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.”