For years I have been asked by my family and friends, "what do you do"? When you are immersed in a role or a project it can easily become your "world". And increasingly, as my work became more globally focused and international in flavour, my day-to-day working life became more disconnected from my family’s world.
The daily emails, conference calls, uploads and downloads that are the substance of my day were anathema to members of my family who work in more traditional roles. And the outputs of my work, from documents and presentations to deal-making and presenting, the world of the knowledge worker is very strange (regardless of whether you are a marketer, salesperson, designer or IT architect). This has accelerated significantly with my personal adoption of social networking tools such as blogs, Flickr, Facebook and virtual worlds.
And while all this allows me to stay in contact with my virtual teams and wider communities it also provides yet another way of alienating my family and friends. The presentation below, by IBM Metaverse Evangelist, Roo Reynolds, helps answer the question "what do you do?". Now all I need to do is get my friends and family to check out my blog. Hmmm … now that could be a challenge!
I completely relate to this dilemma. I’ve given up on telling my family and friends what I’ve been working on, because when I start talking about my day-to-day activities they look at me like I’ve grown an extra head.
It sometimes feels a bit uneven though: I listen to hours of updates on legal cases, patients’ teeth and media matters, but mention nothing of my own activities. The pain of the internet entrepreneur 🙂
At least they all know that “I run a web site that helps people find fabulous bargains”!
As your brother I’m often asked what you do, and all I can say is “I don’t really know anymore, but he’s very important!” Pigeonholing has become much more difficult these days, people can understand that I’m a mobile Hairdresser, but they get a bit lost when I elaborate about integrating a business blog with it.