Everything the Résumé Leaves Out

I’ve been playing keyboards since I was four. Competed nationally as a kid, was in a band called Anachronox for years after. Nobody asks about this in a business meeting, and I never bring it up, but it’s probably the longest-running thing I’ve ever done — longer than any job on this site.

I’m ex-President of The Shri Ram School Alumni Society, 2016 to 2023. Seven years of trying to keep a few thousand people who went to the same school loosely connected to each other, for no reason except that it seemed worth doing. It’s the closest thing I have to civic work, and it taught me more about getting people to show up for something than most of my actual jobs did.

I’ve been training for a marathon in Vienna. Long runs on weekends, the whole build-up. It’s not glamorous and I don’t talk about it much, but it’s on the list of things I’m working toward outside of work, which is a shorter list than I’d like.

I read about longevity the way some people follow a sports league — Bryan Johnson and the rest of that world, protocols, blood panels, the whole apparatus. I don’t do half of what the serious people do. But I like the underlying premise: that most of what determines how you feel at fifty is decided by boring, repeatable choices made well before then. It’s the same instinct that shows up in my actual work — distrust of anything that looks impressive and isn’t repeatable.

Lately I’ve been learning to DJ. Deep house, minimal techno. I’m not good yet. I’m told that’s normal.

None of this is a pitch. It doesn’t lead anywhere, and I’m not building a personal brand around it. But a career page that only lists the jobs is lying by omission — it makes a person look like a sequence of roles instead of someone who also spent four decades at a keyboard, ran a school alumni group for the hell of it, and is currently bad at DJing on purpose. That person is closer to the truth.