I Think We Introduce Ourselves Wrong

A friend invited me to this party at a house in Beverly Hills. It was around the strange pandemic era where everyone was building these "live together and build together" houses. The kind of places where someone somehow turns "a bunch of ambitious people in one mansion" into a business model.

I didn't totally know what I was talking into, but I assumed it would be interesting. Creative people. Startup people. Internet people. The kind of people who seem to always know what's happening before everyone else does.

I showed up at this massive house tucked into the hills … which I then understood why it’s called Beverly Hills, and immediately had that very specific feeling of being somewhere that looks exactly like it does in movies. Giant windows. Perfect lighting. A view stretching across all of LA like someone had designed the city purely to be looked at from THIS house.

And almost instantly, I realized I knew absolutely nobody there except my friend. Which normally would be fine. I actually like meeting people. So I started introducing myself, and one by one, people started introducing themselves back.

"Hey, I'm so-and-so, I have a million subscribers on YouTube."

"Hi, I founded a startup with $1M ARR."

"I was just interviewed by blah..."

"I gave a TED Talk about blah..."

And listen, none of these people were rude. That's the important part! They were actually perfectly nice. But I remember standing there realizing everyone seemed to know exactly how to summarize themselves in one line. Cleanly. Efficiently. Like they had all mastered the art of becoming a HEADLINE.

And then someone turned to me and asked THE QUESTION.

"So, what do you do?"

I don’t remember exactly what I said. I think I kind of laughed awkwardly (LOL) and went, “Honestly… I don’t really know.”

Not in a sad way. More in a genuinely confused way. 👉👈

Because I did do things. I worked hard. I cared deeply about stories and creative work and ideas and helping people build things. But suddenly all of that felt impossible to explain in the format the room seemed to operate in.

I didn't have THE sentence. I didn’t have the impressive metric or clean identity marker or polished founder intro. No “I’m building X.” No “I’m known for Y.” No follower count. No company valuation. No concise proof that I deserved to be standing in that living room overlooking Los Angeles.

And I remember having this weird out-of-body moment where I thought: WAIT… is this what life is? Are we all just becoming increasingly optimized elevator pitches for one another?

And honestly, I left that night feeling strange. Not jealous. More unsettled.

Because if all of us eventually learn how to reduce ourselves into one impressive sentence, what gets left out? What happens to the parts of ourselves that are harder to quantify? The curiosity. The wandering. The unfinishedness of becoming.

Chris Anderson talks about how the best TED Talks are not performances of status. They’re really just people offering an idea they genuinely care about. And I think that’s what felt missing to me that night. I didn’t really want to know everyone’s accolades. I wanted to know what they loved. What they couldn’t stop thinking about lately. What kind of work made them lose track of time. What they were scared of building. What they secretly hoped their life might become.

I think about that party a lot now because, truthfully, I still don’t always know what my title is. And maybe that used to embarrass me a little. But now I think there’s something freeing about it too.

Because the older I get, the less interested I am in becoming a perfectly packaged introduction and the more interested I am in becoming an actual person. Someone who follows what fascinates them. Someone who helps make meaningful things with people they love being around. Someone whose life maybe makes a little less sense on paper but feels more alive when you’re actually living it.

I don’t know. Maybe that sounds naive. But I still think there’s something deeply human about wanting to be known for more than the fastest possible summary of yourself.

Maybe instead of asking, “What do you do?”

we should ask: “What are you excited about lately?”

Or: “What’s something you can’t stop thinking about?”

Those answers tell you far more than metrics do. And honestly, years later, I barely remember anyone's follower count or company numbers from that house overlooking Los Angeles. But I still remember the feeling of wondering whether we were all becoming headlines before we became people.