One Month of Telling the Truth About My Job — and the Opportunities It Flushed Out
Photo: U.S. Navy; The original uploader was Quercusrobur at English Wikipedia.., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I had a pitch. Everyone does. Mine was thirty seconds, rehearsed in the shower, engineered to sound impressive without sounding like I was trying to sound impressive. "I'm a writer and content strategist helping brands find their voice" — that kind of airless, focus-grouped sentence that makes people's eyes glaze over while they nod politely and reach for the chips.
Then a guy at a backyard cookout in Columbus asked me the question, I launched into the pitch, and he responded with the most devastating sentence in the English language: "Cool, cool. You want another burger?"
That stung enough to spark an experiment. For one month, I would answer "What do you do?" with nothing but the plain truth. No polish, no positioning, no buzzwords. Just an honest sentence, spoken like a person.
The Rules
Simple ones:
- Answer in one or two plain sentences.
- No industry jargon — if my mom wouldn't use the word, neither would I.
- Follow the answer with a genuine question about them.
That last rule mattered. This wasn't about monologuing; it was about seeing what honest language does to a conversation.
What Actually Came Out of My Mouth
Instead of the pitch, I started saying things like: "I write for a living — mostly essays and articles about creative work, and I'm building my own site where that's the whole focus."
Notice what's missing: "strategist," "solutions," "helping brands leverage." Notice what's present: an actual human doing an actual thing.
Week One: It Was Genuinely Awkward
The honest answer is less impressive-sounding than the pitch, at least at first. At my barber shop, when I gave the plain version, the guy cutting my hair said, "So like, you write blog posts?" And instead of correcting him upward, I said "Yeah, kind of — but longer, and hopefully better."
We ended up talking for twenty minutes about a newsletter he wanted to start for his shop. Before the cape came off, he'd asked if I'd help him with it.
Week Two: The Filter Effect Kicked In
Here's where it got interesting. The polished pitch attracted vague interest — lots of "oh nice, cool" responses that went nowhere. The honest answer attracted specific interest from the right people and confused the wrong ones. A guy at a networking event heard my plain answer and visibly deflated — he'd been scanning for someone who "did content." Wrong fish, and I'd just saved us both twenty minutes of small talk.
Meanwhile, a woman running a small design studio perked up at "I write about creative work on my own site" and asked if I took freelance assignments. She became a client by the end of the month.
Plain language, it turns out, is a filter. It repels people who want a vendor and attracts people who want you.
Week Three: I Stopped Performing
By the third week, something subtler happened. The pitch had always made me feel slightly like a fraud — like I was selling a version of myself I couldn't quite deliver. Saying it plainly removed that tax. I was just a guy who writes. If you need a guy who writes, great. If not, also great.
The confidence that came from that was worth more than any wording tweak. People can smell the difference between someone describing their work and someone performing it.
Week Four: The Barbecue Redemption
End of the month, different cookout, same question. I gave the plain answer. The guy who asked — a project manager I'd never met — said, "Wait, my sister runs a nonprofit and can't write a grant to save her life. Can I connect you two?"
No pitch I've ever rehearsed produced a warm referral that fast.
What I Kept After the Experiment
The month ended; the habit didn't. Here's my takeaway: your elevator pitch is optimized for a context that barely exists — thirty seconds in an actual elevator with a decision-maker. Real life is barbershops and backyards and awkward conference hallways. In those rooms, plain beats polished every time.
So try it. One month. Tell people what you actually do, in words you'd actually say. The right opportunities will lean in. The wrong ones will drift away. That's not a loss — that's the filter working.
