You.
Consciously or not, I think we all are actors in different parts of our life. Everyone talks or dresses a certain way when they are put in a set environment.
I recently had the privilege of speaking with Ali Eslami, a Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind. He was a major factor in my success joining Google, so I’m grateful to be able to call him a friend. We spoke about many topics, but one point that resonated with me the most was his realisation of how we all are actors.
Obviously there are many reasons why we do this, but I think the main reason is because we want to be perceived differently by certain types of people.
At work, I certainly want to be portrayed as someone smart and trustworthy. This has many benefits, but the main one being in hopes of pursuing projects which need a certain degree of responsibility.
At home, I’m simply different around family members.
However, no matter what circumstance I’m in, there’s a certain baseline of traits I carry to keep me sane.
I’ve developed these traits from my favourite characters, but also from personal experiences in life. I acted a certain way and it had a positive reaction, so I continued doing that.
This isn’t me saying you should put on a mask to be someone you simply ain’t. Instead you should be sharing and withdrawing information from your daily interactions that may not fit into that role you play.
The beauty of life is that you could just change your behaviour at any given moment for the right time.
At the end of the day, this idea is nothing new, we all do it in some form.