Personal branding | writing | Best Practices | Artificial Intelligence
The world wants to know who you are! And we’d like to learn about you in your own words.
On your website, your LinkedIn profile, and other places in your professional life like pitch decks or PDF reports, a biography written in first person makes you more approachable.
Most bios are written in detached third person writing. It’s just the facts. Something like: “Mary graduated from university with a degree in economics in 2005.” This is almost always boring and impersonal.
However, telling is your story in first person can be eye-opening. You can provide interesting details. Something like: “After I graduated from university with a degree in economics, I wanted to see what the world offered while considering my career options, so I backpacked through Southeast Asia for a year with my ukulele.”
Especially now in our world of deepfakes, AI generated content, and skepticism, showcasing who you really are to interested people is a smart approach. And it helps to open interesting doors that a dreadful list of accomplishments doesn’t.
To get your creativity flowing, here is the opening paragraph of my LinkedIn profile. More than a hundred people have commented to me about how memorable it is.
“I was fired. Sacked. My ideas were a little too radical for my new bosses. So, I started writing books, speaking at events, and advising emerging companies. That was in 2002 and since then my books have sold over a million copies in 29 languages.”
