What's your life's elevator pitch?

I met someone last night at a talk on psychedelics (how very Bay Area) in Sausalito. We got to talking and she succinctly delivered a sort of life elevator pitch to me: former tech founder turned introspective, goes eat-pray-love, travels the world, and now focuses her life on raising capital for climate change through storytelling.

Color me impressed -- she had her elevator pitch down. Tech world etiquette and expectations may have played a role in grooming her to deliver such a succinct pitch (imagine all the pitch decks and networking parties), but the succinctness struck me. She took a rough outline of her story and implanted it in my brain.

When asked about myself, I fumbled in comparison. I realized that I don't have a good way to capture who I am nor what I am about briefly. I could throw my hands up in the air and shout that it's because my life is just so damn complex, complicated, unique, multifaceted (read the facetiousness here). Really though, I just haven't thought about the distillation process -- how can I distill the varied experiences in my life into a discernible thread? How can I compress my life story into a format that runs smoothly through the thin wire of an introduction?

The analogy of data delivery bandwidth comes to mind. Smaller wires vs larger ones -- the smaller the wire, the less information can be delivered in one go. The shorter the interaction (or the potential length of an interaction -- in this case, intros can be very short), the better it is for the data to be delivered in smaller chunks. Imagine someone telling their life story in an intro -- one that goes on for minutes. Yikes -- we've all been there. Unless that length of intro is welcome, really it's considerate to gauge others' interest before jumping into a Shakespearean monologue.

I noticed too that my fumbling may have lost this person's interest. Of course, someone losing interest in a conversation can come about for a host of reasons, so in the spirit of not everything being about me, I'll keep that possibility wide open. In this case, however, there's some utility in theorizing that the loss of engagement was due to a poor delivery of information, at least for the sake of this introspection. It's got me asking questions:

• What is my life's elevator pitch?
• Is it useful to have a few different pitches? (in my case, one for tech, one for music; or of varying lengths)

I muse that there could be 1-3 different pitch lengths (short, medium, long), where the short pitch is rehearsed and the longer ones are a memorized set of talking points. Perhaps this approach is pedantic, but I am a believer in the power of rehearsal -- if there is a common, repeated social interaction where a delivery of information has potential yield and upside, rehearsal to increase the probability of upside can serve one's goals. While I'm not in the VC world, it's my understanding that founders and capitalists alike have rehearsed their business pitches as they need them for networking events to signal who they are and their value to others. I think applying that tailored broadcasting to a non-business, social setting can similarly serve us.