Building Your Life Resume

Jesse Itzler is a best-selling author, wildly successful businessman, and has an amazing story from being in rap to owning a professional basketball team to living with a navy seal for 30 days and many many more accolades to add to his “life resume”.

If you aren’t familiar with Jesse’s work, I highly encourage you to check out this website to learn more about him.

So, why am I talking about Jesse Itzler?

I’ll tell you why… I’m pumped up. I love his energy.

Most recently he published his second book “Living with the Monks” (you can listen to it on Audible for free by using this link). This book was extremely entertaining; first of all he actually narrates it - which for me is one of the first criteria I look at when choosing an Audible to listen to.

The whole concept is to take a step back. We are always on the move. We are so busy trying to get things done that we use this philosophy of “multitasking”. What does it even mean to multi-task anyway? Does it even work?

Jesse learned a lot from living with Monks for 15 days and not having communication from the outside world. Most of all he shares what learned and the importance of single-tasking.

I think most of us know that multitasking, while it can work, is not as effective as being laser focused on single task. Think about it right now. How many different things are you juggling as you’re reading this?

What I’m here to talk about in this post is the life resume concept. Jesse describes a “life resume” as not believing in the traditional sense of a resume. Rather, a life resume is focusing on building experiences, creating memories, and doing the most you can with the time you have left.

Think of it this way, Jesse talks about how he gave a keynote speech to a room full of extremely successful business people. Oh, and when I say “extremely successful” - think of his network… his wife is Sarah Blakely, founder and CEO of the billion dollar brand “Spanx”, Jesse is an owner of an NBA team, was a partner at Zico coconut water before he sold to Coca-Cola, and he also built the largest private jet company before selling to Berkshire Hathaway… the guy is connected.

Anyway, the room was full of extremely successful people and he asked everyone how happy they were.

How did they respond?

The average answer was a 7 out of 10.

A "7"!

Does a 7 seem good to you?

While, a 7 may seem good on the surface when you compare it to the standard grading scale that equals a C-. That’s barely passing. When I came home from school when I was young with a C- my parents would not be jumping for joy, and for the parents reading this how proud of your son and/or daughter would you be of a C-?

Probably not too proud.

The point is, here’s a room full of “successful” people and they are looking at there lives and evaluating it as a C-.

Part of this is because of not being in the moment and enjoying the little things. Another part is multitasking that continues to take our attention away from truly being present. AND finally we are so focused on our careers that we easily forget about wellness and happiness outside of work. This is why Jesse believes in the life resume.

Jesse says that to truly grow you need to step into the unknown. He says forget surrounding yourself with like-minded people. You need to surround yourself with people that think different, have different backgrounds, and challenge yourself to truly challenge yourself and grow.

Like it love it or hate it, let me know.

This philosophy is something that I believe in and inspires me to do more with my life. If you want to learn more about Jesse, I highly recommend checking out his books “Living with the Monks” and the OG book “Living with a Seal”. Here’s a link to listen to either of them on Audible for free.

What are you doing to challenge yourself and grow?

Swag On,
SwagSam