Character or Situation — What Defines You?

Marketing meetings are often alike. Marketeers seek numbers, executioners look at the possibilities, artists fumble with the deadlines, and the essence — mostly — gets lost somewhere the middle.
A metaphor for life, perhaps.
Last week we had a marketing meeting. The new design team on board was being introduced to the brand personality. When the string of adjectives grew longer and I noticed eyes beginning to turn glassy, I threw in a noun. A very (very) famous Fantasy literature character.
“This brand, as a person, is spirited and wise. A joyful *super hero*.”
Heads flipped around.
“But *super hero* wasn’t a joyful person. He had the weight of the world on his shoulders.”
The Design team lead objected. It seemed like a fair objection. It seems like a fair objection. Most of us understand this objection. Heck, we live this complaint as an identity. We carry it as the ultimate badge of honour; along with the weight of the world.
The irate object set me thinking of the ever intriguing question: what defines us?
Who am I?
The question that has baffled philosophers for millennia, has birthed religions, and created heretics. The question that often seeps in the night sky with the shades of the dusk, and crawls onto your mirror when you look at your face. We are all familiar with it. We all have tried to answer it at one point or another. One of the most famous attempts at answering it has been from the unarguably controversial personality from the mystic’s world in 922 AD.
Ana ul Haq, Mansur al Hallaj had said.
“I am the Truth.”
He was stoned to death at the order of the Caliph of the truthful.
From Nietzsche to Jung, from Descartes to Bertrand Russell, every progression of human thought has been under the same context: the need to define what describes us.
In that meeting, however, on the last working day of the week as the sunless afternoon was embracing a gloomy evening, unperturbed by the implications of the objection, I chirped gaily,
“He has taken off the weight of world from his shoulders now. Imagine that he has.”
Imagined or not, the meeting came to an end with a workable understanding of the brand persona.
The thought stayed we me though.
I realized I remembered the *super hero* for his person — and not just by the way the story meets him. The realization amused me. The way the story chose to meet him, actually, only made his character speak louder. He, to me, thus seemed like a joyful person DESPITE being in a situation where he carried the weight of the world.
But how often do we choose to define the lead person of our story by the character exhibited, and not by the situations meted?
Lets do an experiment.
Keep a track of the 12 waking, and potentially, busy hours of your day. After each hour make a note of the adjective you identify yourself with. At the end of the day you’ll have a dozen adjectives. As you scroll through these you’ll notice that majority of the adjectives are reflection of the emotional states you were experiencing at that particular moment in time, and not necessarily what you identify with outside that specific situation.
Character is something beyond the transitional situations. It is the grid that defines your framework.
Think of a songbird, for example. Songbirds — identified for their musical prowess — make up almost half of the world’s 10,000 bird species. They perform their musical talent using a specialized voice box called a syrinx, an organ located where the trachea splits into two bronchial tubes. They sing to proclaim and defend their territories. They sing to attract mating partners. They call to communicate a nearby threat or a predator’s location. They learn new notes and mimic. Right from the stage of hatching, the memory is at work in taking down notes. As nestlings they keep learning the tricks of the trade and as grown-ups keep on practicing till they ace their own individual gift.
A songbird is a vocal gymnast. It is not the situation that makes them sing, instead it is the ability to sing that they use accordingly when facing a situation: be it singing for their partner or warning of a predator. The ability to sing is what defines them. Their music making is their character.
How common it is for you to identify yourself in terms that aren’t situational? What five adjectives explain your music in a world of eight billion other instruments?
Underneath that cloak, what stuff is the legend of your story made up of?
