Back then, when I was just out of university and totally clueless about the reality of the working world, I thought I had to brush up my CV, make it look really fancy, fine tune it. I spent hours and hours fine tuning it, perfecting it. It still didn't get me a job. It got me a lot of rejections. I even got HR people telling me: "You are obviously really qualified. But I can't see the red thread going through your CV."

That HR lady, she smashed my confidence. She made me feel like I did not fit in, was not good enough to join her possé of pencil-pushers and HR gatekeepers.

What I did not realise back then was that I was simply not made to be part of a system where fitting in, being normal and having a "red thread" CV were the unspoken rules of what it took to have a "successful career."

So one could say that I failed big time. In the conventional career world. And for years this made me feel inadequate, dumb and like I was a waste of space.

Each time I had an interview, sent out another application, attended another boring, pointless assessment center, I felt like I was dying inside because none of that felt like ME or who I wanted to become, or the kind of intellectual work that I wanted to do. I wanted to be brilliant, thrive and I wanted my work to matter. And sitting in front of these people with their "successful" conventional careers made me feel like I was simply not talented enough.

The reality is, and what I did not consciously know was that none of these people embodied what I call the new way of working, the new world of work. All these people knew was how to check -- based on a list of criteria -- whether my experience, "behavioural skills or competences" would match theirs. None of these people actually understood that we live in a new era where the old model of work is becoming obsolete. And I had no idea that there was another way.

What it takes to be truly remarkable in today's new world of work, is to learn to be different by being yourself.

I learnt that the hard way. When nobody "gave" me the job I thought I deserved, I was forced to re-invent myself. To rethink how I thought of myself and what work I wanted to contribute to the world rather than try to squeeze myself into some pre-defined box (a.k.a a corporate cubicle).

If you are still busy sending out CVs but getting no-where chances are you need to re-think and re-define yourself and what you actually want to be in this world. We get so caught up in trying to" find a job" that we forget why we looking in the first place. To get a pay check? To get benefits? To do interesting work?

Interesting has changed. There is a new interesting. And that's YOU.

Why are you doing what you are doing and why do you want to do the work? If nobody is giving you a job, how about creating your own?

Times have changed and will change even more. So why not use this time to re-invent yourself, do the work that matters and create a career that actually makes you stand out and be the remarkable you that you can be?!