invested significant amounts of time, money and energy on research and development. Traveled the country pitching investors and strategic partners. Her apps even got accepted into a few tech incubators to help scale their operation.

But ultimately, the projects couldn’t gain the traction she was hoping for. After a while, she just ran out of steam. And has since refocused her energies elsewhere.

Do you know anyone with a similar story?

It’s not uncommon in the digital economy. Gartner’s research shows that only about one in ten thousand consumer mobile apps will become financially successful. The process is very expensive, highly labor intensive, and the competition is essentially infinite.

Then again, all depends on how a person defines success.

Your app may not have acquired thousands of users or earned millions of dollars, but that doesn’t mean there was zero upside.

Every project that we shepherd into the world is valuable to our career growth, regardless of its outcome. We may wish there was more progress to brag about, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a real asset to be leveraged for future endeavors. There is almost always merit in including such work as part of our professional narrative.

The problem is, the resume industrial complex has trained us to view our career history as a binary. After all, we only have six seconds to catch the hiring manager’s eye when she’s shuffling through a stack of resumes.

And so, work we’ve done in the past is either relevant experience or not. We must only include those bullet points that are going to help us get the next job.

But the bigger question is:

Is any experience really irrelevant? Isn’t everything we’ve done a meaningful part of our growth story? And did we not gain valuable perspective and wisdom from all of our past endeavors?

Westerners, with our dualistic attitude that compartmentalizes everything into either good or bad, right or wrong, black or right, win or lose, don’t always comprehend these questions. We’re too quick to assign labels to experiences.

When the reality is, it’s all in how you frame it.

Matter of fact, why should our resumes only catalog work successes? Aren’t most employers looking for those candidates who have taken risks, experienced failure, learned from their mistakes and actually built some resilience in their careers?

My new business idea is to launch a curriculum vitae service that helps professionals create anti resumes of their history of failures, listing the wisdom they gleaned from their experiences. In the competitive world of hiring theater where most applicants are only focusing on their wins, job searchers could make waves in the candidate pool by leading with their honest experiences.

Resumeh would be my product name, and could help people not only own their past, but claim their future.

You may think I’m kidding, but my anti resume idea would crush it in the startup would. All the hyper woke companies that claim they’re seeking entrepreneurial minded people to join their growing teams, would be on board.

Because what’s more entrepreneurial than walking into a job interview with a track record of risky projects you’ve launched? Hiring managers won’t care about the results, because that’s not always under a person’s control.

Having worked at multiple companies myself, and applied for positions at thousands of them, these companies just want to see initiative, creativity and courage. Those traits can’t be taught. Everything else is a matter of degree.

What valuable experience are you not leveraging? What hidden project do you have that deserves a more prominent place in your professional portfolio?

Think of it like a parlay. Exploiting your unique collection of experiences into something of much greater value. This is how you give yourself a competitive edge and increase the overall odds of success.

It’s doubling down on your own value. Betting on yourself. And treating all of your experiences as valuable.

Look, you can’t leverage what you don’t acknowledge.

Maybe there’s more progress to brag about than you realize.

Would you rather hire somebody with a single success, or a proven track record of initiative, creativity and courage?