I have long believed that everyone should have two résumés.

There’s the regular one. Jobs, titles, accomplishments. The document designed to explain, in a page or two, why someone should take you seriously.

And then there’s what I call the alt résumé.

Mine includes: lived on a commune in Oregon for six months, hitchhiked across Ireland at 21, sold Christmas trees on the Upper East Side, trained to be a whitewater river guide, wrote and produced a spec TV pilot called The Desire Project.

I realize this is starting to sound like an REI catalog. There were other chapters, trust me.

None of these things belong on my professional résumé. I’m not sure most of them qualify as accomplishments. But if we met at a dinner party, I suspect you’d rather ask me about hitchhiking across Ireland than about my years in brokerage leadership.

That’s the point.

Your regular résumé tells me why you’re qualified. Your alt résumé tells me who you actually are.

I think about this a lot because I spend an unreasonable amount of time reading real estate agent bios, and I have some questions.

Do you really have a lifelong love of architecture? Did you really get into real estate because helping people find a home has always been your calling? Are you sure your unique combination of market expertise, tireless work ethic, and deeply personal approach is what sets you apart?

Because there appear to be several thousand other agents with the exact same unique combination.

This isn’t a criticism. We’ve all been taught to do this. Somewhere along the way we learned that sounding professional meant editing out anything that couldn’t be connected directly to our qualifications. So we keep the sales awards and lose the summer we spent on a fishing boat. We mention the MBA and leave out the mediocre band we played bass in for ten years. We list transactions but not the fact that we grew up above our parents’ restaurant, spent five years designing theater sets, or once moved to Argentina without knowing a single person.

Those things may have nothing to do with how good you are at selling real estate.

But they have quite a lot to do with you. And that’s what most bios are missing. Not another credential. A person.

So make an alt résumé. Not a list of secret strengths. Not ten hardships followed by what they taught you. Please don’t tell me hitchhiking through Ireland taught you resilience.

Just write down ten things you’ve done that would never make your actual résumé. The strange jobs. The detours. The things you tried and abandoned. The places you lived. The worlds you briefly belonged to.

We spend so much time trying to sound impressive that we forget impressive and interesting are not the same thing. One gets you taken seriously. The other makes you someone people actually want to work with. Your alt résumé knows the difference. Trust it.