033 | A good life is not lived on paper.

I spent five years of college building a resume, assuming it was the path to success.

Wrapping up school in 2024, I finished with a Master of Architecture and a Bachelor of Arts degree, earning Graduate Certificates in Urban Design and Design-Build.

In between, I would help accredit three major architecture schools, earned two portfolio awards, worked three summer internships, mentored college sophomores, volunteered my Tuesdays at an elementary school, and led regular tours of our architecture building.

My final year led me to managing the construction site of a LEED-platinum house in Lawrence, Kansas, designed and built by my classmates and me.

All this is to say, I spent a great deal of energy making sure I would finish school landing on my feet. To this day, I’m not quite sure if this pursuit stemmed from a true desire to achieve something great, or to avoid a vague feeling of inadequacy.

Regardless of the motives underneath, my efforts got me what I thought I wanted. Before I knew it, I was speeding out of my small Kansas town with my entire life pressed into the trunk of my Toyota. I was heading west to work as a Project Engineer for a high-end general contractor in Seattle, Washington.

My college days were spent proving I was competent and capable… on paper. In return, I got the best job I could’ve asked for… on paper.

I was now part of a respectable company, on paper. The role I earned sounded important, on paper. The pay was great for a college grad, on paper. I worked with a talented, experienced team, on paper.

Then I lived it.

My day-to-day role often left me with a sense of meaninglessness, with most of my time spent running errands, writing contracts, and ordering materials - building homes for the ultra-wealthy. The pay was great for a Kansan, but Seattle prices and car loans ensured my financial woes would persist. The individuals of the team were in fact talented, but the dynamic within that team of ‘all-stars’ was awkward and disjointed.

Everything that made the job look good fit on a few lines of a resume; what I actually lived and felt happened in the hours that didn’t.

This was the first time in my life I had the painful realization that I don’t always know what I truly want, or what would actually be fulfilling to me. After five years of hard work, I got everything I thought I wanted, just to realize I never actually wanted the thing I was after. The residue of others’ dreams left its collective imprint on me, and I mistook them for my own.

It’s all too easy to get lost in societal pressures that surround us. You can’t get far in America without seeing a billboard, hearing a commercial, or even passing an attractive person wearing designer clothes - not knowing if their attempt at becoming a walking advertisement was on purpose or by accident.

While we can hardly notice it from within, America is drifting towards a general monoculture, disguised as individualism. Live anywhere you want, as long as it’s a house in the suburbs. Go wherever you please, as long as the journey is made by car and ends in a parking lot. Study whatever you want, wherever you want, as long as it ends in a job building someone else’s dream.

We’re presented with the illusion of choice. We get the privilege of choosing between options A, B, and C - so we don’t stop to think whether options D through Z exist. Even the American Dream itself pushes an idea of what we’re ‘supposed to’ want, and we chase it endlessly without questioning if we ever actually wanted the things we were chasing.

So we end up chasing the good life. On paper.

But what would it look like to pursue a life that works for us?

It’s a simple question in theory, yet complex in practice. We can’t separate our desires from society, because we are society. There is no real way to parse out who we are or what we believe without bringing the entire universe along for the ride. What we can do is ask better questions - ones that measure a life by how it’s lived rather than how it’s read out.

“What am I willing to suffer for?”

Or, as Mark Manson says: what’s your favorite flavor of shit sandwich?

Anything you pursue will have moments of pain, irritation, and discouragement. It’s part of doing business. You just need to find something meaningful enough to make enduring the struggle worth it.

This rules out a few things:

1. Don’t choose a life simply because it earns respect or pays well. The struggle is not worth the status.

2. Be cautious of monetizing a hobby to its extreme, or you might end up resenting the thing you loved most.

3. Don’t pursue something long-term if you crave the result more than the process itself.

That last point is the tell… the result is another line on paper. The process is where you’ll actually spend your life.

Another idea is defining your “anti-life”.

What would it look like to live your worst nightmare five years from now?

Inverting is powerful when you don’t know what you want, because you often have an idea of what you don’t want. You probably don’t want to lose your home, build a reliance on hard drugs, or become alienated from the people you care about. These feelings are clear and emotionally charged. Take the exact things you don’t want out of life and do the exact opposite. Taking this direction already gets you halfway there.

Then notice how none of those nightmares are resume failures. Each one is a description of an ordinary day.

This last question strips away the outside influences and helps you look within yourself.

What would you be doing if nobody else could know about it?

Here, money becomes less of a factor; no one gets to know how much you make or how you live. Status simply does not exist. The way others treat you simply becomes a reflection of how you treat them. If that were the case, how would you be living out your days?

Part of you wants to say you’d be on the beach sipping margaritas or golfing in the sun with the boys. But this would get old fast. Two weeks in, you’d be sunburnt, bloated, and pathetically lethargic. Not to mention bored. The human spirit wants to contribute; this is what makes life meaningful.

Form a basic idea of the contribution you want to give to the world and slowly take steps in the direction. Volunteer with your church. Help paint a house. Cook a meal for your parents. None of it will end up in the resume, but all of it counts.

While this is still a countercultural take, moving your life in a direction towards your ultimate contribution is a form of success in itself - one you can only act on once you have a definition of what success means to you.

After a hard-earned lesson about the pitfalls of chasing a resume, my version of personal success has completely flipped. The type of success I now chase is living a life that unapologetically mine, on my own terms.

To wake up on a random Tuesday and go about the day as I see fit. To keep myself healthy enough to support the people I love as much as possible. To make just enough money that it’s not the foremost thing I stress about. To have unwavering conviction in the meaningfulness of my pursuits, and to love the pursuit because of the process, not just the result.

This is not the life lived on paper.

The life on paper is a life lived in honor of the resume - to view your life from purely the lens of accomplishments, finished projects, and closed chapters. To do hard things, not for the sake of doing them, but to say you did them.

When you look at the actual timeline of our lives, you realize:

No life is truly lived on paper. It’s lived in the gaps in between.

You’ll be proud of the big launch, the ribbon cutting, the awards ceremony, the final presentation. But for every moment spent at the podium came a thousand mundane moments before it. The early mornings and the late nights, and even the gaps in between.

Especially the gaps in between. Whether it’s cooking dinners, folding laundry, driving kids to school, or watching an old Adam Sandler movie on the couch.

These are the spaces in between the moments that fill the slots on our resume - the version of life on paper. We can still build a resume worth sharing, but we should remember our life was never meant to be orchestrated around it. We must instead seek out the pursuits that make us feel the most alive, and aspire to live them fully once we finally get there.

The resume is simply the byproduct.

-KPG