Six Words. One Story.

A six-word memoir — or six-word mission statement — challenges you to compress your entire life story, purpose, or identity into exactly six words. The constraint is the point: with only six words, you must choose the idea that matters most and let go of everything else. The form traces its roots to the SMITH Magazine six-word memoir project (2006), which invited people worldwide to describe their lives in exactly six words, inspired by a legend about Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Whether you craft a memoir (capturing what has been) or a mission statement (directing what comes next), the exercise forces ruthless honesty about what you value — because there is simply no room for anything else.

TNT’s Six Word Memoir app brings this exercise into the computer science classroom. The page itself was built entirely through AI collaboration — starting with a single research question to ChatGPT and documented step by step in its chatlog. It includes the concept’s history, a six-step writing process, educator-focused examples, and a live draft tool where you can write and count your own six words. The clips below show real people discovering that six words is exactly enough to say something true. Watch — then try your own.