Why Does All Business Media Sound Like It Was Written in a WeWork in Brooklyn?
the geographical bias in business no one is talking about
I was watching an unexpected video from content creator Kimberly Nicole Foster when she threw a statement out there that immediately made the wheels in my head start turning. On the topic of Emma Grede and the (very intentional and cunning) controversy around her new (business? self help? some other, secret third thing?) book “Start With Yourself”, Kimberly posed a thought (not written here!!) that led me to ask myself an amazing question:
Are we doing ourselves a disservice by only listening to business content from the coastal elites?
What is a “Coastal Elite” exactly?
This is one of those things that doesn’t have a universally agreed upon definition. But since I grew up on the coast (NYC to be exact), I think I have a pretty concrete idea of who these people are. They are people who are clustered along the coasts (e.g., NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston) that are essentially today’s poster-children for what was once deemed the ‘yuppie’— which stands for ‘young, urban professional’. Coastal Elites are college educated, have extensive resumes, are worldly, career driven— and have a vastly different reality than the rest of America.
The sentiments around business that we hear almost exclusively these days come from people like this. I don’t think their sentiments are inherently a bad thing, but we end up in a feedback loop of advice regurgitated by the same person in a different font. If for no other reason, listening to slight variations of the same beliefs over and over creates what the kids like to call an “echo chamber”. (It’s me, I’m the kids.) As Kimberly mentioned in her YouTube video, Emma Grede and folks like her are clustered in the same place, espousing the same beliefs. However, when you try to take those beliefs to a broader audience, we are swiftly reminded that this is not the norm for other people. You then further exacerbate the problem when you paint your largely insular advice as the de facto advice for anyone with ambitions. And presuming the coast is your only real experience of America, there are large swaths of people who do not relate to anything you’re saying.
Let me clock myself for a second.
I want to reiterate….I am from the coast. By some definitions maybe I am a coastal elite (thanks college!). I resonate with much of the content from these types of people, but that’s because it quite literally reflects my reality. I couldn’t dream of living in middle America (no shade, but connecting flights to get anywhere, ever would break me). But that said, I know enough to know that you run into a huge roadblock when you try to take coastal elite type advice and peddle it back to the general populous. Case in point: I live in the American South currently and the idea of being a ‘3 hour mum’ resonates very differently here than it would in Manhattan, where women routinely swap advice about hiring nannies. I know enough about the American work landscape to know that it means different things to different people. So, why is the same kind of person being passed the mic over and over?
So…..what are the business sentiments of the rest of us?
I think that all depends on where you look. I also think it depends on where you are culturally. I think if you still are in the Lean In era of things, here’s the good news: there is PLENTY of advice, old and new, for you to binge. But increasingly, more and more people are moving away from that. They leaned in and when they zoomed out, they realized they had a ton of work to look forward to and not much else. They received promotions and moved up the ladder at the expense of other things. And then when COVID hit, it was a wake-up call for many people. Frankly, I think workers’ sentiments are completely different in a post-COVID world and nobody is addressing it. The problem isn’t Emma Grede and the coastal elites per se, it’s the lack of diversity in business stories. I said as much in a TikTok video recently.
I don’t want this to be critique with no construction. So here’s a gift from me to you:
If you’re anything like me, you are at an intersection of ambition and introspection. You want to do good work and build great things, but you also want to make a life that you look back on fondly at the end of it. You might be thinking, “but there’s nothing out there that touches on this intersection”. There is, but there is digging involved to find it. Thankfully, I want to find it for you.
So my first gift to you is a short list of books that have been written for people like you. These are musings on being a human that works, but that still cares about the work of being human. Please let me know how this impacts your life for the better! And consider joining this community because your voice is important.
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