Identity: It is not fixed

I took a trip this last weekend. As is my usual style the podcasts were playing much of the driving time. Due to this I have many thoughts running through my head.

I relistened to Jim Harper's talk about Identity on IT Conversations. He outlines the four categories of identity:

• Something you are


• Something you are assigned


• Something you know


• Something you have

About half way through the talk he states; "Children don't have identities. They have to build them, and we get our identies from the things we do, and the people we know, and the institutions we work with." I thought this was interesting. You can change your identity.

One of the unstated pieces in the Tree of Self-Realization is that if you change the inputs to your life (the roots), you change the results. I have found that by forcing myself to learn new things about software development, it changed my position within the software development team. I changed my identity from newby to expert.

Do you have an identity you are not happy with? You can change that!