651- Why Your CV Does Not Tell the Full Story
Jens Heitland reflects on the career pattern of collecting positions and titles without asking whether they connect to anything meaningful.
Inspired by a Seth Godin observation, this Daily Hint explores how professional environments quietly reinforce accumulation over alignment, and what changes when that pattern becomes visible.
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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
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Transcript :
That was in 2019. I was on this train and was listening to a podcast from Seth Godin, and he was explaining that in the end, a lot of people in school and in business They're kind of racing all the time and he was saying they're collecting dots, but they're not connecting the dots. And I was standing there as like, "Yeah, that's literally me too." So that conversation from the podcast really kind of changed the way I think and the way I approach things. And then I used that to take decisions going forward to not just collect the dots, like collecting different positions and being on the career ladder. It was, for me, it's like, where do I really want to be, and what do I really want to do? And how do everything that I have done until that point connects to each other so that I can be the best version of myself, rather than how can I have 20 different employees reporting to me because that's seen to be important, and whatever the external factors are. So this is one of the things that truly changed me, and it was, like, a five-minute podcast.