When I arrived in Silicon Valley as a dropout 2 years ago, I met countless seed stage founders who spent years crafting perfect personas for VCs, only to feel increasingly anxious and inauthentic. Traditional psychology says: find your identity, stabilize your self-concept, know who you are. This advice sounds wise, but it creates more problems than it solves.

Your chosen identity is just self-reinforcing loops. You act a certain way because you want to be seen as that kind of person. This makes you act that way more, which strengthens the belief. There's nothing inherent about it. Yet we live in an age that validates chosen identity structures to the maximum.

Here's the problem.

The real work isn't building identity. It's developing internal coherence with your actual curiosity—the underlying patterns of what genuinely energizes you, what problems you're drawn to solve, and what feels right when you're not performing for anyone.

Internal coherence means your actions align with what you actually know and value, not what you think you should want. It's the difference between starting a startup for the sake of it versus solving a problem you really care about or hacking on projects with friends. One drains you, one energizes you.

Instead of asking "Who do I need to say to get x?" ask "Does this align with what I actually know about myself?"

When you try to prop up an identity as a fixed end goal, it creates anxiety. Identity can be built entirely on contradiction and still look whole from the outside. But coherence can't—it fractures when contradiction is introduced, which is why it's real. When coherence fractures, you see the symptoms everywhere: the founder who can pitch brilliantly but can't get users to stick around, the 'visionary' whose roadmap changes every month based on the latest trend, the 'product person' who's never shipped anything that people actually use. They maintain the identity through storytelling and social proof, but the work itself reveals the contradictions. You can't fake depth: either you understand the problem intimately or you don't, either the solution works or it doesn't.

Think of founders who refuse to pivot despite years without progress. They've built an identity around their original idea—"I'm the person who's going to solve X"—and defending that identity becomes more important than solving an actual problem.

Startups should be like running science experiments. You form hypotheses, test them, and follow the data wherever it leads. I've seen when you build an identity around your original hypothesis, you stop being a scientist and become a defender of predetermined conclusions.

The result is predictable: you can raise money, feel validated, and build a stable identity all on an incoherent foundation. And the truth about startups is there's no prize for working on the wrong thing really hard - you end up missing real opportunities while defending a fake self.

When you treat identity as fixed truth, you spend energy defending who you think you are supposed to be instead of obsessing over process and work.

Who you are was never real. Stop trying to be someone. Just do the work.