What Are You Doing Here?
Sometime in the mid 2010s, while I was working at Livingston International, I was invited to speak at an off-site meeting in Chicago. The company was in the midst of digital reinvention and corporate upheaval, and a new CEO had been brought in to shape whatever the next version of the organisation was meant to become.
He was from New York: progressive, engaging, and visibly intent on activating the company from within.
My role at the event was to speak from within the company’s digital transformation initiatives. I was involved in software adoption, corporate training, and instructional design: the necessary work of making technology understandable enough for people to trust it, and intuitive enough for them to use it. I remember speaking with clarity that day, making the technical and organisational feel legible, persuasive, and human.
After the talk, the CEO approached me. He seemed genuinely interested in the material, but also in the person standing behind it. He asked about my background, my interests, what I did beyond the walls of the company. I told him, perhaps with more openness than usual, that while I had spent many years working in corporate life, I was, at root, a musician. I liked the company. I respected the work. But my deeper creative identity lived elsewhere.
He asked whether there was any music of mine he could hear.
I had my laptop with me, of course, so I played him a track I had been working on recently. It was called “No me da de qué.” An irreverent Latin-inflected electronic dance piece: vocal, rhythmic, carefully produced, and very much part of the world I still understood as my real creative life. I played perhaps thirty seconds, maybe a minute. He listened closely, nodded along, and seemed genuinely engaged.
When I paused the track, he looked at me and said something close to:
“That’s really impressive. What are you doing here?”
I don’t remember exactly what happened after that. I do remember the force of the question though. It was a compliment delivered as an existential challenge. Gracious, but interrogatory. He was not dismissing the corporate work. He had already seen that I could do it well. What he seemed to register was that the same competencies were appearing somewhere else too.
The useful part of the memory is not the compliment. Compliments are treacherous little things, really. They can warm you, certainly. But they can also turn very quickly into evidence in a private trial against yourself.
What stayed with me was that he seemed to hear, in that very short piece of music, something that had also been present in my talk. A feel for sequence and emphasis. A way of arranging complexity so another person could enter it, follow it, and feel it become understandable.
That was the bit I had not yet named clearly for myself.
For a very long time, I divided things too neatly. Music over here. Work over there. Real life somewhere off to the side, waiting for the day to end.
The office and the studio seemed like distant ends of one lifestyle. That division is understandable, especially when you have to earn a living inside structures that rarely ask what kind of temperament, or deeper interests a person is actually bringing to their work. Most organisations are interested in the role, and the deliverable. Fair enough. But the practical mistake is that we begin to believe that division ourselves.
When we separate our creative life from our professional life, and our professional life from who we actually are, we can begin to miss the continuity between them. Very often, the same underlying faculty is at work in both places: the ability to listen, clarify, persuade, translate, or make something complex or imagined feel usable to another person.
Some capacities travel across the whole spectrum of a life. We tend to call them transferable skills, but that phrase can make them sound smaller than they are. They are often deeper than skills. They are ways of ordering experience, reading a room, sensing where attention is fading, and knowing where the energy needs a push.
This is one of the ways things hold up. Our own resilience holds up when it remains attached to its source of inspiration. A musical instinct can reappear as teaching. A design instinct can reappear as care. A writerly instinct can reappear in the way one explains a difficult thing to a room full of tired people who do not yet know why it matters.
The danger is not that work contaminates our private strength. Its more that the world names our talents too narrowly, and eventually we start to believe it.
Job title. Department. Deadline.
These words have their uses in keeping the world organised. But they don’t tell the truth about where a person’s usefulness comes from.
What that question exposed for me was a simple fact: corporate work was not fake, and music was not decorative. It was not a split between false and true, but between partial and whole.
This seems to me a more durable form of self-awareness than confidence. Confidence rises and falls. Recognition comes and goes. Some days your work is praised. Other days it disappears. But to understand the source of one’s own competence is different. It allows a person to move through changing rooms without being entirely renamed by them.
There is resilience in that. In knowing what part of you remains present, even when the setting changes. The resilience of being able to say: this thing I do well did not begin here. It has a longer history than this job, this room, this moment of approval or indifference.
So the better question is not simply, “What are you doing here?” The more useful question is: what part of me is being used here, and is it still connected to the thing in me that gives the work its purpose, energy, and form?