At the end of May, I went to three different events. A celebration of life, a church cookout, and a neighborhood block party.

As usually happens when meeting new people, we started talking about what we do for a living, meaning I’d give the same answer I’ve been giving for nearly seven and a half years.

I draw summaries of meetings.

And the same thing happened next, each time. The other person nodded. They sort of didn’t really get it. So I’d reach for my phone to show them a picture of the work I’d done recently, because the picture made the description make sense. A little bit.

Three events, three reaches for the phone, same lame description each time.

The word sinking it

The problem is really just one word. Meetings.

Boring.

Nobody wakes up pumped for a meeting. Nobody shouts with glee, “Oh, I’ve got three of those today, nice!”

The word typically brings out the worst version of itself. The Zoom call you ducked out of, the conference room you didn’t want to be in, the recurring weekly with upper management.

When I said “meetings,” I was handing these new folks the “worst” place they could picture, and asking them to get excited about me drawing in it. Yawn.

What I should have been saying was workshops, conferences, offsites, and keynotes. Places where people show up on purpose. Places where the agenda was built with care. Places people are excited to go.

And here I am saying meetings. For seven and a half years.

The other rooms

The reality of the situation is much closer to this:

If I do my job right at the workshop, the conference, the offsite, or during the keynote, your meetings will actually get better.

The meetings themselves are downstream. They’re the things that get easier when the upstream gathering went well. The actual job is upstream. I’m in the rooms where the decisions get framed, before any meeting is scheduled to repeat them.

A friend and messaging consultant walked me through a different frame the other day. The idea is to lead with the problem the listener already feels, before you ever say your job title.

For me, that sounds like: you know how nobody really remembers what happened at last quarter’s offsite? You know how the takeaways disappeared by Tuesday? I’m drawing in the room to make sure everything sticks.

If I went back to last weekend, I'd say it differently.

I'd tell whoever asked that I work events that matter to organizations. The offsites, the workshops, the keynotes where the real decisions get made. I draw the things people want to remember.

“What do you do for a living?”

From now on, it’s better answers and none of them include the word meeting. The phone stays in the pocket.

Grateful you are here,

Wade

PS - Want to see what I do for a living? Let's talk about sketching your next live event. Hit reply to this email.