The Human CV

I have a document about myself that no job ever asked for.

It doesn't list my degrees or my professional experience. It doesn't have a headshot where I look slightly more confident than I actually am. It's not optimized for ATS systems. Nobody coached me on how to phrase it.

It says things like: I need the big picture. If you give me a small box to work in without showing me the whole landscape, I'll suffocate.

It says: My kindness is often misread as weakness. It's not. I can be radically honest and deeply kind at the same time — and I won't apologize for either.

It lists growth areas — things I want to learn, things I'm not good at yet, things I'm working on. Not as weaknesses dressed up in interview-safe language. Just honestly.

I call it my Human CV. It's also one of the lab's experiments.

The absurdity of one page

Think about what a CV actually asks you to do. Take a whole human being — all their complexity, all their contradictions, all their growth and struggles and midnight realizations — and compress it into one polished page.

And then we're told not even that page is allowed to be honest. Don't mention gaps. Don't say you took time off. Don't show uncertainty — it might signal weakness.

We've built an entire system around showing people the shiniest version of ourselves. And then we wonder why teams don't work, why people burn out, why nobody knows how to actually collaborate with the person sitting next to them.

What a human CV could look like

I've called it different things over the years. Human User Guide — but that felt wrong, because I don't want to be used. There's also the concept of a Manual of Me, which other people have already explored and which I think is beautiful. But "manual" still carries a hint of instructions, of how to operate someone.

I'm landing on Human CV. Menschlicher Lebenslauf. Not a summary of what you've done, but a living description of who you are.

Imagine a document that says: Here's what I'm like to work with. Here's what lights me up. Here's what I find hard. Here's what I'm currently learning. Here's what's going on in my life right now that might affect how I show up.

That last part is key. Because a Human CV isn't static. It's alive. It updates. It might say: I'm caring for my grandmother right now, which means my energy is different this month. Or: We're in a drought and my garden is dying and it's affecting me more than I expected.

Real things. Human things. The stuff that shapes how we actually are — not the performance we've been trained to deliver.

How I found this practice

I need to give credit here.

My fiancée is the one who brought me to journaling. I don't know if she knows how much that changed. But she opened a door I hadn't known was there — the practice of listening to yourself, going inward, daily, without editing.

I do it unconventionally. Voice notes, mostly. Sometimes I speak into code and it becomes a website. Sometimes I talk for eleven minutes and a whole concept falls out. That's how this entry started — this morning's other one too.

And somewhere along the way, I started feeding those journals to AI. Not to get answers — but to get patterns. Hey, look at everything I've written. What kind of person do you see?

The results were stunning. Not because the AI knew me better than I did, but because it could hold more of me at once than I could hold myself. It could see across months of entries and say: here's what keeps showing up.

That's how the Human CV started. Not as an idea. As a byproduct of paying attention to my own patterns.

What if everyone had one?

Here's where it gets exciting for me.

What if this wasn't just my thing? What if teams shared Human CVs instead of — or alongside — their professional ones? Not as a requirement. As an invitation.

Here's what I'm actually like. Here's where I'm growing. Here's where I could use someone who's strong where I'm not.

Because the beautiful thing about growth areas is that they're connection points. Your weakness is someone else's strength. Your strength is someone else's wish. The CV that says I'm not great at this yet is actually saying: I need you.

We keep designing systems that hide our rough edges. But the rough edges are where we fit together.