Jeremy Ring was an early stage Yahoo executive and worked for Anil Singh until about 2001. He was an operations czar and made the sales trains run on time. He had a strong point of view that people need to improve weekly, monthly and especially yearly.
At a sales offsite in 2001, he posed the following question to the young Yahoo’s: Have you improved your personal resume in the last year? What is new on it?
This hit me hard at the time and since then I’ve made this a part of my life. Every year, usually in December, I make a list of things I would add to my personal resume. Sometimes it might be a body of expertise (this year I studying corporate social responsibility), it might be a capability (this year I learned Pro Tools software for audio editing) or it might be work experience. Whatever it is, if the list is short or non-existant, you are probably getting behind.
This has helped push me to think about building my personal resume over the year, starting in the first quarter. My new year’s resolutions are driven around what I might add to my personal resume that would help me add more value in my business and personal life.
Recommended: Build your resume (even if you are happy in your job or self-employed). Highlight all the things you have added in the last year (or two years if you like that better). Think about it for the next two weeks. I’ll add another post about how to make this part of your new year’s resolution work.
Tom Peters quote of a great general: “If you don’t like change, you are going to hate irrelevance.”
