I know a guy in Cleveland. He used to tell me with his whole chest that Cleveland is the greatest city on earth.

He meant it. He would argue it. He would get a little offended if you didn’t nod.
Then as soon as he got seven days off, he would fly to Florida. Every year. A few times a year actually. Same flight. And if you point this out, he’ll explain that “Florida is different,” “that’s vacation,” “you don’t understand, Cleveland is home.”

This is not a rant about a guy, and this is not a rant about Cleveland. Cleveland treated me well during my real estate days, and this guy played a part in it.

Swap in your city, your team, your school, your politics, whatever you defend at a dinner table and then escape the first chance you got. The point is the gap. “Cleveland is the greatest city on earth” and “get me to Florida” are both true at the same time, in the same man, and he doesn’t feel the contradiction at all.

Which means “I love Cleveland” isn’t a statement about Cleveland. It’s doing something else entirely, and trust me, it matters a lot more than a football team.

Here’s the mechanism.

You do something. Then you turn it into something you are. You watch some football and become “a Browns fan.” You went to a school once and become “a Harvard guy.” Hell, you might even wear the t-shirt until you’re 40. You spend time alone and become “an introvert.” You built a company and become “an entrepreneur.”

I want you to notice the move. You took a verb, something you did, and froze it into a noun, something you are. And the second it becomes a noun, your whole relationship to it flips. You stop evaluating it honestly, because now evaluating it means evaluating you. You can’t ask “is Cleveland actually where I want to be” because you’re not the guy asking a question anymore. You’re the guy defending a wall.

Right about now you’re thinking this is about other people. The loud fan, the guy with the flag, the alumni sticker. It isn’t. The labels doing the real damage aren’t the ones you inherited. They’re the ones you’re proud of.

The nouns that actually run your life aren’t the inherited ones. They’re the ones you earned.

You acquire the noun because you practiced the verb. And then you get so attached to the noun that you stop practicing the verb that created it.

Read that again.

A scientist is someone who does science. Tests things. Tries to prove himself wrong. That’s the verb. Do enough of it and you earn the noun, “scientist,” letters after your name, a title. And then, slowly, something reverses. Your reputation now depends on the noun. So the day comes when testing your own belief might embarrass the title, and you find yourself defending what you already think instead of investigating what’s true. You’ve kept the word scientist and stopped doing science, without ever once deciding to. The noun is now eating the verb that made it.

Same trap, every earned identity you’ve got.

The intellectual stops practicing curiosity and starts practicing appearing intelligent, which is almost the exact opposite. One of them requires admitting you’re wrong. The other requires never being caught wrong.

And this, by the way, is the real reason my eye twitches when someone leads with the letters. Doctor this. PhD that. Founder. Bestselling. The blue check. It was never about vanity. The second you put the noun in front, you invite the whole world, and worse, yourself, to deal with the label instead of the behavior that was supposed to be underneath it. A noun you’re protecting is a verb you’ve stopped doing.

A woman wrote me four paragraphs last Sunday to explain why she couldn't write one sentence in public. Two PhDs. She agreed with the post. She wanted me to know she agreed with the post. She just couldn't say so where anyone could see it, because it would undercut her authority.

That message shows up every few weeks. Different letters after the name, same sentence at the bottom.

So you get a physician who can't ask questions because he's supposed to already know. A founder who can't admit the company is drowning because founders win. An influencer who can't share his struggles because surely, with an audience of 500k people, he should have figured life out.

None of them got lazy. They just got trapped. The noun made the verb feel dangerous.

When you really think about it, the title was never about status, but relief.

Before you were the expert, you had to live with the possibility that you didn’t know what the fuck you were doing. You asked stupid questions. You got things wrong. You watched people who knew more than you and wondered if you would ever catch up.

Then, eventually, you got good enough that the world gave you a noun.

Expert. Founder. Doctor. Writer. And the noun answered the question you’d been asking yourself for years: Do I know what I’m doing?

Yes. Look at the evidence.

You made it. You can rest now.

That relief is the prize, more than the money, more than the status. The certainty that you don’t have to be scared of not-knowing anymore.

Which is exactly why letting the noun breathe again is so hard. Going back to the verb means going back to not-knowing. It means voluntarily picking up the fear you spent a decade escaping. Asking for help, saying “show me,” admitting you’re lost in your own field. All of it means surrendering the one thing the title was protecting: your certainty.

You might think the barrier is ego. It’s closer to a low tolerance for uncertainty.

The willingness to not know, and not panic, and not reach for the title to make the discomfort pause.

That’s a much rarer thing than being humble. It’s whether you can remain uncertain without immediately doing something to make yourself feel certain again.

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Now. I would be lying to you if I said I’ve not struggled with this myself. In fact, I write about these things because I wrestle with them.

In my search for solving this for myself, the obvious move, the tempting one, was to throw the whole thing out: Remove the labels entirely. No identity. Dissolve the self, become nobody, want nothing.

Some monk on a mountain has pulled this off already. Maybe that’s even the real answer. But the issue for you and me is that we still have to function on Tuesday morning. You have to decide whether to ship the thing or protect your reputation, whether to take the meeting or hide. You need the machinery. You’re going to run some identity no matter what I say.

So the question is not whether to have one. Identity is extraordinarily useful. It organized you. It pulled you forward. “I want to be a writer” is what got you to write in the first place. The machinery works. The machinery is good.

The problem is the direction it runs.

An identity can point forward or backward. Pointed forward, it organizes what you do next. “I’m someone who figures things out” tells you how to behave this morning. Pointed backward, it becomes a verdict on what you’ve already done. “I’m an entrepreneur because I built three companies” is a monument. And a monument’s only job is to be preserved.

Here’s the cleanest way I’ve found to tell which kind of identity you’re holding: Can your past still prove it for you today?

“I’m a bestselling author” can survive for the rest of your life on something you did ten years ago. “I’m a founder” can survive long after you stopped building. “I’m an expert” can survive on letters you earned decades ago. You can stop doing the thing and keep the noun. That’s when identity becomes dangerous. The evidence is already collected, the case is closed, and your job changes from creating new evidence to protecting the old evidence from contradiction.

But “I investigate what I believe” is different. Your résumé can’t prove that for you. Neither can “I build things.” Or “I’m someone willing to change my mind.” Those identities require fresh evidence. They keep generating behavior precisely because they can never be cashed out as an achievement.

An identity worth keeping is one the past cannot prove for you.

And the reason almost nobody chooses those identities is the same reason we’ve been circling the whole time: you never get to arrive. You never get to rest in certainty. Every morning you wake up and the account is back at zero.

You don’t get to say “I was curious for seventeen years.”

Cool. Were you curious today?

If you’re going to be loyal to something anyway, and you are, be loyal to a practice that keeps creating you. Not a label that just requires you to stay whoever you already were.

Stay smart,

Benoit