In December 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle pushed Sherlock Holmes over a waterfall and killed him.

He wrote to his mother that he was in the middle of the last Holmes story, “after which the gentleman vanishes never never to reappear. I am weary of his name.”

Doyle thought of himself as a historical novelist. Sherlock Holmes simply funded the work he wanted to do.

Ten years later he took the money anyway. Collier’s opened at $30,000 for eight new stories, he delivered thirteen, and in 1903 Holmes came back from the dead.

It turns out Doyle hadn’t been trapped by a bad decision, but by an extremely good one.

Why “pick a niche” still works

If you’re in marketing or around the personal branding space you always hear the age old adage of “pick a niche.”

There’s a good reason that this still lives on. Markets don’t remember people. They remember one thing about a person. The AI guy. The design woman. The one who writes short stories. A label is a shortcut you can install in someone else’s mind, which is also why stories beat credentials when someone is deciding whether to trust you. It’s much easier for someone to compress all that you do into a couple words that helps them remember who you are. And if you’re building your reputation, you want that.

But everyone would argue that they are so much more than the titles that we’ve earned or how a company describes us.

I’ve always thought that the Dan Koe way of describing this was useful. “You” are the niche.

He’s right. But which part of you?

Paul Graham’s case for keeping your identity small

Paul Graham published an essay in February 2009 that explains a lot about identity.

I can’t remember exactly when I read the essay, but what I really enjoyed was the way that he used religion and politics as the base of his story. We all know that you never never talk about religion and politics. It turns out that given the open nature of these two areas that everyone has an opinion. Graham argues though that they are touchy subjects more because they are somehow ingrained in one’s identity. Arguing for or against these touches on who you believe you are.

His point overall was that, at the end of the day, the more we label ourselves, the more we barricade ourselves into a smaller and smaller space. If you label yourself as a certain political party or a certain religious sect then you’re locked in. In many cases, unable to accept other ways of thinking because if you do, you feel as if you’re going against your own nature.

The essay’s last line is blunt. “The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.”

That tells you that the smartest folks are okay with potentially changing their minds and adjusting and adapting based on new information or a new perspective that comes to them.

Graham’s remedy is adaptability. Fewer labels, and more room to change your mind when the evidence that aligns with your thinking moves.

When a job title starts carrying your identity

The cost of this identity shift arrives slowly.

You don’t merely hold the title of Vice President of XYZ. Over time, the role starts to shape how you see yourself. That’s normal. You become a leader by leading, a writer by writing, a founder by building. Repeated behavior becomes part of your self-image.

Where things get dangerous is when a temporary role stops being something you do and becomes something you feel you have to remain as. The title that you’ve collected no longer describes your work; it’s carrying your identity. And because that shift happens gradually, like watching a tree grow, nobody sends you a warning message.

I’ve written before about taking the pen back on your self-image. This is the same pen, held by the market instead of your family.

Inevitably, then something changes. Your company restructures, the platform decays, the market stops paying. Or maybe you simply get curious about something else.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that. But the identity won’t let you go. Brad Stulberg puts it in one line in Master of Change: “Clinging to the illusion of permanence, hoping that we won’t be struck by change, that we’ll stay more or less the same, is misguided at best and leads to suffering at worst.”

Small Core, Flexible Edge

Two different things should be clear here.

Your identity should be small. Your positioning at any given time should be clear.

I’ve started calling this Small Core, Flexible Edge. It’s similar to what Stulberg calls rugged flexibility, even though he’s describing how a person survives disruption. But this is what we’re talking about at the end of the day. Disrupting yourself while keeping the core steady.

The Core is how you behave regardless of what business you are in or what’s going on in the world. For me, in case you want an example, if everything went away I would still be persistent, I’d still be trying to learn and grow every day. I’d still get a high by seeing people develop and helping people and companies get better at what they do.

John Boyd rewrote how the Air Force fights in the air, gave us the OODA loop, and retired a colonel. Ryan Holiday tells the story in Ego Is the Enemy. Boyd described the choice to young officers as a fork in the road. Go one way and you can be somebody: the compromises, the club, the promotions. Go the other way and you can do something. You won’t be anyone’s favorite, but you won’t have to compromise yourself, and your work might make a difference.

