I used to really, really struggle with introductions. I used to struggle a lot with self-compression. A simple “where are you coming from?” could get really messy — “well, I spent the last month in Berkeley, but right before this I was in San Diego; I just deposited my belongings in a new SF house; you know that I’m British and really all this is just the latest installment in a prolonged, nine-month trip that’s involved becoming resident—”
“The hotel next door, today”
People introduce themselves in different ways. By their role, what they do, their institutional affiliation, what they’re into…
Role
Some people seem to really know who they are. I have never understood this simplicity, but I think it is good to lean into —
You can also use more specific labels and/or lots of them.
What They Do
Some people say what they do. I’ve seen lots of variations on “I write code or something”, which I’ve always found too flippant for how miraculous that is.
Some people move up a meta level, which resonates more with me.
Institutional Affiliations
Some people invoke institutional affiliations:
I used to do this but I now think the strat is to dig deeper.
Outside my circles, some people lead with age / sex / location / nationality / ideology / MBTI / Hogwarts House — I guess ‘group affiliation’ — which (affectionately): dig deeper, get a project, do things and talk about them.
Affinities
Here are some people who like things.
In my eyes, “what are we but our stack and our media?”
Beyond the one-paragraph introduction:
Back to unpacking the one-line intro.
Projects
These can be divided into ‘abstract aims’ —
and ‘concrete, live missions’ —
Both are fire, especially the latter.
If you’re going to pick your fighter from ‘Role, Activities, Affiliations, Affinities, Projects’, I would highly recommend leading with Projects.
I like ‘Projects’ a lot. It’s simple and clean, and it’s probably what I’ll lean into long-term. But what do you do when you have too many and how they fit together is kind of hard to unpack? You panic and everything you say is a lie by omission because you just cannot fit everything in.
My solution: the call to action.
Call to action
“Message me! Talk to me!”
“Try my new app!” “Join my reading group.”
Do things! Let’s be action-to-action models. I’m here to shift your config and you mine, then we can go about our lives better for it…
I’d be excited to hear your ‘call to action’.
Amalgams
Some people do cool amalgams.
You can notice the amount of time you spend on each, the order you pick, and what your aspirational rejig of those parameters might be.
Role + Affiliation + Projects
Activities + Affinities + Affiliation + Projects
Activities + Role + Affiliation + Affinities
Activities + History
History + Activities + Affiliation + Projects
Affiliation + Role + History + Projects
History + Projects
Activities + History + Call to Action
Activities + Projects
Appendix — What Inspired this:
I wrote a self-intro that felt true to me:
Affiliation + Projects + Call to Action + History + Values
And ChatGPT made me edit it to avoid dilution —
Affiliation + Projects + Call to Action
And I think that was probably for the best tbh.
What are the best self-intros you’ve seen?
Great curation! I also really like these " now" pages: https://sive.rs/now
It occurs to me that the solution to this should be mechanistic.
I think since you have your LLM clone (https://lydianottingham.substack.com/p/foreverhaven), you could do PCA on the embedding of your writing to identify your major axes of variation.
I'll check for myself later, but I think the top three components on my writing would be something like:
1. technical content ↔ personal narrative
2. mathematical rigor ↔ cultural commentary
3. politics/sociology ↔ metaphysics
If I feel that something important about me is omitted here, then it suggests that I am not writing about my self correctly (that I'm not being Markovian).