The brief
Career changers get flattened by the bio line worst of all — the old identity is legible, the new one isn't yet. This prompt excavates the through-line the one-liner can't hold.
The bio line is a brutal genre for everyone, but it saves its real cruelty for the career changer. The lawyer becoming a product designer. The teacher building a consultancy. The fifteen-year operator going fractional. The founder between acts.
Their problem is precise: the old identity is legible — credentialed, searchable, instantly parsed — and the new one isn't yet. So the one-liner forces a bad choice. Lead with the past, and you attract inquiries for the person you've stopped being. Lead with the future, and you read as unproven, the credibility of fifteen years hidden behind a title you've held for five months. Hyphenate — "lawyer-turned-designer" — and you've made your bio a museum plaque about a transition instead of a door to what you do now.
None of these are describing you. They're compressing you, lossily, in different directions.
The through-line is the missing datum
Here's what the one-liner structurally cannot hold: the reason the path makes sense. Every genuine career change has a through-line — the thing you were actually doing all along, which the old job title obscured and the new one hasn't yet claimed. The litigator who was always really doing narrative architecture. The teacher whose classroom was fifteen years of user research. The through-line is the most persuasive fact about a career changer, and it appears on precisely no résumé format ever devised.
A conversation can carry it. When someone asks you at dinner how you got from there to here, you tell a story with causality in it, and it lands — because the story answers the exact anxiety a stranger has about a career changer: is this a reinvention or a drift?
Which is why the career changer, more than almost anyone, needs a page that can talk. But the page can only tell the story if you've excavated it first. That's what this prompt is for.
The prompt
Open your AI assistant of choice and give it this, then answer honestly for as long as it keeps asking:
I'm changing careers — from [old field] to [new field] — and I need you to interview me until we find the through-line: the continuous thing I've actually been doing across both. Ask me one question at a time. Dig into: (1) the parts of my old work I was drawn to even when they weren't my job description; (2) the moments people came to me for something outside my title; (3) what I was doing in my old field the year I was best at it — specifically, the verbs; (4) what my new field calls that same activity; (5) what I know from the old field that practitioners in the new one usually lack; (6) which clients or problems my old credentials still rightly attract, and which they misleadingly attract. Push back on vague answers. When you have enough, give me: the through-line in one sentence, the story of the transition in one paragraph with causality intact, three visitor types my page should expect (old-field inquiries, new-field prospects, fellow changers) and what each needs to hear, and a list of what I should stop being asked about — phrased kindly.
Answer it the way you'd talk at that dinner, not the way you'd write a cover letter. The interview format matters: the through-line is almost never the first thing you say. It's the thing you say after the fourth question, slightly annoyed, in plain words. That's the sentence you're mining for.
What to do with the output
The one-sentence through-line is your new bio line — you'll find it's better than the hyphenated museum plaque, because it describes a capability instead of a chronology.
Everything else goes into your page's context. The paragraph with causality intact is what your emissary tells the skeptical prospect who asks "so why did a lawyer start doing this?" The three visitor profiles teach it to route: the old-field inquiry gets a graceful redirect (and maybe a referral — your old network deserves one), the new-field prospect gets the through-line plus proof, the fellow changer gets whatever generosity you decide to offer. And the stop-being-asked-about list becomes the page's quiet boundary work — absorbing, forever and politely, the questions about your former life that you're done answering in person.
The one-line bio was built for careers shaped like ladders. Yours is shaped like an argument — premise, turn, conclusion. Stop compressing the argument into a title. Put it somewhere that can make it.
Parlei is in early access — a page that can tell the whole story, one visitor at a time.
