If you decided at age five that you wanted to be a doctor or a teacher and you're doing that now as an adult, this blog post likely won't interest you. You have a great answer to that common question, What do you do? Everyone knows (or more accurately, thinks they know) exactly what it means to be a doctor or teacher.
If, however, you have zigzagged through your working life (for example, working as both an electronic engineer and an orchestral conductor), then you might enjoy the new book How To Be Everything by Emilie Wapnick. The author runs a popular website for people she calls "multipotentialites" who tend to be good at many things. She's also given a TED talk, "Why Some of Us Don't Have One True Calling." In her own background, she's studied music, law, and film making.
One of my favorite parts of this book helps you answer that "What do you do?" question. Emilie offers several approaches to this problem in the book and in this blog post. The one I liked involved describing your "why," tying together an action that you do with an audience. She suggests, "I help __ do ___." In other words, instead of describing the pottery classes you teach to kids, the volunteer work you do at the children's library, and the talks on creativity you've given to Girl Scout troops, you could just say, "I help kids express their creativity."
In my brainstorming, I took this idea a step further and started thinking about creating fictional characters. I made a random list of actions and audiences and had fun placing them together. There's no drawing requirement for this exercise, but I found that some of the combinations were so funny that I couldn't resist. Here's one of my results:
So, what do you do?