Keep Your Identity Small, Especially as a Builder
Paul Graham has a short essay called Keep Your Identity Small. The argument: the moment a belief becomes part of your identity, you stop being able to think clearly about it. You defend it like territory instead of evaluating it like a claim. He uses it to explain why religion and politics turn people stupid in conversation. I want to point it somewhere he didn’t, at building, where I think it’s the line between people who keep getting better and people who get stuck.
The trap is sneaky because it looks like commitment. You build a thing, it does okay, and slowly the thing fuses to your sense of self. You stop being a person who made a Rust backend and become “a Rust person.” You stop being someone who tried a business model and become a believer in it. Now any evidence against the choice isn’t data, it’s an attack on you. You’ll defend a dying approach long past sense, not because you’re stupid, but because killing it now feels like killing a piece of yourself.
I’ve watched this quietly end careers. The engineer who became their favorite framework and couldn’t see the world had moved on. The founder who became their original idea and kept it on life support for years because pivoting felt like admitting they were wrong, not just that the idea was. Their identity got big and heavy, and a big identity can’t turn. Too much surface area committed to being one particular thing, so every change of direction tears something.
The builders who compound hold everything loosely except the work itself. Not “a crypto person” or “an AI person.” A person who builds, currently pointed at crypto, ready to repoint the second the leverage moves. Tools, stack, domain, even the specific company, all held at arm’s length, swappable, never fused to the self. I’ve worked hard to keep my identity to one line. I build things, and I try to be right about what’s worth building. Everything past that is a temporary position I can drop the moment it stops paying, and dropping it costs me nothing that feels like me.
Cleaner way to say it: make your identity a verb, not a noun. A noun, “I am a backend engineer,” “I am a Solidity dev,” is a fixed thing the world can make obsolete, and the agents are deprecating nouns by the dozen right now. A verb, “I build,” “I learn,” “I ship,” survives any specific skill going worthless, because it was never bolted to the skill. When the terrain shifts, the noun-people get stranded defending their territory and the verb-people just start building the next thing.
This is also why the founders I admire were deists, not dogmatists. They held beliefs they could update, propositions they’d revise on evidence, instead of identities they had to defend to the death. Jefferson could take a razor to his own holy book precisely because his identity wasn’t fused to the parts he cut.
Keep your identity small. Become a verb. Then nothing the world deprecates can take you with it.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.