What does your job actually do

A nine-year-old in Doha asks her uncle what he actually does all day.

He works in marketing, and he has a ready answer for adults. Brand, campaigns, positioning, growth. The words land well at dinner. They land on her like a wall.

So he tries again, more slowly. He helps people decide to buy things. Why would they need help? Because there are a lot of things. Then why do they not just buy the best one? And here he stops, because he does not entirely know.

Explaining something to a child is hard for a specific reason. A child does not accept the vocabulary as a substitute for the idea. Every term has to be turned back into the thing it stands for, and that only works if you know what it stands for. Being good at a job is not the same as understanding it. You can do the work well every day, earn every promotion, and still be running on habit and borrowed phrases.

That is the uncomfortable part. Most of us avoid the plain explanation not because it is beneath us, but because it would show where our understanding ends. It is easier to say that this is simply how the industry works than to go underneath and find out why.

The child is not asking for a simpler answer. She is asking for the real one, and often we only have the familiar one.

The question is worth taking. Anyone who can explain their work to a nine-year-old has had to understand it first. Many of us never quite get round to that.