How to Write the Sentence You Want Said About You

She was asked to give the toast at a retirement party for somebody she admired, and she took it seriously. Four drafts, every one of them about him. The thing he did in 2009 that nobody else would have done. The way he ran a room without raising his voice. The phone call he made for a junior analyst who never found out.

Driving home, she realized she could not have written that paragraph about herself. Not out of modesty. She is very good at her job and she knows it. She simply had no idea what fifteen words anybody would use.

That is an ordinary position for a competent person, and it is fixable in half an hour. The sentence people will eventually use about you is already being written, one plain week at a time. You can let it accumulate on its own, or you can write the draft yourself and then go make it true.

What is the sentence, and why fifteen words?

It is the line somebody who knows you would use to describe you when you are not in the room, and fifteen words is the constraint that forces a real decision. Anything longer lets you keep three priorities you do not actually have, which is exactly how personal mission statements turn into paragraphs nobody can remember, including the person who wrote them.

The short form does something a long one cannot. It has to be sayable. If you cannot deliver it in one breath, it will never be repeated, and a sentence that never gets repeated is not the sentence people use about you. It is a document.

It helps to see the size of the target. "She hired people nobody else would hire and half of them are running things now" is nineteen words and needs a trim. "He told you the number early, every time" is eight and could carry more. Somewhere in that range there is a version that is specific enough to be about you and short enough to be said at a table. That is the whole target, and it is smaller than the exercise feels before you start.

There is also good evidence that writing about your core values is not a decorative exercise. Cohen and Sherman's review of self-affirmation work in the Annual Review of Psychology found that brief writing about personal values can improve outcomes in education, health and relationships, sometimes months or years later, largely because it changes how a person reads the pressure in front of them. Fifteen words is that exercise with a job attached.

How do I write mine without it sounding corporate?

Write about people and behavior, never about categories. Cut every word that names a job title, an industry, or an adjective you would find on a performance review, and whatever survives is usually close to the true sentence.

Three passes gets most people there.

Pass one, write it badly. Get anything down. "A visionary leader driving transformational outcomes" is a fine bad draft because it shows you what you have absorbed rather than chosen.

Pass two, put a person in it. A sentence with no other person in it is usually a resume line. "He made three careers possible and never once took the credit" is a sentence. "She told people the truth early enough for them to do something about it" is a sentence. Both name a behavior somebody on the receiving end would recognize.

Pass three, cut to fifteen. Every word you delete raises the price of the ones that survive. Delete the adjectives first, then the qualifiers, then the job.

Run one final check. Could a colleague say this about you with a straight face today, or only in the version of you that exists after next year? Both answers are useful. The first means you have a description. The second means you have a target, which is better.

How do I check whether it is actually true?

Audit last month, not next year. Open your calendar and your sent messages for the past four weeks and mark every block a stranger holding your sentence would have predicted, then count what percentage of your working hours those blocks add up to.

Next year is where people hide. Everybody's plan for next year matches their sentence perfectly, because next year has no traffic in it. Last month is evidence. It contains the meeting you agreed to out of habit, the thing you did well that nobody asked for, and the two hours you gave somebody without putting it anywhere.

While you are in there, run a second column: who was I useful to. Name the people, not the projects. Most people find this column fuller than they expected and completely unrecorded, which is worth knowing because the fifteen words that survive a decade are almost always about that column rather than about output.

Do not score yourself out of ten on any of this. The count is a measurement, and the only thing you need from it is a number you can compare against next month. Twenty percent of your hours pointing at your sentence is a workable starting position for somebody with a real job and a full calendar. Zero percent is not a character problem. It is a scheduling result, and scheduling is something you already know how to fix.

What if last month does not match the sentence?

Then you have found the useful part, and the fix is one calendar change this week rather than a new life. A gap of a few hours is a scheduling problem. A gap of everything is a sentence problem, and it means you wrote the sentence you admire instead of the one you would defend.

Sheldon and Elliot's work on self-concordance is the reason this matters more than it looks. Goals that line up with what a person actually values get more effort and are more likely to be reached, and reaching them does more for the person than reaching the borrowed kind. So the audit is not a discipline exercise. It is a check on whether you are spending your considerable energy on the thing you would pick if you were choosing on purpose.

If the gap is small, move one recurring block this week and leave everything else alone. If the gap is total, rewrite the sentence rather than the calendar, because a sentence you cannot live in is just a nicer way to feel behind.

Fifteen words are a decision rule, not a poem

The payoff shows up the next time somebody asks you for something. A five year plan cannot help you at four in the afternoon, and a fifteen word sentence can, because you can run a request against it in about two seconds. Does agreeing to this make the sentence more true or less true. That is faster than any framework and it is portable across every decision you make this quarter.

It also survives a change of job, which no plan built around a title ever does. Reorganizations, industries and employers move, and a sentence about how you treat people and what you insist on moves with you intact. That is the practical reason the fifteen words leave out the job. Titles are rented. The behavior is yours, and the behavior is what anybody would actually say about you at a party twenty years from now.

Fifteen words are also too easy to lose in a notes app, so put them somewhere physical. Then keep going. The sentence is not a request to slow down or to want less of anything. It is a filter that lets you say yes harder to the things that count, for another twenty years, without the annual crisis about whether any of it was aimed anywhere.

Sources

• Annual Review of Psychology, The psychology of change: self-affirmation and social psychological intervention
• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: the self-concordance model