Why ten questions are enough

The first instinct, when you build something that speaks for you, is to give it everything. More input, better output. It feels obviously true, and it isn’t.

A twin isn’t there to reproduce you. It is there to answer what people actually want to know about you, whether they met you last week or have known you for years. Those questions are few, and they repeat. What do you do. Why. What are you proud of. What are you like. What are you up to. Everything else is a follow-up, and a follow-up can be pointed back at you.

The ten for a person, exactly as they appear, with what each lets the twin answer. A business gets its own ten, about where it is, when it opens, how prices work and what it doesn’t do.

The ten

1. What do you do? Say it the way you’d tell someone you just met. Student or between jobs? Say that. The opening line, in the words you would use out loud, so the twin can say what you do without a job title doing the talking.

2. What are you busy with these days? What you are up to now, not two years ago. It is the answer that goes stale first.

3. A friend texts you: “Why do you even do this?” Reply the way you’d really text back. No names. Why. The one question a profile never answers, asked as a text because people are honest in texts and stiff in forms. It is also where the twin picks up your rhythm.

4. Tell me about one piece of work or a project you’re proud of. What did you do, and how did it turn out? No names or details that could identify anyone. One real thing, start to finish. When someone asks “have you done anything like this?”, the twin has a story, not a list.

5. What do people always ask you about? What you are good at, without having to say “I am good at”. Other people have already told you.

6. How did you get into this, and where did you learn it? The short version. Your route in. The twin can answer “where did she learn this?” without inventing a university.

7. What are you like to work with? One good thing, one hard thing. The hard thing is the point. A twin that only says nice things is a brochure. One honest flaw makes the rest believable.

8. What’s a skill, hobby or odd fact about you that would never go on a CV? Something surprising, so the twin reads as a person rather than a profile, and visitors have something to open with.

9. Are you looking for anything right now? Work, an internship, people to work with, or nothing at all? Leave out prices and dates. What you are open to. The twin can repeat what you wrote and stop there. It can’t promise anything for you, so nobody negotiates with a chatbot.

10. What could you talk about for hours if someone asked? What lights you up. Usually the best answer on the page, and the one visitors remember.

Why the eleventh is optional

After the ten there are forty more, in six packs: your work, your story, how you think, the hard questions, what is next, and your twin’s manners. They are for people who want the twin to go deeper.

They are extras for a reason. The ten already carry the conversations that happen. A twin with ten answers can tell someone what you do, why, one thing you did well, what you are like and what you want. An eleventh answer lets the twin cover one more thing; it doesn’t make the first ten work any better.

A quieter reason, too. Everything you write is something the twin will say to a stranger. Ten answers is a page you can read back in a minute and stand behind. Fifty is a document you forget you wrote.

What the twin does with the gaps

Anything the ten don’t cover, the twin doesn’t answer. It says you haven’t written about it and points the visitor to you. That isn’t a gap to patch with more questions; it is what makes the ten safe to use. You also get a list of what it was asked and couldn’t answer, so you can decide what, if anything, to write next.

That is where we start you: ten questions, your words, one link. If you want help with the words, here is what to write in your ten answers. If that sounds like enough, you can make your own twin now.