Why is “What do you do?” so hard to answer?
ISSUE #010
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Someone asks what you do. Easy question, right? Then you open your mouth and somehow start explaining the history, the context, the four different ways the work shows up, who it helps, what you technically don’t do, and one important caveat you feel weirdly obligated to mention even though nobody asked.
Meanwhile, you can practically feel the other person’s eyes glaze over.
I know this one well. When you spend a lot of time inside complicated work, explaining it simply can feel weirdly difficult because you know all the nuance. You can see the connections. You understand why the obvious two-sentence description is not technically the whole story.
So you keep adding until the explanation is accurate... but almost impossible to follow.
Knowing more can make clarity harder
There is a reason the person outside your work can sometimes describe it more simply than you can: they do not know everything. You do.
You know the programs, projects, history, people, exceptions, internal language, future plans, and six things currently being redesigned behind the scenes. When someone asks what your organization does, your brain has access to the entire filing cabinet.
The other person does not need the filing cabinet. They need the folder label.
That distinction matters.
Decide what they need to understand first
This is where people get tangled up. We try to explain everything that is true instead of deciding what is most important for this person to understand right now.
Those are different jobs.
If you run a nonprofit with seven programs, the answer probably is not listing all seven programs. If your role touches strategy, operations, communications, planning, and the random problems everyone brings to you because apparently you looked available... you probably do not need to recite your job description either.
Start one level higher. Ask yourself: What is the common thread through all of this?
What problem keeps showing up? What becomes easier, better, or possible because this work exists? That is usually much closer to the explanation people need first.
Give them the headline before the footnotes
I used to think being precise meant including all the nuance immediately. What it often meant was making people work way too hard to figure out my point.
Now I think of it more like this:
Headline first. Details if they care.
You might say, “We help families find stable housing.” Then, if they want to know how, you can explain the programs.
Or: “I help our team turn big priorities into work people can actually execute.” Then you can talk about planning, systems, communication, or whatever else lives underneath it.
The first sentence does not have to carry the entire weight of your work. It just has to give the other person somewhere to stand.
Try the “because” test
If you are struggling to find the headline, this is a simple place to start:
We do ______ because ______.
The first blank tells me what you do. The second usually gets closer to why anyone should care.
For example: We run after-school arts programs because kids in our community need more places to create, belong, and be seen.
Or: I build simple operating systems because important work gets messy fast when priorities and ownership are unclear.
You may never use that exact sentence publicly. That’s fine. The exercise forces you to separate the activity from the point of the activity, which is where a lot of clarity starts showing up.
Then test it on an actual human
Not your website. Not ChatGPT. A human.
Tell someone what you do in one or two sentences and watch what happens. Do they immediately ask a useful follow-up question? Good. Do they repeat it back in roughly the way you meant it? Even better.
Do they stare at you politely and say, “Ohhh... interesting”? You may have more work to do. 😆
You are not testing whether your sentence sounds impressive. You are testing whether it creates understanding.
Clear does not mean simplistic
Your work may genuinely be complicated. You may serve different groups, solve interconnected problems, or operate inside a system that cannot be explained neatly in twelve words.
You do not need to flatten all of that. You just need to decide what comes first.
Clarity is sequencing. Give someone the part they need in order to understand the next part. Then, if the conversation continues, add the nuance.
You can always tell them more. It is much harder to recover after telling them everything at once.
So the next time someone asks what you do and you feel the ramble starting, resist the urge to explain the whole machine.
Give them the headline. Let them ask for the footnotes.
Cheers to getting unscattered,
Put this into practice.
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