Legibility comes in stages

“The work that brings you alive hasn't learned to pay you — yet.”

By now you may have unforgotten a few things. A room in your inner home you'd stopped visiting. A set list of things you know in your bones. A sign you've been hiding behind, and what's underneath it.

And then you try to say some of it to someone. A new acquaintance at a party. A friend who asks how it's going. The "about" page of a website you keep meaning to finish.

It comes out wrong. Too big, too vague, too strange. Or so small and sensible it sounds like someone else.

When that happens, the first explanation to arrive is usually that there's something wrong with you. Everyone else seems to manage. So you set about fixing yourself. You get more polished, more strategic, more palatable. You read the books, take the course, have the sessions.

And every adjustment seems to confirm the diagnosis.

There's another explanation.

Nothing is missing

Notice what isn't the problem. It isn't effort: most people in this position are already running flat out, and that's part of the trouble. It isn't talent, because the people who've seen your work up close say it's good. It isn't care. You care far more than is convenient. And it isn't confidence, because you've done the inner work, probably several times over.

In the 1990s there was a computer game I loved called The Incredible Machine. Each level gave you a puzzle and a toolbox of improbable parts, and you had to arrange them into a Rube Goldberg contraption. The cat chases the mouse, which runs over the balloons, which are being fanned towards the button, which lights the torch, which burns the fuse, which fires the cannon, which bounces off the trampoline and, if you've got it right, rings the bell.

The first time I put a screenshot of it up in a talk, I had no idea whether it would land. People laughed, and then I watched them get it. It's the part of that talk people still mention.

Here's what I loved about that game. Nothing was ever missing from the toolbox. Every level could be solved with the parts you were given. The whole game was getting those pieces into an order the energy could travel through.

A multidimensional life looks a lot like one of those levels. From the outside it's chaotic and busy, with parts that don't seem to belong together. What if nothing is missing for you either? What if the pieces just aren't yet in an order anything can travel through?

That order has a name, and it's not the one you'd expect.

A word with two meanings

Legibility has an everyday meaning everyone grasps at once: handwriting you can read. It also has a longer, darker history. In Seeing Like a State, the political scientist James C. Scott describes legibility as something large institutions impose so the world becomes readable to the administrative eye. Surnames. Street grids. Plantation forests planted in rows. The census, with its neat boxes for messy lives.

Whatever fits the boxes gets counted. Whatever doesn't risks being ignored, erased, or forced into a shape that doesn't suit it. As the saying goes, what can't be counted doesn't count.

We learn to do this to ourselves. If the world mostly rewards clear, simple roles, we fit ourselves to them. Someone whose practice is storytelling ends up choosing between "educator" and "content creator", because those are the words the room already has. We make our practice legible at the cost of making it real.

The everyday version happens at parties. It's the ugly question this sequence started with. "So, what do you do?" is rarely a curious question. It's a request to be located, so the asker knows which box you go in and what to talk about next. Say "project manager" and you'll spend the evening answering project manager questions, inside a description that was never really about you.

The trap is that the quickest cure for being unreadable is to become generic. You get legible by getting average.

Legibility isn't visibility, either. You can be very visible, posting often and turning up everywhere, while nobody can say what it is you actually do. And it isn't only a matter of finding the right words, because you can't clearly communicate something you haven't named yet.

Three stages, in order

Here's the shape I've come to see. Legibility comes in stages, and they run in sequence:

1. Legible to yourself. Having your own language for what you do and care about, and permission to use it.
2. Legible to the peers you didn't know you had. Saying the true thing out loud, and being recognised by people who get it.
3. Legible to the wider world, to the extent you want to be met by it.

You can move back and forth between them, and they feed each other. But there's a clear direction of travel.

That last clause matters too. There's also a fourth option, always available: strategic illegibility. Some rooms don't need to read you, and you can choose to stay unreadable to them. Scott, as it happens, wrote a whole book about people who did exactly that.

You can't be met at a stage you haven't reached. Much of the pain is a sequencing problem, experienced as a worth problem.

Almost everything written about personal branding is stage-three advice. It assumes stages one and two have already happened. When they haven't, the advice rings hollow, the incredible machine refuses to line up, and you conclude that the problem is you.

What each stage looks like when it goes wrong

At stage one, the usual mistake is naming yourself in the market's language before you've found your own. That's the shrink-wrapped octopus again: a self priced and packaged before it's been met.

