2026-07-09 · 4 min
The overlap a résumé flattens
A CV turns a life into a sequence. The interesting part was happening between the lines.
A résumé is a kindness to a tired reader. It puts your name, a sequence of roles, and a list of tools in an order that can be skimmed on a phone. It is also a flattening instrument. The thing you were making at the kitchen table, which taught you the skill the job eventually paid for, becomes a bullet or disappears. The overlap, which is where your actual taste lives, has no line of its own.
Ibarra describes identity as something you try on in public, in experiments, before you update the story you tell at dinner. The résumé is the last document to change, and it should be. It is a claim about what you can be trusted to do next Monday. The map is a different document. It is allowed to show the spoon you are carving and the closed laptop and the fact that both belong to one person.
Rose and Ogas, in Dark Horse, went looking for people whose paths ignored the standard timeline and found a pattern they called fulfillment: a close fit between the work and a person’s particular motives, close enough that the person could stand the difficult parts. Their dark horses were specific. Specificity is the whole trick. “I like people and ideas” helps no one. “I rewrite technical manuals so a night-shift nurse can find the warning” is a direction.
Side projects get romanticized into a second unpaid job. A better size is six weeks, one audience, one artifact. A pamphlet, a class, a repaired gate with a short account of how you decided. The artifact is what a résumé cannot hold and a conversation can. You put it on the table. You watch whether the other person leans in. That lean is data.
If you already have an Interest Map, read the labeled lines as résumé repairs. Each label is a phrase you can use when a form gives you three hundred characters and a human later gives you four minutes. The sequence of jobs can stay chronological. The sentence you lead with can be the through-line. Chronology says what happened. The line says what it was about.
Sources
- Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity. Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
- Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas, Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment. HarperOne, 2018.