I went for a massage on Friday – new place. On the obligatory info sheet there was a section of “Occupation”. I never know what to put here.
“Entrepreneur” sounds like I don’t have an income
“Business Owner” sounds pretentious
“President” is vague
and really, what are they going to do with that information anyway?
The challenge with outdated forms like this is that they encourage the status quo. They are designed to fit people into boxes in a world too fragmented to accurately describe people in such a macro format. Of course, one could argue that I’m a rare breed, (as an entrepreneur/business owners/president), but the same is true for employees, of course. Your occupation today may not be be the same as it was two years ago, or will be two years from now, so what baring does the snapshot of “today’s occupation” have on defining who you are? Far more effective to ask “what are you working on?” or “how do you spend your day?” Never has it been more important than now to be able to answer those two questions, definitively and with conviction.