Trudi Boatwright, a grokkist I've known for years, spent years introducing herself as "a, um, well, I've got the arts, and experiential, and it's communication." She'd had something like 48 jobs, from hospital clown to motion-capture artist to change manager. One day she was too tired to dress it up, and told someone, "I teach people how to play." They said, "Oh, I like it." You can hear her tell it herself. That's what stage one sounds like when it clicks: less like an achievement, more like relief.

At this stage there's very little to show the world, and that's correct. This is private work. The best sign you're still in it is that explaining what you do takes forty-five minutes and a flowchart.

At stage two, the mistake is never having said the true thing out loud. You can be surrounded by friendly people and still be unmet, because what they know is the sign in the window. Many people stuck here are excellent at reading rooms. The reading only goes one way.

Your peers often turn out to be different people from the ones you expected. Not the members of your professional association, or the people who share your hobby. Peers are the people who share your relationship to things, whatever the things are. Sometimes you already knew them and didn't know they were your peers. What moves at this stage is recognition, and later, people who send others your way because they finally understand what you do.

At stage three, the problem is visibility: the true thing exists, a few people get it, and strangers can't find it yet. You're brilliant once people are in the room, and it's hard to get them into the room. This is where tools like a pitch or a premise belong, a short line about what you make and for whom. Write one at stage one and it feels like lying, because it's a stage-three tool used two stages early.

The best test of stage three is whether someone who isn't you can explain what you do, accurately, to a third person, while you're not there. I'm still working on that one myself. At a talk I gave in July, the host told the audience at the start that they wouldn't introduce me, because they didn't know what I did.

Trying names on

When you do get to stage three, naming what you do becomes an act of translation.

Privately, I think of myself as a kind of magician: someone who breathes life into things and helps other people see what's really there. That's legible to me. To most people it's meaningless, or worse.

So when the world asks, I say I'm a threshold guide. People understand that. It's still a bit woo, which is fine, because so am I.

The name has to be true enough that your soul nods at it, and legible enough to invite someone else into the story. It's never final. Try a name on like clothes, and expect it to change as you do. Some will be too big, some too plain, some a colour you'd never have chosen and somehow suit.

One more thing I got wrong for years. I assumed this would feel like effort: reaching, building, assembling. In my experience the verbs run the other way. When legibility arrives it feels like relaxing into something, letting through what was already there. Less "I've done it" and more "oh, is that right?"

The stage you can't do alone

Everything in this sequence so far has been stage-one work. Language, permission, unforgetting. You can do it on your own, and you have been.

Stage two is different. Nobody becomes legible to their peers alone. It needs mirrors, a room, and people who recognise your weird shape because they have a weird shape too.

Most of us wander around looking for the other half of the world to meet us. Stage two is where some of it turns up.

There are two places at Grokkist built for this. The Legibility Lab is an open room. You tell a few people what you actually do in the world, without the professional labels. They ask what it's about, then what's hard to explain about it. Then everyone throws names at it, and you see what sticks. It's structured so there's deliberately not quite enough time, which helps.

Between Shells is my own small accompaniment circle, for people partway through a crossing who want company while they make something of it.

Neither is required. Both are there when you're ready.

And if you look after a community or a team whose people might be living this, I run a version of this piece as a free, 90-minute workshop, The work that brings you alive, with the incredible machine, the three stages and a conversation in pairs.

Try this

Over the next week, notice which stage you're actually at. Look for the evidence, and leave your hopes out of it. Some questions to sit with:

• When I describe what I do, whose language am I using: mine, or the room's?
• Has anyone ever named back to me what I do, in words that made me nod?
• Who have I never told the true version to?
• Am I working on a tool, like a pitch or a bio, that belongs to a later stage?
• Which stage am I trying to be paid from, and is it the one I'm at?

Then try the Legibility Lab on yourself. Write a few sentences about what you actually do in the world, with no job titles. Underneath, write what's hard to explain about it. Read both out loud, once, to an empty room.

It's practice for the room that answers.

For a printable version of the three stages, the signs you're at each one, the steps for a Legibility Lab of one and some further reading, there's a sheet to keep: Legibility in stages (PDF) ↗

Next in Unforgetting: Coddiwomple. Moving purposefully toward somewhere you can't see yet, and coming back round to the same questions, changed.