How to talk about what you do
Oh, hi friends!
When someone asks, “What do you do?” you might reach for a list of nouns and adjectives: writer, doctor, editor, accountant, designer, runner, etc.
You do a lot. You are a lot. You change a lot.
But you're more than your job title or the activites you do on the weekend. And your interests can ping-pong every month.
"In 1962, Clare Booth Luce, one of the first women to serve in the U.S. Congress, offered some advice to President John F. Kennedy. 'A great man,” she told him, “is a sentence.' Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: 'He preserved the union and freed the slaves.' Franklin Roosevelt’s was: 'He lifted us out of a Great Depression and helped us win a world war.' Luce feared that Kennedy’s attention was so splintered among different priorities that his sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph.” (source)
Now I'm not asking you to pull us out of the Great Depression (although our country could use some heavy lifting right now, thanks). And this isn't going on your tombstone.
But are you a sentence or a paragraph?
You can change it whenever you’d like. I just have a feeling that coming up with a singular arrow can help point you wherever you need to go.
Now I’ll be off in the corner, writing my own.
Here's Elia Kazan...
A good director is like the good friend my father was: A friend of his was depressed, in a bad way. Almost everyone told him to buck up, snap out of it, but my father only told him how much he missed his good friend, the real man trapped in whatever sadness had consumed him. My father's friend improved.
You do the same with any artist—actor, writer, designer: You remind them of what they have and what they've done and what they can do. You keep shining light on the path they're taking, and you occasionally help them with the heavy load they've taken on.
Wow. Finish reading here. (h/t brother)
Job Alert!
Alexa, the New York Post's luxury magazine, is hiring a temp photo editor while a colleague is on maternity leave. Let me know if you apply so I can send up a flare to Brass Ring friend-to-all Carrie Seim who’s an editor there. (Thanks Carrie for the tip!) Full details.
Did you enjoy reading? Please share with a friend!
Love, Kara
PS — I wrote this email last night but forgot to schedule it to send this morning. Forgive me.