Yesterday, most of my time was devoted to re-branding myself — that is, re-vamping my CV. It was surprisingly fun, I think, because it didn’t take too much squinting, tweaking, or twisting to completely re-characterize my life’s experience right before my eyes.
I should probably say explicitly that I re-branded myself in good faith. No lying or gross misrepresentation on my part. Essentially, all I did was look back over my life, education, and experiences and highlight everything that aligns with my new career goals in a way which accords with those goals and which will also make easy sense to those persons who can help me achieve those goals. Really, it involves only a shift in focus and then taking the time to communicate the results effectively.
Now, to some extent, the easy achievement of this transformation shouldn’t be too surprising to anyone who has dabbled in philosophy, psychology, or neuroscience. At some point, you’ve probably encountered something like this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duck-Rabbit_illusion.jpg
There are a ton of these little tricks of the eye, whereby a simple change in attention can completely change what a person perceives.
Is a CV re-vamp the same as a trick of the eye? Not exactly but I think the essential idea is the same. The important difference is the person preparing the CV has to do the work the brain seems to do automatically for the trick of the eye. In other words, a conscious effort has to be made to re-cast the facts charitably.
For example, one time I wrote an essay and by essay’s end I realized that my original point — the conclusion I had been arguing for — was entirely wrong. With the thing due the next day, I was surely doomed and I came very close to starting from scratch. In a surprising moment of good sense on my part, I got up from the computer and went and did something else for a bit. After a bit of a rest, with fresh eyes, I re-read the essay and realized it would only take a few words here and there to completely shift what I had written so the essay read as if the research and analysis I had done — trying to defend a different thesis — actually wholly and entirely supported the new conclusion I had come up with. It was simply a matter of highlighting things differently and in good faith.
It occurs to me, as I write this, that most girls — thanks to make-up — probably understand this point all to well. A face can be transformed with the right highlights. Well, so can an essay. So can a CV. And, for that matter, so can a person’s understanding of his or her life — past and future.
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MOVEMENT 
