At some point, if you go deep enough on anything, people will start calling you "the _____ guy."
And at first, ...it feels great. You just spent years of your life learning and mastering something hard, getting into the nitty gritty of it, and the market rewarded you for it. The label is a compliment and means that people really noticed.
But over time, something shifts.
The label stops being a description of what you did, and starts feeling a lot more like a description of who you are supposed to be.
You start introducing yourself that way, update your bio everyplace to match, and people actually hire you for it. You may even get hundreds or thousands of people to pay you to do your thing.
Then you think back, and try to remember who you actually were before going down that rabbit hole.
Maybe you didn’t pick the thing because you loved the thing. Maybe you picked it because your brain couldn’t resist attacking it, solving that problem you know that only you could. It’s a complex and messy problem that needed someone like you to understand it fully. When that happened, the market attached you to it with a label.
But the label was never the goal. It was just a nice little side effect of going deep on that one specific thing.
Is that bad? Well, probably not.
But what if the market shifts? The thing that made you “that guy” a few years back might be the kind of thing that is holding you back today. You didn’t fail, but the overlap between your initial curiosity of what kicked everything off in the first place could now be aligning with a market need that is closing.
And I don’t think this needs to be a crisis.
There’s danger in thinking you need to find your “next thing”, and then put on a new mask for another decade. I don’t think you need to. Maybe you never needed a label in the first place. You just need an interesting problem to solve, and the freedom to go as deep as you want on it.
The decade wasn't wasted, and maybe the label wasn’t wrong. But maybe it was just a season -- a really profitable, impactful season of your life when your curiosity perfectly overlapped with the need of a market.
What lies under that label? Maybe something even bigger, because it’s you at your core. For me, this is recognizing patterns, simplifying complexity, and teaching others what I learn. I go deep on these things, and these are the sort of items that don’t expire when the world shifts.
Someone who "goes deep on an interesting problem and teaches what they learn” was true before the label, and it’ll be true after.
What’s your “true you” when the labels are stripped away? Don’t forget it.