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What Would I Know About You If I’d Known You for a Long Time? · Just Julia

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  SPEAKER_00: What would I know about you if I'd known you for a long time?
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  SPEAKER_00: This summer,
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  SPEAKER_00: at Mindvalley University in Tallinn,
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  SPEAKER_00: I met a woman only briefly, but she asked me a question I haven't forgotten.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was one of those encounters that lasted only a few minutes and somehow stayed
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  SPEAKER_00: with me long after the event ended.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was one of those environments where you meet an extraordinary number of people in
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  SPEAKER_00: a very short amount of time.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone sits beside you at a talk,
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  SPEAKER_00: you introduce yourself over lunch,
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  SPEAKER_00: you start talking while waiting for the next session,
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  SPEAKER_00: and within minutes you're exchanging WhatsApp numbers with someone who lives on
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  SPEAKER_00: the other side of the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: Most conversations started in exactly the same way.
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  SPEAKER_00: What's your name?
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  SPEAKER_00: Where are you from?
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  SPEAKER_00: What do you do?
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  SPEAKER_00: Normally, there's nothing particularly difficult about those questions.
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  SPEAKER_00: That summer, there was.
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  SPEAKER_00: I had lost my job only a couple of weeks earlier,
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  SPEAKER_00: and I still didn't quite know how to talk about it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every time someone asked what I did, I felt myself hesitate.
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  SPEAKER_00: Should I say what I had been doing until two weeks ago?
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  SPEAKER_00: Should I simply say I worked in fashion and leave it there?
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  SPEAKER_00: Should I explain that my position had recently been made redundant?
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm not particularly good at pretending something is true when it isn't,
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  SPEAKER_00: so most of the time I told people what had happened.
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  SPEAKER_00: My position was recently made redundant.
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  SPEAKER_00: And more than once, someone would immediately try to correct me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Don't introduce yourself like that.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tell people what you do, what you're good at, what you're looking for next.
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  SPEAKER_00: They meant well.
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  SPEAKER_00: And rationally, I understood what they were saying.
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  SPEAKER_00: But inside, I kept thinking, I have just lost my job.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what the positive version of this story is yet.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then I met her.
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  SPEAKER_00: Instead of asking me what I did,
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  SPEAKER_00: she asked, what would I know about you if I'd known you for a long time?
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  SPEAKER_00: I remember stopping.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was such a simple question, but it required a completely different kind of answer.
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  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't give her a job title.
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  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't name a company.
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  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't hide behind a country, a role, or a polished professional introduction.
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  SPEAKER_00: I had to think about what someone who really knew me would know.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't even remember exactly what I answered.
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  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps I told her that I have lived abroad for most of my adult life,
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  SPEAKER_00: that multicultural environments make me feel alive,
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  SPEAKER_00: that I love being surrounded by people who grew up seeing the world differently
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  SPEAKER_00: from me.
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  SPEAKER_00: But I remember how the question made me feel.
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  SPEAKER_00: For a few seconds, not having a job didn't matter.
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  SPEAKER_00: She had asked me who I was without asking me to explain my status.
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  SPEAKER_00: She told me she asked this question often.
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  SPEAKER_00: Whenever she met someone and exchanged numbers with them,
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  SPEAKER_00: she also took a photograph together so that later she could remember not only a name
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  SPEAKER_00: in her phone, but the person attached to it.
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  SPEAKER_00: We took ours too.
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  SPEAKER_00: I still have it.
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  SPEAKER_00: We were both laughing.
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  SPEAKER_00: And there is something about that picture that makes
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  SPEAKER_00: the whole encounter feel even more meaningful to me now,
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  SPEAKER_00: because at a time when I was struggling to understand how to introduce myself,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: a stranger accidentally gave me a much better question.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we rely too heavily on what do you do?
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  SPEAKER_00: It's convenient.
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  SPEAKER_00: It gives us something immediate to talk about.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it also allows an enormous part of a person to disappear behind an answer.
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  SPEAKER_00: What happens when you don't like your job?
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  SPEAKER_00: When you've just lost it?
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  SPEAKER_00: When you're a mother who has stepped away from work?
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  SPEAKER_00: When you're between careers?
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  SPEAKER_00: When the title after your name no longer feels like you?
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  SPEAKER_00: Or simply,
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  SPEAKER_00: when the most interesting thing about you has absolutely nothing to do
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  SPEAKER_00: with how you earn your living?
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there are better questions.
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  SPEAKER_00: What would I know about you if I had known you for years?
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  SPEAKER_00: What do the people closest to you know that your LinkedIn profile never could?
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  SPEAKER_00: What makes you light up?
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  SPEAKER_00: What part of your story would someone have to know before they really understood you?
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  SPEAKER_00: I think I'm going to keep her question.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not only for those moments when I don't know how to explain who I am,
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  SPEAKER_00: but for the next time I meet someone new.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because perhaps one of the nicest things we can do for another person is give them
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  SPEAKER_00: the opportunity to introduce themselves without asking them for their resume first.
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  SPEAKER_00: Just Julia.