Life Is Your Experience

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. 

Abraham Lincoln

While this blog was intended to be a daily glass of lemonade, I have found lately that I've had the time to write here closer to weekly, at best. This all boils down to a very simple fact-- I'm super busy. Who isn't, you ask? We all work hard, manage our lives and households through cooking, cleaning and organizing, sleep, and try to maybe relax for a minute or two. Where in there is the time for extracurricular stuff like pondering the meaning of life?

This got me thinking to my recent experiences in searching for a new job. Oh, job hunting is such an amazing experience. Nowhere in life do we have such an excuse to talk about ourselves with reckless abandon. Nowhere do we smile more or laugh at more bad jokes. We enter the interview room with hope and excitement, answer their questions the best we can, and leave, wondering if we answered the questions they way we should have. Job hunting is a roller coaster full of excited ups as we find the job that we just have to have and downs as we receive that letter telling us it has already been filled. Cramped fingers from typing up individualized cover letters, tired necks from holding the phone to our shoulders as we make follow up calls, achy feet as we wear those ludicrous high heels we never wear otherwise.

As I pieced my resume together for this journey, I thought about something my father once said. You're never as perfect as you are on your resume. I'm sure he did not make this quote up, but he reworded it well enough that I can't seem to find the original source. The closest I can find is Bo Bennett's definition of a resume: "Resume: a written exaggeration of only the good things a person has done in the past, as well as a wish list of the qualities a person would like to have."

Yes, the resume is where we put all of our wonderful achievements, hoping that future employers will look at this one or two page summary of our life and say, "I must hire this person. Now. And offer her a very large salary, to boot." Mason Cooley once said, "If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements." Yes, we put it all on, and then twist it, tweak it, and maneuver it so that it looks like we're amazing, perhaps even more amazing that we really are.

But we don't really have the chance to put everything on our resumes, do we? Employers don't really care about the experiences that we get from places other than school or work. Herein lies my big gripe. What about those hard working folk who stay home with their kids for years on end, and then enter the grueling job search with "nothing" on their resumes? What about the lessons we learned from the bullies on the playground (or, sadly, the bullies from our adult life)? What about our age, gender, religious background, sexual orientation, and other things that make us who we are and help to create our work ethic, but are too taboo to mention? What about the broken hearts, the things said that we wish we could take back, the feet placed in our mouths and crows eaten, all which makes us stronger, smarter, and more able to correctly make good decisions in the future?

My son, at his first skateboarding lesson, AFTER he fell, cried, and got back on again...

These are the things that make us who we are, and who we are is as important, if not more, than what we have done in life. Who we are is based not only on achievements but also on failures, the times that we fell off the proverbial horse and got back on. Our traditional resume would say, "Successfully rode horse," but our life's resume would add, "after hours of trying and failing and a significantly bruised gluteus maximus." It is how we handle our failures that make us truly successful; for lack of a more appropriate pun, it is how we make lemonade out of those lemons. Be proud of your failures in life, because it is the through those failures that you have reached your greatest achievements!