Self as Presentation
June 25, 2025
Introduction
You are a person, and every action or manufacture you create is a presentation, a derivative of you that hints at you physically and your internal state. A photograph, a video, a portfolio, writing, grades, research articles, online posts, your speech.
Society in pre-internet era was characterized by few digital presentations. Your presence in school, your grades, your research in a paper, publishing in a magazine or a book might be all there is. Not only that, presentations were expensive. Getting the engraved metal plates to publish a book itself or making a photograph in a dark room required physical expenditure.
Comparatively, it increased the worth and the signal of each presentation because there were so few out there. It was not uncommon for someone to wait all day for the phone to ring, yet today many block most of their phone calls and ignore messages. Today, that same signal has to stand out by being higher quality or coming in a more expensive medium, such as your own site versus a Substack.
High quality presentations
If you are at school: pursuing quality there, being a teaching assistant, and knowing professors is better than what Iâm suggesting below. However, this has some degree of information asymmetry: knowing what presentations to focus on is important. If everyone is doing Leetcode and spamming resumes, but this isnât an effective presentation anymore, then they are wasting their time.
This is for those already out in the world, hoping to get noticed, pulled into a group (job) thatâs doing something you enjoy rather than floating in the aether. You have to create presentations so that your company, app, or organization gets noticed.
To maximize your chance of connection, you should make high-quality presentations. As to what high-quality is, it depends: a Hacker News post thatâs an in-depth dive into a niche technology may be a standout hit, even if the website design is hard to read.
But I generally feel the two are highly linked because people may ship landing pages (a presentation) before the actual product because otherwise your funnel (awareness -> landing page -> download -> purchase) doesnât convert well. When looking at advertisements for apps, I feel itâs more that marketing is about seeing something from multiple angles, and that each angle looks âgood,â as if you went through a deck of photos and nothing seemed bad or off-putting.
A cellphone camera isnât enough, everyone has one. You need a high quality camera, high quality object transformational ability (photo editing, video editing), and high quality videography, good website coding ability. In short, you need to be a good designer and generalist. You may find out after some time where your skills lie and specialize.
Find where people in your industry cluster: whether volunteering at a conference, going to a hackathon, or going to meet-up events such as on Lu.ma. Add knowledge and skill to the discourse and you will get noticed.
State of things today
We are in a state where people have numerous fragmented presentations, so people have aggregated it together with link list apps.
And meeting a person is a case of looking through their past presentations (social media) since we are meeting many more strangers than we historically wouldâve in the past. For some they have judgmental purposes, such as qualifying othersâI generally recommend against this as itâs not socially beneficial to do because it incurs their resentment for no benefit to self. But a large part of it is just needing some mutual context in order to have any conversation at all.
If you managed to be a part of a dense community network (certain countries are naturally like this) or certain college groups, then perhaps you donât need this advice since you may be doing fine, and you can just get introductions from people.
Maximizing your presentations is better than the alternative: nobody even knowing or hearing of you, as you slowly rot away since most are unaware of your existence and you are unable to make the right connections to move forward.
What channels matter?
In the modern era you need to know the effectiveness of channels. With links and analytics (such as PostHog) there may be a referrer telling you what website someone used to land on your page. Your links may have a utm tag on them. The various websites you use may have analytics on them.
Even if you tape a QR code to your back, you could add a query parameter like website.com/?query_param=value to track the effectiveness of that channel.
Some jobs that ask how you found this job in a dropdown list are trying to do the same thing.
Social media such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X.com/Bluesky/Warpcast are like trying to skip a rock on the ocean. You may invite some friends to repost but the chance of consistent success is hard. People cast a lot before getting one or two hits.
Therefore many try to build their own distribution channel: Hacker News is a distribution channel for YCombinator. An email list, your LinkedIn connections: these are all a bit better than casting out into the ocean.