If you aren’t likable, not even the best resume can save you.

You’re likability is a collection of your personality, your charisma, your values, and your principles. It’s the very essence of who you are, minus the raw information found on a resume.

And yet when we’re looking for jobs, or we’re looking for a romantic partner, or we’re looking for someone to invest in our business, we often default to information—rather than personality—to seal the deal.

This is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.

But there is a way we can change this, and it starts with our understanding of communication.

Employers, Investors, and Romantic Partners all want it

There’s two types of communication that we can engage in.

The first is high information communication, and the second is low information communication. An example of high information is your resume.

Your resume is a collection of all your professional data. A potent distillation of all the information that a hiring manager could ask for, with no fluff added.

The second type is low information communication. This can best be exemplified by “The Interrogation”. An interaction where you’re hesitant to reveal too much. Think about talking to an immigration officer when you’re entering a new country. You might not necessarily be doing anything wrong but, in general, the less information you give, the better.

Just about every communication we engage in falls somewhere on this spectrum.

Employers, investors, and potential romantic partners all seek high information communication. They want the goods, and the goods often manifest as hard facts.

But the truth is we don’t actually make decisions using information. We make decisions using emotion and personality, and justify it after the fact with information. 

First Dates and Interrogations

There’s another dimension in which we communicate. That is, of course, with our personality.

Again, there are two ways we communicate using personality: high personality communication, and low personality communication.

Think back to The Interrogation.

How much of your personality are you trying to show an immigration officer when you enter a new country (or when you’ve been detained by the FBI)? Any good mob boss will tell you, the answer is very little. An interrogation is both low information, and low personality. Loose lips sink ships after all.

Then there’s high personality communication.

High personality communication is the very best way to get someone new to like us.

Tactically, it would look something like a first date. Where it might not be in your best interest to reveal your deepest darkest secrets, but you certainly want to win them over. As a result, you engage in high personality, low information communication.

All communication can be boiled down to this two-axis spectrum.

On one axis, we have the level of information someone can expect. On the other, it’s the amount of personality we express that information with.

Becoming incomparable

So there’s a magic quadrant we have yet to explore.

When you reach the top right quadrant of high personality and high information, you’re bringing your whole self to the table. You’ve tapped into what makes you unique, and in doing so, have freed yourself from the world of competition.

When all of your background, all of your experience, and all of your knowledge is filtered through the lens of your personality, you become truly incomparable.

The best example of this quadrant is online writing.

I can speak from experience when I say the level of personality and the level of information that you can convey through this medium is unlike anything else.

By imbuing your particular experience with your personality, an entirely new gateway of possibilities will spring open for you.

Engaging in high personality, high information communication is like comparing apples and dragon fruit1.

Sharing your values

Letting the world know who you really are and what you truly value, can be scary.

Often times, we default to suppressing our personality—in things like job interviews— out of fear. We stick to strictly communicating information, in an attempt to protect ourselves from saying the “wrong thing”.

Yet deep down, we all know that it’s our personality that gets us hired, and it’s our personality that gets us the second date2.

Sharing our personality is the key, but we’re all too afraid to use it.

By writing online, we can convey our values in a controlled manner.

We can collect our thoughts, arrange them, and tactically articulate our deepest beliefs. The body of work we produce can then be used as augmentation to our resume, our dating profile, or even our investor pitch deck.

The fear that we have when communicating our values face-to-face, can be assuaged by the lack of timelines that online publishing grants us. We don’t have to whip up a witty answer to every value-probing question in the moment. We can sit, and ruminate, and make sure we say exactly what we mean.

Writing online is not shooting off a dozen tweets when we feel impulsive. Instead, it’s about thoughtfully curating, and articulating, our deepest values for all the world to see.

You’ll become a serendipity magnet

The most inspiring attribute of high information, high personality communication is that your values are attractive.

Each one acts as a magnet, drawing people and opportunities to you. By exposing more and more of yourself to the world, you are creating new avenues for people with similar magnets to connect.

Each piece you publish online, is a new way for someone to find you.

These connections act as a gateway to serendipity. Some gateways lead to career opportunities, other to friendships, and still others to worlds previously hidden to you.

As a personal example, my writing has led to me starting my first real profitable business, being handed unsolicited job offers, and connecting with some of the most influential people in San Francisco. I never explicitly asked for any of these things, I only put my thoughts out into the world.

I set up a whole years worth of magnets, and watched as weird and unexpected things came my way.

The truth is, up until this point, writing letters or emails, would have worked just fine. But the leverage that the internet gives you is what really sets online writing apart. By sending your thoughts out into the digital ether, you’re directly communicating with luck.

It’s like throwing a magnet into a junkyard. There’s no telling what you’re going to attract, and that’s the best part. You may connect with a diamond ring, or a crusty old pick up truck. You never know.

Stop searching, start being found

The power of high information, high personality communication is two-fold.

The first is that, you will have become a dragon fruit, radically separating yourself from the apples.

It’s very hard to compare two people with similar backgrounds, and similar educations for a job opening. However, it’s very easy to tell if someone is a good fit for your company, after they’ve written one hundred articles about their worldview, values, and principles.

The second is that, you will have created an opportunity machine that works on your behalf even while you sleep.

The magic of writing online is, each piece you publish becomes a serendipity magnet. So instead of spending hundreds of hours searching for the right job, employers will come to you. Instead of pitching dozens of investors as to why you’re business is going to succeed, they’ll already know and be excited to meet you.

Once you’ve published, your magnet lives on the internet forever, raking in opportunities. The more robust your library of works, the more outlandish and unexpected your opportunities will become.

Obviously, writing online isn’t the only way to become an incomparable dragon fruit. What really matters here is that your engaging in high personality, high information communication3. That you're giving strangers a way to connect with your knowledge, your experience, and most importantly, your personality.

—Zac