The cursor blinks. It’s been blinking for at least 15 minutes, a tiny, relentless black rectangle mocking me from the void of the white page. My coffee is cold. My shoulders are clenched somewhere up around my ears. All I have to do is summarize the last 45 months of my professional life-a sprawling, chaotic project with a budget of $855,575, a team of 5 brilliant but difficult people, and a stakeholder who changed his mind more often than the weather-into a single, elegant bullet point. It needs to start with an action verb. Of course it does.

“Spearheaded”? Too grandiose. “Managed”? So beige it’s invisible. “Executed”? Makes it sound like I took it out behind the chemical sheds. The blinking continues, a digital heartbeat for a document that has no life in it. And it hits me, not as an intellectual concept, but as a physical wave of exhaustion: this whole exercise is a lie. The resume is a fossil. We’ve polished it, optimized it, and placed it under museum glass, but it’s the skeletal remains of a creature that no longer walks the earth.

Leo G. and the Ghost of a Skill

I know a man named Leo G. He’s a precision welder. If you ask him what he does, he’ll just shrug and say, “I join pieces of metal.” This is technically true, in the same way that Michelangelo saying he “painted a ceiling” is technically true. Leo works with alloys that cost more per ounce than gold. He can lay a bead of TIG weld so clean, so perfect, it looks like it was grown there. His tolerances are measured in microns. He once spent 235 hours on a single component for a deep-sea submersible, a piece of equipment that would have to withstand pressures that could turn a human body into pulp. His work is a fusion of physics, metallurgy, and pure artistry. How does Leo put that on a resume?

“Utilized Tungsten Inert Gas (TIG) welding techniques on exotic alloys for mission-critical applications.”

“

It’s a ghost. A faint outline of the real thing. It says nothing of the way he has to feel the machine, to listen to the specific hiss of the arc, to know by the smell of the ionized air if the weld is pure. It communicates none of the stakes. It’s a description of the ingredients, not the meal.

The Lie We’ve Built an Industry Around

I’m going to tell you something I probably shouldn’t. About five years ago, I was hiring for a key role. I received 175 applications. One resume was perfect. It was a masterpiece of the form. Every bullet point was a miniature story of triumph. The metrics were staggering, the verbs were powerful, the formatting was cleaner than an operating room. I hired the resume. The problem was, the person attached to it wasn’t nearly as good as the paper they were printed on. They were a professional resume-writer who had simply applied their skills to their own career. They could describe work beautifully, but they struggled to actually do it. It was a costly, painful lesson that took 15 months to fully unwind.

We have built an entire industry around this lie. Resume coaches, keyword optimization software, professional writing services. We are all complicit in perpetuating a system that selects for the best performers of corporate Kabuki theater, not necessarily the best performers of the actual job. And I’ll admit, despite this rant, I spent two hours last week tweaking my own LinkedIn profile. I played the game. Because for now, the gatekeepers still demand the password, even if the password has become meaningless.

It’s funny how we got here. There was a time when your skill was your resume. Think of medieval guilds. To become a master blacksmith, you didn’t write a list of previous forging experiences. You created a “masterpiece”-an incredibly complex and beautiful object, like a lock or a suit of armor, that proved your skill beyond any doubt. It was the work itself. Your reputation was your reference. We’ve lost that. We’ve replaced the masterpiece with the bullet point.

Show, don’t tell.

That’s the oldest rule in storytelling, and it’s the only way out of this mess. The problem isn’t that we need to communicate our skills; it’s that we’re using a dead medium to do it. The solution is to stop translating and start demonstrating. Stop describing the weld; show the weld.

Stop talking about your code; show your GitHub repository. Stop claiming you have a brilliant marketing mind; show a case study of a campaign you ran, complete with the messy results and what you learned.

This is particularly true in fields where performance is directly measurable. Take finance. A resume can say, “Successfully managed a diversified portfolio, leveraging arbitrage opportunities to generate above-market returns.” It sounds impressive. It’s also completely unverifiable fluff. What does that actually mean? What if, instead, you could present a verified track record of your decisions? A log of your trades, your wins, your losses, and your rationale. It’s not a claim of skill; it’s the evidence of it. For anyone starting out, a detailed record from a high-quality stock market simulator for beginners can speak more truth than five pages of perfectly crafted bullet points. It demonstrates process, risk management, and the ability to learn-the very things a resume can only gesture towards.

From Leonardo to Now: The Evolution of Proof

This shift from description to demonstration is already happening. Designers have portfolios. Developers have code repositories. Writers have clips. The rest of the professional world is just slow to catch up. We’re still clinging to a format invented by Leonardo da Vinci in 1485. Yes, really. He wrote a letter outlining his skills to a potential patron. It was essentially the first resume. I think we can all agree that the world of work has changed just a little bit in the last 535 years.

The document is dead because it is one-dimensional. It’s a black-and-white photograph of a multi-sensory, full-color world. It has no room for failure, which is where all the best learning happens. It has no room for nuance. It has no room for the quiet competence of someone like Leo G., who will never be good at boasting but can do things with a torch that seem to defy the laws of physics.

We keep trying to resuscitate the corpse. We add QR codes, links to videos, splashes of color. But we’re just decorating a coffin. The spirit has already left. The future isn’t a better resume. It’s a collection of proofs. It’s a portfolio of work, a record of performance, a body of evidence that you are who you say you are and you can do what you say you can do.

It requires vulnerability. To show your actual work is to show your flaws. To present a trading record is to present your losses alongside your wins. But it’s honest. It replaces the slick, polished lie with a messy, authentic truth. It’s a move from being a good storyteller about your work to being a good worker who can show their story.