{"id":310,"date":"2013-05-17T15:25:33","date_gmt":"2013-05-17T15:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scqa.hult.edu\/en\/news\/blogs\/2013\/may\/should-you-let-your-career-define-you-the-digital-careerist\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T11:03:03","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T11:03:03","slug":"should-you-let-your-career-define-you-the-digital-careerist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hult.edu\/blog\/should-you-let-your-career-define-you-the-digital-careerist\/","title":{"rendered":"Should You Let Your Career Define You? [The Digital Careerist]"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Adam Britten, Social Media Manager for 16 Handles<\/a>, blogger for The Digital Careerist<\/a>, Hult Alumni – Class of 2012.<\/p>\n

Sunday night, I received a very reassuring email from my boss. She said \u201cAdam, I don\u2019t expect you to answer emails on weekends\u201d after I had sent her a file that evening. This was nice to read, as I like to let my weekends be my own personal time, but I sometimes feel guilty when I arrive at the office on Monday morning and someone says \u201cdid you see my email?\u201d and I have to answer \u201cnot yet.\u201d But this email from my boss reminded me that my weekends ARE my own, and that my life is more than my job.<\/p>\n

I feel like many of my peers are letting their careers define them. And if you asked many of my \u201cdistant friends\u201d (those friends from college who you are still connected to on Facebook, but who you haven\u2019t seen in person in at least a year for whatever reason) they\u2019d probably describe me as \u201cthat social media guy.\u201d As much as I take pride in the fact that my friends, former classmates, and colleagues come to me when they have a question about how to run the Twitter account for the company they work for, or\u00a0how to ask for a recommendation on LinkedIn<\/a>, I worry that this is the\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a0thing they remember me as. (Ok, they might also remember me as the guy who was\u00a0way too obsessed with theme parks and Pixar movies<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

But I want my peers to think of me as a more multidimensional person. When I think about my group of friends from college, there are a few that I only know as \u201cthe guy who works at JPMorgan\u201d or \u201cthat girl in law school\u201d because they are completely focused on their carers, almost to a fault. I\u2019m sure their parents are proud of those titles, but I\u2019m far more impressed by my friend who I summarize as \u201cthe girl who works in production at Macy\u2019s who is teaching herself violin\u201d or my other friend who is \u201can operations manager at a theatre festival who I run into at SoulCycle all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

So yesterday I thought a lot \u00a0about what I want my friends to define me as. No, I thought about what I want to define MYSELF as. I don\u2019t want my personal\u00a0elevator pitch<\/a>\u00a0to simply be \u201cI work in social media.\u201d I want it to reflect a complete person, and not just an office job. If I had my way, people would know me as:<\/p>\n