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Key Takeaways Building your identity around titles such as “founder,” “writer” or “leader” makes your self-worth more dependent on other people’s recognition.
Focusing on verbs shifts your attention from protecting an image to creating value through action.
The giver mindset can reduce ego-driven pressure by making contribution, rather than validation, the measure of completion.
“Hell is other people,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in No Exit. Philosopher Kiki Berk examines the phrase in her analysis of Sartre’s view of personal relationships. It does not simply mean that other people are unpleasant or responsible for our unhappiness. It describes what happens when another person looks at us and turns us into an object inside their consciousness.
They interpret our behavior, assign motives to our actions and create a version of us that exists independently of the person we believe ourselves to be. You may be generous and still appear selfish, remain silent and appear weak, or speak confidently and appear arrogant. You can explain yourself, improve your performance and try to correct the judgment, but you can never enter another person’s mind and arrange your image exactly as you wish. Their perception remains outside your control, yet much of your identity may still depend on receiving the right verdict from it.
The identity trap
Jennifer Crocker and Katherine Knight write that self-esteem depends on “what people believe they need to be or do to have worth as a person” in Contingencies of Self-Worth. This is the real danger of labels. Once your worth depends on being a founder, writer or leader, an ordinary setback stops being an event and becomes evidence against who you are.
Anlan Zheng, Brittany Duff, Patrick Vargas and Mike Yao found that people “choose to share things that are self-enhancing” in their research on social-media self-presentation. That habit does not remain online. We begin observing ourselves while we work, travel, learn and build, asking what each activity says about us instead of whether the activity itself matters.
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