Halfway through soundcheck at some regional theatre, the sort of venue that smells of decades of spilt beer and broken dreams, one of the lighting crew found me crouched under the drum riser taping down loose cables.

Mid-twenties. The kind of confidence that comes from knowing exactly which cable goes where.

"Didn't you used to be the lead singer in that Twisted Sister cover band?" he asked. "The one that played the Marquee?"

I looked up from a tangle of XLR leads. Sweating, knackered, back aching from two hours on my hands and knees. "Yep. That was me. Now I'm wiring stage left."

He laughed and clapped me on the back. "Respect, man. No ego."

On paper, that was a demotion. Frontman to cable monkey. In reality, it was the first time I understood that a career isn't a ladder you climb. It's a set you keep playing.

Roadie. Band manager. Record label. Virgin Interactive. The Xbox launch team. Cybersecurity. Product marketing consultant.

On paper, it reads like it was planned by someone with a dartboard and a short attention span. In reality, every apparently irrelevant job built the thing the next one needed. Humping flight cases taught me logistics under pressure. Managing musicians taught me stakeholder handling, which is the same job with better hair. Selling records taught me audience. Xbox taught me international launch. Cybersecurity taught me how to make something complicated sound simple.

None of it was planned. All of it was necessary.

And yet I spent years apologising for it. Sanding the odd bits off my CV so the whole thing looked like a strategy rather than a series of decisions made in car parks. My LinkedIn headline once genuinely read "Roadie Extraordinaire", and I'm still in recovery.

So I'm not judging anyone here. I'm telling you what took me far too long to learn: your messy past isn't the thing you have to explain away. It's the thing nobody else has.

That is why I wrote a book about it, and as an independent author, I would be grateful if you would consider pre-ordering now. This helps with rankings and ensures the book reaches the people who need it.

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

Right. What follows is a small sample, not a summary. Four frameworks out of a book that is mostly exercises rather than opinions: every chapter ends with work you actually do, on paper, about your own career. That's the difference between reading about turning your messy past into a future-proof career and getting on with it.

Think of this next bit as the soundcheck. Then there's a launch offer at the bottom that puts your name in the print edition.

1/ Position yourself, don't just list yourself. "Senior Product Manager, five years' experience in SaaS" is a job description. "I help B2B software companies turn complex technical capability into something a customer will actually pay for" is a value proposition. One of those makes someone lean in. The other makes them wonder if there's more coffee.

Do this: rewrite your LinkedIn headline today to describe the value you create, not the role you hold.

2/ Your "random" experience is the differentiator. The ex-teacher who understands onboarding because she knows how people actually learn. The former consultant who can align eight stakeholders because she's survived worse. Your weird combination isn't a gap in the story. It is the story.

Do this: map your career as a skill-building journey rather than a timeline. What capability did each stop build? What do they add up to that nobody else has?

3/ Start acting like the next version of yourself. Not doing two jobs for one salary. Just the meaningful bits: the cross-functional initiative nobody's taken, the strategic view rather than the tactical one, the post-mortem that helps everyone. Leadership isn't a role you're appointed to. It's a posture you adopt and then get paid for later.

Do this: pick one responsibility from the job you want next and demonstrate it, small, this month. Don't wait for permission. Create evidence.

4/ Build career insurance. Something that exists independently of your employer. A newsletter, a workshop, a framework, a community. Not so you can become a LinkedIn lion roaring about your learnings, but so that when the conversation about your future happens, you're negotiating from strength rather than from panic.

Do this: pick one asset you'd still own if you left tomorrow, and publish the first version of it this month.

Here's the uncomfortable bit. Some of the most valuable work you do leaves no evidence. The disaster you prevented never happened. The alignment you created just looks like an absence of arguing. The process you built makes everyone else look organised.

None of it shows up on a dashboard. None of it shows up as a quarterly metric. Then comes the review where nobody mentions a single bit of it, and you go home wondering whether you imagined the whole year.

That isn't a reason to stop doing the invisible work. It's a reason to make it visible.

Compare: "I improved our onboarding."

With: "I noticed 60% of trial users churned in week two without completing setup. I redesigned the initial workflow, added progressive disclosure, and lifted trial-to-paid conversion by 23% - roughly £340K in additional quarterly revenue."

Same work. Same person. Completely different career.

Most career advice skips this part, presumably because it's awkward at parties.

Redundancy. Burnout. That creeping sense you're in the wrong place doing the wrong things for reasons you can no longer remember. I've been made redundant twice, burned out more than twice, and had several stretches where I genuinely wondered whether I'd lost the plot entirely.

When I was made redundant from a senior marketing role, my first reaction was panic. My second, about a fortnight later, was relief. I no longer had to pretend to care about projects that had stopped mattering to me some time around the previous Christmas. That redundancy led directly to consulting, which gave me more freedom and variety than any employed role ever had.

Setbacks aren't career endings. They're career data.

Seven small steps instead of one enormous leap you'll never take.

Two axes. Visibility across the bottom, value up the side.

High value, low visibility. Hidden Gem. You're doing the work and someone else is doing the talking. Time to speak up.

Low value, high visibility. All show, no substance. Time to re-anchor around something that actually moves the business.

Low value, low visibility. Danger zone. Be honest with yourself, then move.

High value, high visibility. Sweet spot. Now scale yourself - mentor, teach, take the bigger swing.

Most people never plot themselves at all, which is a bit like touring without a setlist and hoping it goes well.

This week. Rewrite your LinkedIn headline. Value, not job title. It takes five minutes, and it's the highest-leverage five minutes in this email.

This month. Plot yourself on the career axis. Then have one conversation with somebody already doing the job you want next, and ask what they did differently.

Before 1st October. Pre-order the book and claim your patron credit. Details below, and yes, the 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.

That lad on the lighting crew thought he was making small talk. What he actually did was hand me the question this entire book is built on: didn't you used to be something else?

Yes. And so did you. The teacher who became a project manager. The chef who runs operations. The person who took three years out and has spent every interview since apologising for it.

Stop apologising. That's the whole book in two words.

Be kind to yourself out there. It's a rough market, and you're doing better than you think.

Keep on rockin'

Harvey.

With thanks to Maja Voje and GTM Strategist, who published the very first piece written about this book long before it had a cover, a date, or any real proof it would exist. Her team designed the book's four illustrated frameworks, and we're republishing them here with her permission. If you work anywhere near go-to-market, her newsletter is worth the inbox space.