What You Do Is Not Who You Are

It's prom and graduation season, which means parents are getting dropped into more social situations than usual. House gatherings, park meet-ups, picture-taking events where you meet the parents of your kid's new friends for the first time. It's awkward.

This weekend was a perfect example. My daughter changed schools a year ago, so most of the deeper relationships don't exist yet, which means my wife and I have not met the parents of any of her friends.  On Saturday we went to the house of one of her new friends for a pre-Senior Ball gathering. We walked in knowing exactly one person in the room, our daughter. As we walked in it was like we were the new exhibit at the zoo, other parents looking over and trying to figure out who we were.

It was a mirror of that first awkward Jr. High dance, men in one corner all holding a drink at chest level making small talk. Within 60 seconds of someone asking who my son or daughter was, making sure we actually belonged there and not the Bar Mitzvah down the street, I got the question.

"So, what do you do?"

Ask a 45 year old founder or executive, or anyone really, what they do and you'll get the company, the title, the kids' sports schedule, maybe the weekend project. That's not who they are. It's what they're spending their time or money on. The two get conflated because the doing is so consuming it starts to feel like being.

This works fine until it doesn't.

Early in my career I was interviewing with the chairman of the board of an early stage start-up, same background as me in medical device. At some point in the conversation he told me about selling his last company for legit F-you money. He did the standard thing, bought the Porsche, the Rolex, joined the country club. Ninety days in, he was bored out of his mind. He was in his mid-fifties, all his friends still worked, and the only people on the golf course mid-week were retired guys comparing health problems. He went and found a new role because he had to. Not for the money. For the verb.

Three-quarters of American workers plan to keep working after they retire. Only about thirty percent actually do, and many of them go back not for the money, but because they don't know who they are without a role. They retired from a job and discovered they had also retired from themselves.

The same trap is waiting for the founder who never built an identity outside the business. You sell the company and the question "so what do you do" stops having a comfortable answer. You become an "ex-something." The whole frame of your life was built on a verb that no longer applies.

Here's the part you won't want to hear. You can't build that identity in the gap year between chapters. The people who land well started architecting it while they were still in this one. I'm not telling you to slow down. I'm telling you to know the difference between what you do and who you are while you still have time to be honest about it. Circumstance will eventually take the doing away. Whatever is left is the part you should have been investing in all along.

Back to the gathering. I laughed when the question came because I knew this article was coming today. So I told him, "Right now I crash pre-prom parties, but typically I'm just a dude working my way through life." The other dads chuckled. I sidestepped the question entirely.

If the company, the title, the kids, and the schedule were all off the table, what would you say?

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