{"id":1665,"date":"2014-07-21T08:53:57","date_gmt":"2014-07-21T15:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/?p=1665"},"modified":"2014-07-21T08:53:57","modified_gmt":"2014-07-21T15:53:57","slug":"what-are-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/career\/what-are-you","title":{"rendered":"What are you?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When we talk about people in broad terms, we use lots of descriptive nouns. I’m not talking about the role that specific people play, like student<\/em> or mother<\/em> or engineer<\/em>. Those, in fact, help distinguish individuals and groups from each other: student<\/em> versus teacher<\/em>, mother<\/em> versus non-parent<\/em>, and so on.<\/p>\n

What are the nouns we use to talk about everybody? One of the most popular these days is consumer<\/em>. But what this says is that your most important function in life is to consume things. If you’re not spending money and consuming, then … you’re not doing your job.<\/p>\n

In previous ages, the most important role everybody was expected to play was citizen<\/em>. This highlighted your engagement in civil discourse and governance of your community and nation. I find citizen to be a much more valuable description, something which will improve the world I live in.<\/p>\n

Two other terms to ponder are viewer<\/em> (old media) and user<\/em> (new media). Both of these seem a bit denigrating, as if your job is to merely sit back, spend money, and give your attention. They don’t really give you much of an active, contributing role.<\/p>\n

Okay, so this is a bit of a rant today. How do we bring this down to personal action?<\/p>\n

It comes down to not being content with how others describe you, especially in broad terms. Someone may think of you as a consumer<\/em>, but that’s not how you have to think of yourself.<\/p>\n

What is the contribution you’re going to make in the world?<\/p>\n

What is the mission you’ll decide to take on?<\/p>\n

How are you going to make others’ lives better, not just your own?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we talk about people in broad terms, we use lots of descriptive nouns. I’m not talking about the role that specific people play, like student or mother or engineer. […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6,56,73,65],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-carl","4":"has-more-link","5":"post-1665","7":"format-standard","8":"category-career","9":"post_tag-coaching","10":"post_tag-inspiration","11":"post_tag-mission","12":"post_tag-passion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1666,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions\/1666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}