Definitions help. They compress a thousand pages into a spine you can grab. They let strangers coordinate, managers sort, clinicians name the ache, software guess your next click. But the same squeeze flattens. The shortcut swallows the road. The bigger map fades to a brand-colored napkin. Ask a child what they are and they don’t give you grammar. They give you blur—running, drawing, building, laughing through a mouthful of dirt. Ask an adult and they hand you a box with a sticker on it—lawyer, parent, founder, designer. The world loves boxes. Boxes stack. Boxes sit still long enough to be shelved. But you are not shelf-stable. Life leaks. That’s the knot inside “What are you?”—the way a tidy noun keeps trying to choke a living verb.
We chase crisp answers because ambiguity chews our nerves. “I’m a corporate lawyer” lands cleaner than the armful you’re actually carrying—advocate, parent, caretaker, poet, amateur cook, neighbor, citizen, wanderer. Titles are sedatives. They make the dinner table orderly. And order always charges a fee. Names harden incentives.
A better reply to “What are you?” is a stack of practices. Not “I’m a writer,” but “I write every day.” Not “I’m a strategist,” but “I study constraints until more doors appear.” Verbs keep the hinge oiled. They travel across seasons. They make process the point and smuggle growth into the answer.
Companies etch taglines to sharpen their outline, then become allergic to change because the line made them legible. Product–market fit freezes into product–market lockup. Teams ship safe work to protect a sentence on a website. Build definitions with pores. Keep the promise plain and the paths plural. “We help small businesses trust their legal decisions” carries more work—and leaves more room—than “We sell templates.” One points north; the other dead-ends into a brochure rack.
Refusing every label is another prison. Pilots run checklists. Patients need a name for what hurts. Startups sketch ideal customers so they don’t wander into traffic. Use a simple rule—define so you can operate, not so you can exist. Treat definitions as tools, not altars. Keep them editable. Review them like pilots review weather—regularly, eyes up, ready to reroute.
If definition narrows you, it also narrows your sightline on others.
From the sidewalk, mastery looks like a noun. From the workshop, it’s a pile of verbs. The surgeon’s steady economy, the advocate’s one-sentence frame, the engineer who deletes more code than they write—none of that arrived by title. It arrived by years of noticing, iterating, refining, discarding. The iron of repetition. The quiet ache of discipline. The faith to keep throwing yourself against the grain until the grain gives.
Let definition be a snapshot, not a sentence. Keep your nouns provisional and your verbs in motion. Write your bio in pencil. Keep the eraser warm.
Be the current, not the container.