Cosplaying Business

I’m a "businessman.”

What does that even mean?

I keep thinking about this idea that there’s a “proper” way of being a business person, and perversely I find myself exploring what it is to wear that outfit sometimes, and…I enjoy it.

I’ve just about come to terms with the fact that I’m a scruffy, soft, creative person, at the core. I’d mostly always embraced that, but my flirting with ‘big business’, and actually thinking back to when I did some work experience where you had to wear suits, had me operating more in that mould and therefore adopting more of the traits associated with the corporate world.

A lot of the time, and certainly how it’s presented to us in the West as we go through school, the idea of being an elite, or having success, is arguably to work in a big building, to wear a suit, to drive a shiny car and to play golf and holiday in luxury destinations. To operate well in that space, you’re short, sharp, controlled. You assert authority and understand your place in the order of things.

Curiously, whilst I’ve found this to be mostly the case, there are some quite brilliant exceptions where scruffy, soft creatives have done extraordinary things, yet you may likely miss it.

It’s enjoyable when these two types of people meet, as well - typically one has arrived in the room via following very structured pathways, and the other from ignoring them entirely.

Anyways.

Despite discovering that corporate life is not for me, I can happily admit that I like to borrow from that culture on occasion, purely for fun. Why? Well because I realised that I like wearing outfits as a means of motivating myself to do things. That is, to imagine I am a thing, in order to act like it. (I should imagine we all do that - you’ll have to check with a psychologist). So in terms of ‘businessman’, there are days where I like to embody a bit of that.

I’ll wear something simple and discrete, and go and work somewhere corporate-feeling. WeWorks and co-working spaces are great for this. I’ll be doing my usual sound-related work - but I’ll approach it with a little more focus. Having everyone around me tap-tapping away has me tackling those more mundane admin tasks with a little more focus and intensity (look up body doubling and co-working as an act of focus driving).

I like going up and down to the coffee machine, buzzing in and out of different floors with my ID card to use the loos and hopping out at lunch to a high street sandwich chain.

I don’t know what it is, but the sense of being a worker-bee once in a while is a refreshing break from sitting on my own in a creative space. I guess I came through a school system which was the training ground for this world, so it’s engrained in me to some extent to get some comfort from working this way (note: I really liked most of my school experience, for which I’m lucky).

I’ve also come to learn that there of course is no “proper” way to be a business person, and that in reality the diversity of people doing business is huge - it just looks like…being a person.

With all this I guess it’s dawning on me that actually business is something I’m really passionate about, and spend a lot of time doing and learning about. And because a lot of the more formal and traditional sources of information about business come from the more structured/corporate world, I think it can tickle the imposter syndrome in me, and in part me wearing that outfit some days is an attempt to see how I fit in.

What’s cool now though is there’s so many more sources of business education, coming from much less corporate people, and so it’ll be interesting to see how that impacts things over time. Is there a future where we see “suits” less as the major “business person” archetype?

I doubt it, but whilst that serves - for me at least - as an extreme outfit, I’ll continue to have fun trying it on occasionally, especially if it helps me get these damn emails done.

TTFN,

Will