Who am I? Who do I think of myself as? Scientist? Biology PhD? A generalist? American?
When we introduce ourselves, we usually put the labels first. Nationality, hometown, job title, the school on the diploma. They are fast, and everyone in the room already knows what they mean. But they also spare us the harder question underneath: if we were not our identities, who are we?
I put identities first for another practical reason: identities are important for goal setting. In the book Atomic Habits, author James Clear argues that identity is important in sustaining behavioral changes. This was an important read for me, but perhaps I’ve picked up that mindset in a weirdly twisted way. I wore my identity like armor in my interactions with others, and let it dictate what I thought I should do next. I had a hard time understanding that this way of thinking has its downsides, especially if you allow your past to shape your identity for the future. In retrospect, too much of my life has been wasted on things I am supposed to do as opposed to want to do.
Paul Graham (Y Combinator) has an interesting way of looking at identities. His essay Keep Your Identity Small has a compelling claim: once a belief becomes a part of who you are, you can’t evaluate it honestly… because changing your mind feels like a personal threat. “The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.”
This presented me with a conundrum. If I were to introduce myself to others, including the About Page of this website… what can I say? It is easy to say that I am a dataviz person, or a Python person. But if not those, what does a stranger get to know? And even more broadly, if I were to stop identities becoming a hardened shell that make me dumber, what gives me my backbone and should become my guiding light?
Three antidotes I am experimenting with.
Attention. What catches my attention at the moment? Tyler Cowen has a famous interview question that captures this sentiment, which is to ask what browser tabs you have open at this moment. Again, not what I think I am interested in. What I am actually interested in. My tabs happen to be around researching a lightweight CMS system that reduces friction around editing new blog posts, which directly led me to concocting this exact blog post that I have been putting off. Even better, I think attention is also a close proxy to innate curiosity, which, as Paul Graham argues, is the core of doing any great work.
Practice. What do you practice regularly? To distinguish it from the “Work” antidote on the bottom, practice is the activity you return to, as opposed to the finished thing you produce. A good example for a violinist would be practicing scales every day. For me currently, it is frequent curation of my thinking park site. Note that my habits change frequently, but they are not my identity so I am not tied down to any one of them anyways.
Work. What are your recent outputs that you produced? For me (currently), that seems to be the recent quotes in dmq, my daily management quotes page. Also my MBTA Station of the Day feature. Also my visualizations, which often make it to #1 on Reddit dataisbeautiful. The trick here is to understand that you are not your work. If you tie your identity to your past work, you fall into the same identity trap. So I would consider there to be a decaying coefficient where the most recent work is weighed most heavily.
These antidotes almost have a meditative or philosophical ring to it, focusing on the now and present, and not identities you can craft for yourself based on the past. But the antidotes are not infallible, and the boundaries are not as clear cut. One can have a strong identity as a biologist while still not allowing that to affect their future goals. Conversely, one can still strongly be attached to their practices and work and make it their identity, although they are naturally easier to update than fixed attributes.
Before I finish, I want to mention one exception to identity that Graham mentions in his essay. It is the identity of Scientist, which is the identity of following evidence without committing to particular conclusions and updating beliefs as necessary. This is the backbone that I am perhaps looking for, to fill the gap that opens up when I discard my labels. Okay, fair Mr. Graham. I will keep that identity and wear it proudly.