Everybody’s best friend on the Internet, the relatable Elyse Myers (3.9 million followers on Instagram, with a New York Times best seller to boot), published an amusing post a couple of days ago about her best friend of 12 years. Apparently a wonderful person, a really bright spark.
She confesses that even if she knows her friend’s job is very demanding and no one’s ever done it better, Elyse has no clue what she actually does.
None whatsoever. Zero. Zilch.
Elyse describes her bff’s job as this “colorless, shapeless orb.”
Kinda strange, isn’t it? To know a person so well, yet know so little about such a big part of their existence?
Except, it’s not that strange anymore.
For a lot of people, that’s exactly how their jobs feel. Hard to explain. Harder to connect to. Easy to default to vague language because the work itself has become vague.
Not meaningless, necessarily. But distant. Stripped of anything you can easily point to and say, this is what I do, and this is why it matters.
That’s the norm now.
It’s why most of us in Consultantland dread going to cocktail parties. There’s always the off-chance that somebody might ask you what you do for a living. Even worse, they might have a dark sense of humor or a little sadistic streak in them (or both!) and actually expect a coherent answer, instead of mercifully changing the conversation to something less awkward. Like politics or religion.
Next thing you know, with beads of sweat running down your forehead, you find yourself regurgitating the same buzzwords every other consultant at the party is using:
“…Helping organizations optimize their core operations…leveraging disruptive technologies…aligning business strategy with emerging market trends… yada, yada, yada…”
Not a gig for the faint of heart.
We have a name for that amorphous orb Elyse described.
We call it The Void. It’s where most work lives now. Transactional. Comfortable. Manageable. Forgettable. If you’ve ever wondered why our name is so weird, that’s it. We made it our business to kill it.
But that’s harder than it sounds. The Void pays well. It doesn’t ask much of anyone. And once you’re inside it, the language you use to describe your job starts to sound like the language everyone else uses to describe theirs.
Which is to say nothing at all.
The orb isn’t your friend’s blind spot. It’s yours.
