What Do You Do For A Living?

Quite often a topic or an idea will come up over and over, as if nudging you to think it or write about it, and you know that if you don’t explore it, your work and progress will come to a dead end where you will be faced with it.

While I was listening to Be The Media interviewing Seth Godin on Blog Talk Radio about his new book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, somewhere along the interview, Seth Godin was discussing about his marketing methods and offering insights to his thought process that made American Way Magazine dub him to be "America’s greatest marketer." Near the end, he talked about what he does for a living. Simply that he notices things.

“I notice things,” he said. Most people would equate Seth Godin to be a marketing genius, or a bestselling author, or an entrepreneur. Yet, Seth Godin doesn’t describe himself to be an author, a writer, a blogger, or even a marketing – none of that. First and foremost, his job is to notice things, and the writing, publishing, blogging and marketing are like manifestations of what he sees himself as.

I thought, well that’s nice and compartmentalized the idea. Then later on the day, I visited TED to see which talks I haven’t heard yet and Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk stood out to me, even though many of my prior visits to TED  I had ignored her talk, but interestingly today, her faced pulled me in and I clicked on the video.

In exploring her creative process, Elizabeth Gilbert explains that to save her mental creativity, she sees herself as a mule and the genius that feeds her creative is a partner in her writing process, but that it is not her nor is it something that she is responsible for. Writing is what what she does for a living, and the creative genius that makes her writing great belongs to a separate entity. Writing is what she does and creative is what that “genius entity” does. She assigns her responsibility to writing and all she has to worry about is showing up to do her job: writing.

How simple these creative geniuses see their work, and I think it’s the reason that sets them apart. They see a role that they are responsible for and they do it – it’s their natural talent, like their calling that they’re committed to fulfilling.

The fact that this theme reoccurred and made notice to me is like a sign to make me think about what it is that I do for a living. Since I’m pursuing a couple of new social development initiatives and building a web service business, my plate is full, it helps to remind myself what it is that I do for a living.