“To be or to do? Which way will you go?” (Shakespeare I am not, I know.)

The Boyd quote is useful because the Core is built around what you’re willing to do, not what you need to be called.

The Edge is what you ask the market to associate with your name. Your title, your category, your offer, your platform. It answers what you want to be known for right now, and “right now” is the most important part.

But the Edge isn’t fake or disposable. It is the platform your Core gets to stand on. A job gives your leadership somewhere to go. A business gives your ideas somewhere to live. A title can create the authority to do work that matters to you.

That is also why changing it can feel so difficult. When you are the product, taking a route people don’t expect can feel like violating the positioning you’ve spent years building. The market knows you for one thing, and changing direction risks giving up the shortcut you worked so hard to install.

You see this all the time with artists who make an album nobody expected from them. Or, more concretely, Matthew McConaughey, who stepped away from Hollywood to escape the rom-com identity he had become associated with. As he put it, “Since I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, I stopped doing what I was doing, and I moved down to the ranch in Texas.” He hasn’t made a rom-com since 2009. Four years later he made Dallas Buyers Club and won Best Actor.

That’s why losing an Edge can still hurt deeply. You may not have lost yourself, but you have lost one of the places where yourself was able to show up.

The goal isn’t to detach the two. The Edge should express the Core. It just shouldn’t become the Core.

At some point your experiences start to help form your core as well.

What I lost when the title went

I remember the day that I got laid off. It was around 10:30 in the morning, and I took the news without a whole lot of surprise. I went out to tell my wife, who was working at home that day. I remember it being a sunny day and just sitting on the couch next to her and letting her know, and us just talking about it for a bit. But then a calm came over me. I had already prepared myself for something like this happening.

The calm had a reason. A few months earlier I had told my CMO that what I really burned for was leadership development, and I think that conversation is what might have made it easier for me to be let go.

What I wanted to do was point and lead in the direction of where I saw myself bringing the most value to the organization in the future. It was a very risky thing to do. Most people would have just buckled down and gone in and asked about promotions and raises, but it was important to me to try to keep my core true to what I wanted to do versus just buying into the traditional move.

It didn’t take long for me to shed the label and the edge.

I’ve written before about the repair work that comes after a layoff, and I stand by all of it, but I left something out.

Whatever grief that I had was, as usual, connected to the team and what we built and what we had recreated. It was certainly not about the title or the job itself, but essentially what it had enabled me to do. Those things, the job and the title, had enabled me to help people develop and ultimately help us expand our brand.

The label I probably would have used has always been leader because I’ve always said that my philosophy was not to make content marketing great again, but rather to make people better. Take a team of content marketers and try to make them the best that they can be in our industry so that we could collectively build something unparalleled.

When the hard time hits though, the thing that you worry about losing is the income, but underneath it all, I think it was more about losing something amazing that you’d built. I’d liken it to a coach building up a dynasty and then suddenly being removed from his post.

That coach still knows how to coach. Losing the Edge leaves everything he is with nowhere to put it, and that gap is what grief actually is.

I’ve essentially changed careers and titles a number of times now throughout my career, but at the end of the day, I’ve just always been me. And I’ve always tried to position myself as I am and lead in the direction of where I am going.

Across everything that I’ve built, the companies and titles have changed, but the body of work has compounded while everything else kept changing.

Your personal brand is not your identity

The smaller your private identity gets, the bolder your public one is allowed to be.

Once the label isn’t load-bearing you can plant it hard, because you stopped asking the flag to tell you who you are. After all, you are already the niche.

Nobody says “I’ve lost my identity” out loud, by the way. It sounds more like: now that I don’t have that job anymore, I feel a little bit lost and uncertain about what’s next, or even a little bit about who I am and what I want. If you have said some version of that this year, what you are missing is probably the platform, not the person.

Doyle never made the separation. He wrote historical novels for nearly twenty years and believed they were his real work. Almost nobody alive has read one, and the label that made him famous felt like a demotion for the rest of his life.

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