You are in your late 20s, at a cocktail party, and strike up a conversation with a friendly and socially lubricated stranger while standing in line for a drink. Five minutes into the conversation, the stranger asks you what you do. How do you reply?
It's a probing question, and it can mean a ton of different things.
- Is this a transactional question? A status biopsy to ascertain your relative import on the social ladder, and determine if you are a rung worth climbing?
- Is this solely a pretext for the stranger to tell you what he or she does, possibly flexing his or her own social capital?
- Will you take this opportunity to be transparent or indulge in playful obfuscation?
When I was single, I was deliberately avoiding anyone who was looking to date a doctor. I used to list my occupation as "crisis management" in online bios on dating sites, figuring that it could just as easily describe a social worker or firefighter as a physician.
I didn't want to be valued as a partner for my occupation or income potential. I'd contrast this with my med school roommate, who as a first year would wear scrubs out while running errands, and had a pager.
For those readers not in medicine, the only time you wear scrubs as a first years is to anatomy lab so that your regular clothes won't reek of formaldehyde. And there is no reason for a first year medical student to have a pager - no one cares where you are, so long as you stay out of the way.
My roommate would ask, " At noon I plan to be looking at pairs of glasses with a very cute optometrist I scoped out last week. Can you PLEASE page me at precisely 12 o'clock?"
In case you are wondering, yes, he asked the optometrist out, and yes, I felt somewhat complicit as an enabler to his shenanigans.
I've been revisiting this question lately because I don't necessarily see myself as a physician first, and in several years time I may not be a physician at all. So what,then, do I do?
A helpful starting point came from, of all things, a random speaker in a five minute online video, who summed up how to define your purpose in five easy steps:
- Who are you?
- What do you do (what do you feel qualified to teach other people)?
- Whom do you do it for?
- What do those people want or need?
- How do those people change as a result?
I'm going to spend some time today working through this deceptively simple-seeming framework, but the speaker points out that only two of these questions are about me. The majority are about service to others. There some wisdom in that.