👋🏻 Hey, before we get started, as a valued subscriber, I wanted to give you a heads-up about a change coming. This newsletter is being rebranded as the “Anti-Resume Newsletter”. It will still feature the same content you've come to value, but I will also include lessons from my book (like the one in this week’s edition) of the same name to help readers build a future-proof career.

"You want me to do what now?"

I was seventeen, standing ankle-deep in used tyres at a Speedy Parts depot in Manchester. It was my fifth job since leaving school at fifteen, and they'd already taken me off delivery duty for crashing their Yugo. Twice. Once into a stationary car whilst bellowing Bon Jovi, and once reversing into a Range Rover, which was harder to defend.

Now they wanted me off the road permanently. Tyre stacking. All day, every day. No sunlight, no music, just grease, rubber fumes and a warehouse full of grown men shouting at each other about rim sizes.

The depot manager, Dave, wore his permanent disappointment like a long-service medal. He gave me a shrug that said, "This is your lot now, mate."

So I took off my regulation polo shirt, draped it over a stack of Michelin retreads, and walked out the back door into a grey Manchester afternoon. No plan. No backup job. No idea how I'd explain it to my parents, who were already questioning their parenting choices after five false starts.

I walked for hours with U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" on repeat on my Walkman. It didn't feel like a song. It felt like a medical diagnosis.

But I knew one thing with bone-deep clarity: whatever came next, it wouldn't be this.

"Follow your passion" is terrible advice. Not because passion doesn't matter, but because of the bit everyone leaves out.

Passion doesn't pay the bills straight away. It only pays off after you've dragged it through failed side hustles, unpaid gigs, uncertain pivots and enough "why am I still doing this?" moments to fill a particularly depressing concept album.

The second lie is worse. We're told passion arrives as a lightning bolt. One day the clouds will part, a choir will strike up, and your life's purpose will appear in golden letters across the sky. So we wait. And wait. And refresh the job boards.

Mine certainly didn't arrive like that. At seventeen, I couldn't have told you what I wanted to do with my life. I could only tell you, with total precision, what I didn't.

Which, as it turns out, is a perfectly good place to start.

When people ask me how to find their passion, I give them an answer they rarely enjoy: you probably don't start with passion. You start with revulsion.

When you don't know what you want, your brain does what it does best. It eliminates. My early CV read like a greatest hits compilation of what not to do. Wedding suit measurer (fired). Butcher's assistant (quit after a grown man helicoptered an ox tongue at me). Delivery driver (see above). Turkey wrangler at Marks & Spencer during the Christmas rush (nearly trampled).

On paper, it looked like a lad who couldn't commit to anything. In reality, it was the most valuable market research I've ever done. Every job was quietly cataloguing what I couldn't stand: being shouted at by people who treated basic dignity as an optional extra, following rules that existed purely to prove someone else's authority, and doing work a moderately sophisticated toaster could have handled.

Call it entitlement if you like. I call it data.

Every "not this" moment narrows the field. It works like negative space in design, where what you remove matters as much as what you keep. The irony is that we treat these moments as failures, when they're often the only part of the process that's actually working.

Before I ask you for anything more, here's something for you…

Before you hand in your notice on the strength of this newsletter (please don't, my inbox can't take it), there's an important distinction.

Walking out of the tyre warehouse was a "not this" moment. The environment was wrong, and no amount of sticking at it would have made it right.

But around the same time, I was learning to play bass. I'd looked at a six-string guitar and decided six strings were six too many. Bass had four fat ones, and you played one note at a time. If you could count to four, you were basically in business.

I was rubbish. Properly, make-the-neighbours-call-the-police rubbish. And if I'd treated that discomfort the way I treated the tyre warehouse, I'd have walked out on the thing that eventually took me everywhere. Touring Europe as a roadie. Managing bands. And years later, into Microsoft boardrooms launching Xbox.

That's the trap. Most people don't get stuck because they lack passion. They get stuck because they've never stuck with anything long enough to get good at it. They're still in the "sounds rubbish" phase, and they mistake that discomfort for a sign to quit.

So we end up doing the exact opposite of what we should. We quit the things we might love because we're bad at them, and stay in the things that no longer stretch us because we're good at them. Before I climb onto my high horse, I'm guilty of the second one. Years later at Microsoft, I stayed in a role long after it had stopped stretching me, simply because I was good at it and it was comfortable.

Passion isn't discovered like a hidden track at the end of an album. It's built, slowly, from four things:

1. Doing difficult things competently. The first time I ran a mixing desk, I was convinced I'd electrocute myself or accidentally summon demons through the PA. Six months later, I was fixing problems in real time while a band played on. That shift from terror to competence is where the enjoyment actually comes from.

2. Seeing your work land with someone. The first time I watched a crowd go wild for a band I'd helped get stage-ready, something clicked. I wasn't just lugging flight cases anymore. I was part of a night people would remember.

3. Repetition. Unglamorous, unfashionable, completely non-negotiable. The breakthrough comes from turning up consistently, especially when the progress is invisible.

4. Sounding rubbish for ages before you don't. Everyone goes through this bit. Me, your manager, and the person on LinkedIn whose career looks like it was drawn with a ruler. They just didn't post about it.

Every messy job, every wrong turn, every "why am I still doing this?" moment: that isn't wasted time. That's your anti-resume.

It's not the job titles you've collected. It's the story they tell, and the skills they taught you while you weren't paying attention. Wrangling temperamental musicians turned out to be excellent training for stakeholder management. Reading a crowd turned out to be how you run a room full of executives.

None of it felt strategic at the time. All of it turned out to be necessary.

So I wrote a whole book about it.

The Anti-Resume: Turn Your Messy Past into a Future-Proof Career is now available for pre-order. It's for anyone who's had a messy, nonlinear, hard-to-explain career and been made to feel like that's a weakness. It shows you how to find the thread running through everything you've done, tell a story that actually lands, and build a career that fits who you really are. The tyre warehouse, the ox tongue and several worse stories are included free of charge.

That messiness is your biggest asset. You just haven't learned how to use it yet.

This Week: Write your "Not This" list. Every job, task, manager or environment that made you want to emigrate to an island without Wi-Fi. Then flip each one. "The boss who took credit for my work" becomes "I need recognition and fairness." Those flipped lines are your non-negotiables.

This Month: Separate "not this" from "not yet". Look at the things you've walked away from. Which were the wrong environment, and which were simply the "sounds rubbish" phase? Pick one "not yet" and give it thirty days of deliberate practice. Keep a simple note of what energises you and what drains you as you go.

This Quarter: Find your thread. List every role you've had, including the embarrassing ones, and the skill each one taught you. Then look for the pattern. Mine eventually boiled down to one line: "I help underdogs become unforgettable." Yours won't come out right first time. Write it badly, then rewrite it. (That's the "sounds rubbish" phase again. You're getting the hang of this.)

Before 5th October. Pre-order the book and claim your patron credit. Details below, and yes, the (extended) deadline is real.

Everything else lives at the-anti-resume.com. The workbook, reviews and the free soundtrack: every song the chapters are named after, in order, as a playlist. Twenty-one chapters, twenty-one tracks, two of them Bowie, and I'm not apologising for either. It's also the place to send anyone you think needs it.

Dave never knew it, but that shrug was the best career advice I ever received. He showed me exactly what I didn't want, in high definition, with a side order of rubber fumes.

Your "not this" moments are doing the same job for you. Each one is evidence you're paying attention.

Be kind to yourself out there. If your career looks like a mess right now, think of it as the intro. The chorus is coming.

Keep on rockin'

Harvey.

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