This is an unused draft of a BEN Talk – UPENN’s equivalent of a TED Talk – that was started in 2018. In 2022, I uncovered it while looking for something else, and so I did my best to update and finish the draft based on my original premise.
“What do you do?”
You may have already been asked this question once or twice today. You’ve surely been asked it hundreds if not thousands of times in your life. But it’s such an odd phrase.
“What do you do?”
You breathe. You walk. You talk. You think. You collaborate with stakeholders to achieve synergistic innovations. Or you’re a lawyer.
The last bit is obviously what people want to know when they ask – “what do you do?” They expect you to respond with your job title. And when you tell them the generic or arbitrary marker your manager has assigned to you – which does little to describe anything resembling an occupation – they’ll have even more questions.
But the reason they have more questions is that they don’t really want to know what you do. They probably don’t really care if you’re in accounting or grant-writing or firefighting. They probably don’t want to know about the big project you’re working on or how much your clients value your talents.
They want an answer to a question they can’t ask. They want to know “who are you?”
In our country, your value as a worker is often the first identity applied to you by others. People want to know if you’re a friend or foe, an equal or a superior. They need to approximate your value somehow in order to feel comfortable around you. And I’m here today to tell you something extremely important:
You are so much more than your job.
Precisely none of you are impressed by this statement. You know that you are so much more than your job!
I felt the exact same way in 2015 when I changed careers. Of course I wanted this new opportunity, but it wasn’t going to define me. I loved so many things, I had an amazing partner, and we made beautiful plans for our life together – how could this one part of my life become my entire being?
On the outside, at a cocktail party or in a coffee shop, I had an extremely cool job. People were fascinated by what I did and I was proud to tell them. When people asked, I talked about how great it was to work with Mike Solomonov. When a friend of my father’s wanted to have dinner with me in Philadelphia, I took him to a client’s restaurant where I knew we’d receive complimentary food to impress him. When my beloved Temple University Football team won their first conference championship, the coaching staff celebrated at a client’s bar and he called me down to meet the whole team – something I could only experience by working at this company.
But when I told these stories, and talked about how great it was to have my job, I was lying to everyone in my life. I bounced between anxiety and depression on what seemed like an hourly basis. My relationships were suffering – outside of the “Band of Brothers” type bond we had developed in our office – and I had accumulated the kind of mental and emotional debt that can overwhelm even the strongest among us.
In 2017, my now wife and I booked a week-long trip to Spain. We were desperate for something to look forward to and the timing worked out for both of us. Our flight home was landing pretty late, so we each had planned to take the next day off to relax before getting back to work.
But relaxing was out of the question – I was a complete mess – terrified of what had gone wrong while I was away. The anxiety was so acute that my wife all but pushed me out the door to spend ninety minutes in a sensory deprivation tank.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with this type of experience, sensory deprivation involves an hour or more spent floating in a pitch black tank, where the water has so much salt content that you effortlessly float. It has become popular with Navy Seals, Marines, and professional athletes to name a few. As a lowly account executive at a design agency, I even had imposter syndrome about using the therapy.
When I returned home, I told my wife that I was going to quit my job without even finding a new one. I was done. We agreed that I would put in my two weeks notice that Friday.
The next morning, Wednesday, I arrived early to the office and was surprised to not be the first one in the building as I almost always was. After a few minutes, our CEO called me into her office and told me it was my last day at the company. Things had gone wrong while I was away, and she felt that I was no longer performing well enough to stay in the job. I had a few tearful hugs with colleagues and I headed back home. I was stunned, but ultimately relieved. The fear about my future could wait – for now I was free.
Getting fired was easy. If anyone is looking for tips, please see me afterwards. I can have you unemployed by the end of the day. And because I knew I wanted to quit, I actually didn’t feel bad about it. I was so happy to be removed from the situation that I naively thought everyone else around me would understand. That was absolutely not the case.
My parents, who I thought would be concerned, were actually more embarrassed initially. They assured me they wouldn’t tell anyone at all. My friends were unsure how to react, which made me hesitant to tell most people in my life. To this day, I think there are still people, people who I am very close to, who do not know this story.
And that is a tragedy. Just because my identity temporarily changed to unemployed (unintentional division) didn’t mean I was any different. I was still the same person! I was still just as smart (or not) as you might have thought before. One person’s decision to fire me suddenly became an albatross hanging from my neck. And I know this experience is not at all unique. More than 20 million Americans were fired in 2017 – so I had a pretty big support group.
Maybe some of them were fired for “better” or “worse” reasons than me, but I highly doubt that the act of being fired made them different in a fundamental way. It’s a fact that losing a job is a transformational experience for many people, but it isn’t the firing that causes the change – it is the person’s reaction to getting fired that determines the long term change. Which brings me back to my point. Even when you get hired into another job or start your own business, you’ve still got the scarlet letter of being fired stuck to your chest.
What you do is not necessarily what your job is at this moment. Your job will change, and you will change too, sometimes one changes the other and vice versa. But nothing can change you without your participation. At the end of the day, you make choices about how to spend your time, and those choices add up to a life.
If I could leave you all with a piece of advice today it would be this: Make choices that are sustainable, that are healthy, and that bring you closer to your own goals. Jobs mostly don’t care that you want to read more often or start a family or host more dinner parties. They just want you to do your job as efficiently and as cost effectively as possible. In a system that is so focused on extracting your time and energy from your control, self-care is basically a revolutionary course of action. It is also the path to making those choices that add up to the life that you really want to live.
So when people as you what do you do? You can tell them you take care of yourself and your people. By any means necessary.
Joe Buckshon 