Institutions are biography compressors. When somebody asks for my story in a context where I have to actually answer non-flippantly, every non-institutional year of my life adds about a minute to my story, but every institutional year can be efficiently explained in 10 seconds.
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Titles are the ultimate compressors. "Professor" or "VP of Sales" communicates entire volumes. Super shorthand. To communicate free-agent life content equivalent to "I am a professor at X university" (3 seconds) would take me like 3 minutes.
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"Professor" communicates a whole pattern. It says you have a certain pie chart of activities. It says you publish in certain ways, and supervise other people in certain ways. I do very similar things but I have to explain all of it because most people don't know any of it.
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The weakness of young self-descriptors like "blogger" is that they are not tight. They refer to about 100x broader scope of life patterns than say "professor"
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I need a compact way to introduce myself. When I introduce myself as "blogger and consultant" and people later find out everything hiding under there, they sometimes react like I've been misleading or putting a false humility posture. No, I just don't have a compression.
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Pitch yourself like a movie "Consultant meets Batman" (or whatever)
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If I introduced myself that way to new people I’d seem like an asshole. Which is not entirely wrong.
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What “profession” do you list on your tax returns? I end up with “financial advisor”, which is right in a meta way, but so wrong in the descriptive use for which it was directly intended by the US gov’t. And that makes me happy.
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But is so right about this. Saying “I am large; I contain multitudes” to people when they ask what I do ... just doesn’t cut it. Neither does “writer” or its diminutive, “blogger”.
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doesn't seem like traditional compression (physician, lawyer, professor, grad student, soldier) gives an accurate pie chart of activities to relative laypeople either, tho. interesting that ppl assume you've been misleading them
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That’s why I wrote in my bio “lossy compression not recommended” :) Even more true for your case!
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