How to choose your ten words
4 min read
Ten words is not a CV and not a label set. It is the ten things most present in your head right now. The more concrete they are, the more the portrait sounds like you — and the better the people you meet.
Skip the adjectives
Kind, fun, ambitious — everyone writes those, so they carry no information. The AI can only hand back the same sentence to everyone.
Use things you can see: rain, a second-hand bookshop, a 2am convenience store, badminton on Wednesdays, your mother's soup. Concrete words carry their own feeling.
Keep one word only you would write
At least one of the ten should be oddly specific: a place name, a fragment of a song, a cat that is no longer around, a small thing only you notice.
That word is usually where the most accurate line of your portrait comes from. Ten generic words produce a generic portrait.
Let the words contradict each other
People are inconsistent. Solitude next to noise, stability next to elsewhere — that is not a mistake, that is accurate.
Contradiction turns a portrait from 'someone who enjoys life' into 'someone moving between two lives'. The second is easier to want to meet.
Write in eighteen minutes, then stop
Do not look words up, do not polish, do not ask a friend whether it sounds good. First reactions are closest to your current state.
Then ask three questions: which word did I add to look good? Which one is too abstract? If I could keep only five, which five?
Questions
- Can I submit ten words more than once?
- Yes, rewrite any time. A rewrite regenerates your portrait; the old one stops being shown, and existing conversations are unaffected.
- Can I leave some blank?
- No — exactly ten, all different. If you are stuck, list ten small things you did yesterday; it is faster than staring at the box.
- Can I write in Chinese?
- Yes, and mixing languages is fine. The portrait follows your interface language.