Polina Marinova Pays Attention to the Little Things

If you really pay attention to the little details, you can learn a surprising amount about people. And if you learn about people, you’ll learn how the world works. 

That’s what Polina Marinova thinks, and paying attention to little details is her job.

She’s a journalist who writes the newsletter, The Profile, where she features the best long-form profiles about people and companies, every week.

To Polina’s expert eye, the profiles that teach us the most are full of these small details — they show the way a subject folds their hands, or the way they speak when they’re uncomfortable. These are the kinds of stories that teach us the most about the world — by examining people, they show us how things really work.

And when you dig into Polina’s life, you’ll understand why she thinks this way. She moved from Bulgaria to the US as a child. Suddenly, she found herself in a completely new country, with a new school, and new classmates — but she didn’t speak the language at all. Then her parents got divorced.

In the aftermath of so much change, she had to pick up new tools to understand and work with the world around her. So she started to pay attention to people. She began to notice nonverbal cues and gestures that told her what people were thinking, even if she didn’t quite understand the words they were saying. It was those small details that made the difference for her. 

“I learned to pay attention to tiny things a long time ago,” she said to me in our interview. This made her really good at first impressions. “When I meet somebody I can pretty quickly understand what type of person they are based on small cues that they give away.” 

Polina has taken that obsession with the details of people and turned it into her job. She left a great job at Fortune to write The Profile full-time in March — at the height of the pandemic. Now she gets to learn and write about people 24/7 — and share the best of what she finds with her audience.

So what can we learn from reading about people? What makes a great profile? And what are the systems and processes Polina uses to curate the best pieces of journalism for her audience each week?

We cover that and more in below. Let’s dive in! 

Polina introduces herself

Hi, my name is Polina Marinova. I studied journalism at the University of Georgia and graduated in 2013. After graduating I freelanced for about a year — working remotely for USA Today and CNN.

Eventually I moved to New York, did a stint at a media startup, and then got a job at Fortune where I was the social media editor and then a reporter. After that I started writing at Term Sheet. 

But I left Fortune in March to write full-time on my newsletter, The Profile, where I feature long-form profiles of interesting people and companies. 

I actually started The Profile a few years ago — at the time I was down on the whole media industry because there was so much clickbait. It was genuinely hard to parse through all that to find really, really well reported journalism. 

So every time a really good piece of journalism came out my friends and I would Slack about it or text about it. So I decided to put it all into one email so people can have a place to go and find great journalism in one place.

What makes a good profile

When I’m reading an article I can usually tell pretty quickly whether or not it’s going to be a good profile. A good profile immediately grabs you at the first sentence. 

For example, this is a profile I really like of Greta Thunberg, the climate activist.

The first sentence is: “There is persona and there is reality in Greta Thunberg.” It’s great, I immediately want to know more.

But the writer also explores in detail the contradictory sides to Greta. On the one hand she’s a climate activist who’s trying to get the world to pay attention, and on the other hand, you know, she’s a teenager. 

A good profile captures the little things that make us different. It really helps when the writer has spent time with the subject and can capture their little quirks, or their eccentric habits. 

One of my favorite profiles ever is on Justin Bieber. And the reason I like it is because the writer was able to capture these little bits about him that make him come alive and seem human. For example, the interviewer describes how as you’re talking to him he doesn’t backchannel.

Backchanneling is those cues like nodding your head that let someone know that you’re listening and following along. Instead, he just stares at you. And so you don’t know what he’s thinking.

And I love that stuff. It’s those details that make the subject of the piece come alive. As a writer, you have to actually figure out ways to show the reader who someone is versus just telling them. 

A bad profile reads kind of like a press release. It’s just generic stuff that doesn’t go into any of the challenges, or nuances, or contradictions of the subject. It’s just general and high-level — you forget it as soon as you read it. 

Why she likes profiles

I’ve thought about this a lot. When I first moved to the US I didn’t speak English. So in my elementary school I had to try really hard to understand what people meant from just their expressions and their body language.

I learned to pay attention to these little things a long time ago. So I think I’m fairly good with, like, first impressions. When I meet somebody I can pretty quickly understand what type of person they are based on small cues that they give away.

I’m also just fascinated by why people do what they do, and how they make decisions, and how those decisions made them end up in the situation they are in now. I'm kind of attracted to really complicated characters who have had a lot going on in their lives. 

I think all of us are like that to some degree. In college I had to do a profile of someone for a class assignment, and it was really tough because the person was so boring. I went to my professor and I said, “Oh my god, I can’t get anything. This is the most boring person in the world.”

And the professor said, “No one is inherently boring. They’re only boring because you haven’t asked the right questions.”

For me I want to learn from the most interesting people on earth, I want to understand their experiences. So I think above all writing and reading profiles is a great way to learn. 

I think the best way to learn is through other people. If you hear about an experience someone else went through, you’re able to relate to it in a different way than you would if it was just an abstract idea.

But also, the best profiles humanize people. I don’t want to read an Elon Musk profile that just talks about how much of a genius he is. I want to learn about the fact that he lost a child, and how after that he became maniacal about work and poured all of his energy into it. I want to learn about the hard things he’s been through and how he learned from them, and how they helped him become the person he is today. 

Polina’s daily routine

I wake up around 7:30, do some work and have coffee. By late morning I give myself 30 minutes to exercise or take a walk or do something that’s not at my table. 

Then I come back and do more work.

I have an email that goes out on Wednesday and then another one that goes out on Sundays. So I’m pretty much always writing.

At night, the hard thing about working from home is that I have to force myself to actually stop working. If it was up to me I’d work until like 11:30 PM. I love what I do, but it’s also a double edged sword, because it’s hard to even know when work stops.