One of my friends was telling me that he had been invited to participate in a group where it’s by invitation only. You’re invited to small dinner parties, you make dinner together and sit around a table. One of the rules when you go into it is that no one knows your last name and no one knows what you do. I just love that because one of my pet peeves is the question what do you do? Now I realize this is and has been for forever a go-to question when you meet someone. It’s a conversation starter, but it’s old. It’s outdated. It’s uninteresting and so limiting. What do you do? It used to always make me cringe, either because I didn’t have a job with an article before it – I’m a lawyer, I’m a doctor, I’m a journalist – or I was in the process of reinvention and didn’t really know the answer or I was doing something that I wasn’t proud of and I didn’t really want to answer that question.

My life was so much more than what I was doing for work. Anyway, I recently published a bonus episode called Lion Hearted when ordinary people do extraordinarily kind things and the person who was being interviewed, my friend Talia Shafir, when I asked her to set the stage and give some context for the conversation, chuckled, and said “well, in this iteration I am…”. I love that language “in this iteration”. I mean, hopefully by the time we’re 50 we’ve done many different things and we can answer that question in many different ways. Or better said, we are more interesting than our job title or our profession.

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