Who We Are and What We Do

I have really been thinking about the separation of work, my start-up businesses, my music career and my personal life. There has been a great discussion started by Penelope Trunk over at Brazen Careerist about doing what you are and not what you love. Sam Davidson, of Cool People Care, took the discussion into the tune of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs have to do what we love, that’s why we started our start up in the first place. We felt so passionate about something that we stepped outside of corporate culture and made our own rules.

I would say that I do what I like, not what I love. I love making music and performing. Due to outside circumstances, that part of my life has been postponed. So what did I like about the music gig? The marketing part.

I became intrigued with social networking and meeting people in Virginia and NYC without ever stepping a foot in these cities. I was getting them excited about my music and getting them involved with the promotion of my products.

Now that I am working for a large corporation, I am becoming the face of our organization more and more everyday. My name is directly attached to social networks, blog posts, interviews and videos. I have no problem with this, or so I thought.

After my presentation on Tuesday, I was speaking with 2 of the directors over at the Tampa Bay Workforce Alliance Scholars. We got into a conversation about how to separate ourselves with their work persona and their personal persona. One of the girls, Rebeca, stated that she doesn’t ever use her real name or reveal any information about her personal life online. While I find this hard to believe with a Myspace and LinkedIn profile, posting nothing about yourself online is not an easy task to ask someone of the Millennial generation to do. We have profiles on Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, make videos in YouTube and email photos from camera phones to Flickr pages.

So what do I do? What do you do when you are in a similar situation? I know one of my counterparts who has the same problem as I do. We have to constantly maintain a professional online personally so our corporate careers do not suffer. We both also have outside businesses that we are continuing to grow and are trying hard to build and maintain credibility for.

These lines are crossed everyday. Should I use a persona other than my real name? I already think that I do. I use my music name or persona a lot online, G-Ro. And while it might sound silly to some, it is building a brand for myself and my company, while not compromising my given name.

I do what I like, and would love to do what I love. I must maintain credibility at all ends to continue to do the things I feel are important for myself and my family. I would love to hear form some people who have something to say on this subject and what they are doing in similar situations. I’m signing off to go and do what I love because I love it, not because I get paid for it.