Identity Lag: Why Self-Image Updates Slower Than Your Résumé
Not long ago, I was invited to speak to a room of MIT Sloan fellows about building with your brain. We talked about founder mindset, cognition, and how identity holds up under the pressure of building something. The room was full of C-suite executives, founders, and experts in their respective fields — people whose accomplishments were not in any reasonable dispute. I will admit that I felt a flicker on the way in: These people run companies. I am here to tell them something they don’t know? Then we got to the questions, and what surprised me was that the questions weren’t about strategy or scaling or hiring. Over and over, in different phrasings, the room asked a version of the same thing: Why do I still feel like a fraud? Where does this come from? What do I do about it? It was a roomful of people at the top of their fields, privately auditing their right to be in the room (including myself!). I have thought about that afternoon a lot since, because …
