
How many people do you know call themselves an “entrepreneur” but have never started a business?
How many people do you know call themselves a “writer” but write once a month?
How many people do you know call themselves a “fitness coach” but do not coach people in fitness?
How many people do you know who call themselves an “artist” but never create art?
Are you one of these people?
People like titles.
Titles are rational, useful tools.
Titles make it easy for us to tie our identity to something and make it easy for others to infer things about us. They signal things about us that we want others to know. When we call ourselves by a certain title, we broadcast to others that we have traits that other people with that title have. Entrepreneurs have an admirable risk tolerance. Artists are creative. Writers are focused and disciplined. Athletes are fit and competitive.
When we hear titles, we use them as heuristics for making decisions about people. This helps us make quick decisions about how to treat people and how to approach them. Each title is a bucket in our mind in which we place everybody who uses that title. This means that actual, real-life, running-a-business entrepreneurs get bunched in with the guy who is always “launching a business” but never acquiring a first customer.
What eventually happens after you meet enough starving artists or wantrepreneurs is that the title gets diluted. Now, when you meet somebody who is an “entrepreneur” the once-useful traits you associated with entrepreneurship are useless and you have to invest more in getting to know this person before you can judge if they have admirable traits or not.
This is all well and good if you legitimately want to spend time building a relationship with this person but most of us don’t want to do that with everybody we meet (harsh, but true. You don’t want to “get to know” everybody in the world when you have things to do).
The other day, I wrote that you have to show up every day in order to succeed. Going to the gym once does not get you in shape.
You have to regularly do what you want to do in order to do what you want to do.
This sounds pedantic, but it bears internalizing. People who want to be writers but never write are not writers and will never be writers. People who want to be artists but never make art are not artists and will never be artists. People who want to be founders but never found businesses are not founders and will never be founders.
Unless you change, which you can.
Fake Titles Harm You
The more important a call to action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel about answering it. But to yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. — Steven Pressfield
Fake titles breed complacency. In a title-driven world, one of the reasons why we like to adopt titles is because it gives us a little dopamine boost when you realize that you occupy the same category as your role models.
We all have role models who fall into the buckets of labels we use.
If your role model is Tony Robbins, you know he describes himself as a coach. When you describe yourself as a coach, you put yourself in the same bucket as Tony Robbins. This feels good and helps affirm your meaning.
But what happens when you go from saying, “this is what I want to do,” to actually trying to accomplish that thing?
Our process of success involves three two forces: resistance and momentum.
Resistance is that force that gnaws at you any time you want to sit down and make your goals clear, form habits, and develop a sense of self-efficacy. It’s the force that keeps you from the gym in the morning, the force that keeps you from the Word Processor, the force that keeps you from saying hi to that attractive person across the coffee shop, and the force that keeps you from picking up the phone to do more cold calls. It’s that intangible discomfort in the stomach that convinces you that “tomorrow would be a better time,” or that “it requires a little more work before you put it out there,” or “you don’t have the right credentials.”
Momentum comes in two forms: discomfort and comfort.
Momentum from discomfort comes when you hit a threshold of discomfort. Maybe your car keeps breaking down and you decide you’ve had enough and will commit to earning more money to upgrade to a luxury model. Maybe you can’t walk more than a few hundred feet without getting winded. Maybe you can’t put up with your angry boss anymore and decide that you’ll make just as much money working for yourself. Momentum from discomfort is a powerful force.
Momentum from a desire for comfort comes when you experience or imagine experiencing something upgraded from what you have now. You experience what it would be like to make your own schedule. You experience vitality. You imagine being in control of your life. Momentum from desire keeps you going when things get bland.
Titles are part of momentum. Earning that title puts a fire under you to get started, keep working, and push through the resistance.
Imagine somebody referring to you by your referred title and doing it with esteem. You embody an admirable archetype in their mind. You embody being an entrepreneur, an artist, fit, a coach, a writer. That feeling of pride and accomplishment only comes when you have actually earned your title.
Now imagine somebody saying you’re that title and rolling their eyes, saying it sarcastically, or saying that you are not a serious person. You eschew that admirable archetype. Even once you achieve that archetype, you’re always that guy or gal that took forever to actually do that.
Fake titles harm your ability to execute. Stop using them.
Fake Titles Harm Your Future
I’m in the market for a new car. I thought about buying a Tesla Model S and started looking around different websites and reviews about buying them used.
One comment stuck out to me:
“Yeah, but once you get a Model S, where do you go from there?”
I think I’m going to go with a used Japanese car.
Once you start calling yourself by the title of what you want to achieve, where do you go from there?
“World-class entrepreneur?”
Blah.
“Renowned artist?”
Eh.
“[Adjective][Noun].”
Not a good look to have.
When making decisions about how to brand yourself, keep your future self in mind. Everything that is not growing is dying. Stagnation is death.
Give yourself room to grow. Give yourself somewhere to go as you achieve goals. Give yourself the opportunity to reinvent yourself. Under-promise and overdeliver.
Fake Titles Harm the World
The usefulness of titles is based on the models that people hold in their minds. “Entrepreneur” is a good title so long as most of the people who are associated with that title are good models. Same goes for “artist,” “investor,” “coach,” “advisor,” or any other title.
Adopting a title prematurely not only paints you as somebody more interested in status than substance it also paints other people who are actually striving towards the achievement of that title in a poor light.
Every day you call yourself an X-er and you don’t X, a kitten dies and a child loses his dreams.
Stop it.
What To Do?
X.
If you want to be an X-er, do X.
If you want to be a writer, start writing (you’re reading this on a site you can start writing on today).
If you want to be an entrepreneur, start building a business.
If you want to be a boxer, start boxing.
Focus less on status and focus on substance. If you focus on substance, the status will come.
Start X-ing to become an X-er.

