"Multidisciplinary Creative" Was My Most Expensive Sentence

For three years, my LinkedIn headline said I was a "Multidisciplinary Creative." I'd chosen it the way most of us do — by panicking, looking at what other people had, and picking the phrase that committed to the least.

It felt safe. It was also quietly costing me money.

The Vagueness Tax

Here's the thing nobody tells you about vague positioning: it doesn't attract everyone. It attracts the wrong people, confidently.

When I was a "multidisciplinary creative," my inbox filled with inquiries like "Do you do logos? Websites? A mural for my cousin's food truck?" People weren't being lazy — I'd given them nothing to filter against. If you can do anything, potential clients assume you'll say yes to everything. And clients who want everything usually want to pay for one thing.

The turning point was a coffee with a former art director named Priya, who read my website on her phone and laughed out loud. "Richa, this says nothing," she said. "You design brand identities and write the words that go with them. That's it. That's the whole thing. Why is that not the first sentence?"

I had no good answer. So I rewrote it.

What I Actually Do (Revised)

The new version of my bio, roughly: "I design brand identities and write the copy that brings them to life. If you need a logo and the words on your homepage to feel like they came from the same brain, that's me."

Boring? Maybe. But the inquiries changed almost overnight. Fewer of them, yes — and every single one was better. A boutique fitness studio in Austin. A fintech startup that needed naming, identity, and launch copy. A food writer rebranding her newsletter. People arrived already knowing what I did and whether it fit.

Specificity isn't limiting. It's a sorting mechanism, and sorting is the whole point of a bio.

The Strip-It-Down Exercise

Want to try this? Grab your current bio — LinkedIn, website, wherever — and do what I did. I call it the buzzword strip, and it works like this:

1. Copy your bio into a blank doc.
2. Delete every word you wouldn't say out loud at a barbecue. "Passionate," "storyteller," "solutions," "dynamic," "journey" — gone. If it would sound absurd spoken across a folding table at a backyard cookout, it doesn't survive.
3. Delete anything that could describe a thousand people. "Creative thinker" describes every mammal that's ever had an idea. Cut it.
4. Look at what's left. If you're staring at three words, congratulations — you've found your actual positioning. If you're staring at nothing, write one sentence answering: what do people pay you for, specifically?

When I ran mine through the strip, "multidisciplinary creative with a passion for human-centered storytelling" became, essentially, "I design brands and write their copy." The buzzwords weren't adding meaning. They were subtracting it, one comfortable phrase at a time.

But Won't I Miss Out on Work?

This is the fear that keeps everyone vague, and I understand it. Narrowing feels like closing doors.

But think about how people actually hire. Nobody reads a bio and thinks, "This person can do anything — perfect!" They think, "This person has solved my exact problem before." The specialist gets the call. The generalist gets added to a spreadsheet and forgotten.

And here's the secret: you can list multiple specific things. "I design brand identities, and I also do packaging design" is specific twice. "Multidisciplinary creative" is specific zero times. The problem was never that I did two things. The problem was that I refused to name either one.

The Uncomfortable Bonus

There's a side effect nobody warns you about: once you say what you do plainly, you can't un-say it. Plain language creates accountability. If I claim I write brand copy, then my brand copy better be good — and it better be on my own website.

That's the real reason so many of us hide behind jargon. Buzzwords are camouflage. "Multidisciplinary creative" couldn't be judged; "brand designer and copywriter" could. But camouflage also means nobody finds you.

My advice, for what it's worth: say the true thing out loud, in plain American English, and let the right people recognize themselves in it. The wrong people were never going to hire you anyway — they were just going to waste your Tuesday afternoons.