For the last few years, whenever existential dread knocked at the front door of my conscious mind to ask who was inside, I would open the door and politely explain to him that “I’m a builder,” and that I didn’t need any nudges to think about who I was.
In 2024, I got used to him knocking, so I only opened the door some of the time. I don’t need to talk to him, why does he keep coming back?
And in the last year, 2025, I stopped opening the door completely. I would just yell at him to leave. “I’m a builder, now get off my lawn.”
The last few years of my company have not gone so well. In the moment, I wasn’t really sure why. And only when I stopped calling myself a “builder” did I recognize why the man kept coming back.
I don’t think it was a coincidence. Not making time to question myself and the venture going sideways probably have a lot more in common than I thought.
Admitting failure is good when it comes to things that matter in your own life, and this is especially true if you are passionate about what you’re doing.
Why, you might ask? Well, speaking from experience, when you really “lock in” on something, it can get hard to separate yourself from what you’re building. The keystrokes flow so naturally. Like how a racecar driver says “I completed a lap” instead of “the car completed a lap with me in the driver’s seat,” there is a certain techno-grace in the man-machine fusion.
When you start, you have to look at your sticky notes to remember :wq. But before you know it, you become so tuned and focused on the act of what you think you’re supposed to be doing, that it stops being “the thing I am working on.” It becomes… you.
But your project and your identity fuse not because of your project’s importance. You could be curing cancer or finding a breakthrough in cold fusion. But I think that you only become your project when you abandon everything else.
Your identity and your project fuse into one not because of intense focus or unbridled ambition or hard work or long hours. You become your project because you stop being curious about who is knocking at the door.
For most well-adjusted readers, this might be the point where you say “oh, I see.” But for some, I can hear the objection: “Oh good, this is where the tourists give up and only the hardcore people stay.”
I’m gonna challenge that thought.
“I’m a builder” is a useful identity if and only if your goal is to build things. But if your goal is to “make something people want,” then it’s better to be dispassionate about what you’re building. What you’ve built can have your personality, but it is not you.
Because if the objective function is capital maximization and you can’t tell the difference between your finger and the keyboard, between your brain and your creations, you won’t book that sales meeting. If the customer rejects my product and I am my product, then the customer is rejecting me entirely as a human.
See? There are better products out there that customers do need. But by falling in love with what you’re building, you can’t, in good faith, be making something people want.
Labels and stereotypes are useful for their mimetic value, but I assure you, there’s more to you than just that. I think you can be whatever you want to be, and you can do whatever you want to do, just as long as you’re open to hearing who’s knocking at the front door.