on identity

Ben Kany

Early in my career I was told to build a personal brand.

It was framed as practical advice. Something to start thinking about immediately. Almost a rite of passage. To become legible. Easily recognizable. To collapse myself into something other people could remember. Ideally something distinct.

I took the advice seriously.

For a while, I treated identity like a problem to solve.

I made mental maps of values. Character trait lists. I started painting abstract art, cooking steaks outside, journaling on napkins to remember my epiphanies. I even started thinking about identity as a system that could be modeled. I treated it like construction: building from the outside in, choosing features I could polish and present until I started believing them myself.

And when that didn’t quite work, I tried the opposite. Pulling qualities out from within, trying to surface something buried beneath the layers.

Either way should’ve worked. After all, who knows me better than me?

What I didn’t understand then is that branding is reductive by design. It’s a shortcut for narrative. A layer optimized for context. Work-identities. Social-identities. Internet-identities. Versions of self that shift depending on the room, the audience, the incentives.

You realize quickly that identity can be worn almost like clothing. Situational. Layered. Reversible. You emphasize one edge of yourself in one room, another somewhere else, and something different at home. No one pushes back. No one even notices. It becomes easy to evolve. Easy to stay strategic.

But also exhausting.

At some point, I noticed I was spending more energy trying to be legible than trying to be honest. People could repeat “me” back to me, but I didn’t feel known. I once overheard someone describing me and realized they weren’t wrong, but I still felt the need to correct them. And when I tried, I didn’t know which version of myself to defend.

Then I met Ethan.

The more time I spent with him, the more I started noticing something else entirely. Some people weren’t doing this at all.

They weren’t adjusting to the room. They weren’t smoothing edges. They weren’t trying to be understood before speaking. They weren’t trying to be understood after, either.

And yet there was nothing confusing about them.

You could drop them into any room, strip away any title, remove any context, and something still held. At first, I mistook this for confidence. Or charisma. Or intelligence.

But it was coherence.

Ethan wasn’t performing conviction. He didn’t even know how to perform conviction. He simply couldn’t separate himself from it. The work was an extension of his identity. Maybe the clearest expression of it.

We’re taught to admire passion as long as it remains optional. Ambition as long as it has an off switch. Entrepreneurs who are intense but balanced. Visionary but grounded in reality. Capable of coming back down to Earth.

Ethan carried conviction without reservation.

He views his work as compulsion rather than passion. Something that gives structure and consequence to what already exists inside of him. Strip it away and the boundary between the individual and the work disappears. Without it, he might be empty.

Maybe I shouldn't phrase it like that. It sounds pathological. Unhealthy. Obsessive. But pretending otherwise obscures something important. Those who endure are often the least divided people in the room. The distance between what they believe, what they build, and who they are is nothing. That coherence is expensive. It costs relationships. Reputation. Balance. Sometimes reality itself.

But it also creates a force that other people can feel immediately. And eventually, after enough time, something uncomfortable starts to happen: you recognize the same pattern in yourself.

For a long time, I thought identity was something to construct. Something to refine carefully enough to eventually arrive at. But the only times identity became visible were the moments when managing myself stopped working. When the room stopped mattering. When the performance collapsed. When whatever I believed had to carry me.

Most people adapt themselves to the environment around them. Ethan bends the environment around his beliefs instead.

Maybe that’s why he never seemed particularly interested in identity in the first place.