Simon Sinek warns against defining yourself by your job title. He tells the story of a retired CEO who discovered his social invitations had only come because of his position, not because of who he was. Sinek calls himself an optimist and author instead, qualities that don't disappear when his work changes.
Chapters
If you look at most people's bios, and let's be honest, we write our own bios, right? You can see how people define themselves. It's, you know, you know, it'll say the title, you know, owner, operator, it'll say CEO, it'll say Oscar nominated actor, whatever it is. And so we're talking about ourselves based on the position we hold or something we did 20 years ago, but that's not who we are. And I see this happen to a lot of people, usually more successful people, believe it or not, which is they completely intertwine their identities with their, with their jobs. And if they stop doing their jobs, they retire, they move on, whatever it is, they have crazy identity crises. I'll give you an example. There's a very high powered CEO that everybody here would know and definitely know the company. And he left his job, it's his time to retire. And he thought he was going to stay busy and all that. And there was a big Hollywood party that he would get invited to every year and he didn't get an invitation this year. And a friend of his was over and said, you got your invitation, right? And the guy goes, yeah, of course I got my invitation. He goes, I didn't get mine. Maybe they got lost. He never could understand that they were never inviting him and they were inviting his title. And so when he didn't have his title, he didn't have an identity. And so I realized this years ago that I wanted to feel about myself, who I was. So whenever you see me blurb a book or if you see my bio, it says optimist and author. And so I will be an optimist till the day I die. But the stuff I do will change throughout my life. So I want to be defined by who I am, not what I do.
