Hedge Your Identity: Having Several Things Going Might Not Be A Bad Idea

Who am I? What do I stand for? What’s my identity?

Questions that everyone asks at some point in their life. Easy to ask, hard to answer. And when you find the answer, it usually looks like this:

“Oh, I’m a … entrepreneur / athlete / loving and caring mom / engineer / independent black woman who don’t need no man.”

The common thread among all those answers is that the identity is tied to an activity (except for the independent black woman, no idea where that came from). Engineers engineer. Athletes do sports (or could you say “Athletes athlete”?). Moms take care of their kids (and sometimes husbands). Entrepreneurs create companies. Actually, being an entrepreneur is kind of like being a mom (or dad) I suppose, since you’re also raising your baby. But that’s beside the point.

Now, what happens if for some reason you lose your main activity? You get fired. You tear your ACL. You realize that your company will not be the next unicorn. Your kids move out.

What do you have now?

In many cases, nothing. When disaster strikes, people need to reinvent themselves — and quite frankly, disastrous situations aren’t the best time to reinvent yourself; you’ve got a lot of other shit going on.

That is, unless you’ve taken precautionary measures.

Let’s take a short detour into the world of investing. You have some money, and you’d like to invest it in a way that minimizes the risk of losing it while giving you some return. Would you invest it all into one particular stock?

Hell no. The chances of that very company going to shit are way too high. So, instead, you hedge. You get a backyard, a fence, some hedge cutters and then you’re set for life. Wait — no, that’s not what hedging means.

Hedging means you invest into diverse assets: stocks, bonds, commodities, long and short options, futures, etc. Instead of going all in, you let the statistics do the work for you and offset risks (for a more detailed explanation, check out Wikipedia. Whoever wrote this article does a lot better job than I ever could).

Yet, when it comes to who we are, most people identify with one thing. You’re this. I’m that. Why would you do that when instead, you could be hedging your identity?

A couple years ago, my girlfriend at the time broke up with me. I was devastated. I was very much in love, and I identified myself as her boyfriend — which was awesome. However, all the sudden, that was gone. Who was I?

Luckily, she wasn’t the only thing I had in life. I had the startup I work on. I had Lacrosse, and I had my team. Being in a relationship with her was part of my identity, but it wasn’t my whole identity. I could still say “I’m Dom, and I’m an entrepreneur and athlete.”

It allowed me to move on eventually. Time heals all wounds, they say. It’s true. Time passes even faster when you’ve got cool stuff to do.

But say for example, you’re in your 70s. Your partner dies, and literally your whole life you were busy taking care your partner, the kids and the grandchildren. Now even the grandchildren are adults, your partner’s gone — what do you do? That’s a tough transition.

This is why I advocate to hedge your identity.

Pick up different things that you enjoy, and make it part of your identity — no matter what it is! You’re not just one thing. You’re a beautiful, facetted person, and you can show that to others.

Don’t get dragged down if one thing in your life changes drastically. Instead, make sure that you have enough other pillars to rest upon, until you can find something new. Identity isn’t static, but fluid. It evolves with you.

The notion that we have to be really good at one thing is, in my opinion, far outdated. You don’t have to be in the top 1% of what you do; instead, aspire to be in the top 5% in two or three things that you do (for me, that’d be entrepreneurship, lacrosse and writing while maintaining a healthy relationship). If one of those endeavors doesn’t work out, you’ll still have plenty of other things to work with.

And avoid an identity crisis that’ll have you asking again: Who am I? What do I stand for? What’s my identity?