what’s your identity capital? why you should do things for the plot

about a framework I live by called Identity Capital, and how to engineer your own luck and richest life from it.

There are a few frameworks I implement into my daily life and decision-making, one being something I measure as Identity Capital, which is basically adjacent to the amount you’ve fucked around and found out for the plot.

I sometimes make light of the way I’ve whimsically lived, career hopping and being able to turn hobbies into jobs as if I hadn’t taken any of it seriously and just tripped and fell into it. I joke that I got my current high-paying job working for Youtube channels as a content creator through playing pickleball. Yeah, I was in this guy’s Instagram story for pickleball and then I got a job offer in my email. I joke that I’ve never really job-searched. It’s true, I haven’t ever really sat down and just started applying. But I downplay how competitive my interview actually was amongst the thousands of applicants, as well as how difficult it really is to make a living doing creative work. I sometimes make it seem as though I can float through life, taking too-good-to-be-true opportunities as they come. But really, what I have been doing instead of job applications has been intentionally building something called Identity Capital, a term coined by clinical psychologist Dr. Meg Jay.

“Identity capital is our collection of personal assets. It is the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, the things we do well enough, or long enough, that they become a part of who we are.”

Sure, it includes things like degrees, certifications, test scores and official positions. But it also includes how we look and speak, where we’re from, how we think, and what we’ve done. It’s everything that makes us interesting and therefore comprises what we bring to the “adult marketplace” when we metaphorically purchase jobs, relationships, and more.

At 15, I began blogging. At first, it was just to follow the robotics page my sister had made for our team. But soon, I became captivated by the fashion posts that’d make it onto my feed. I was merely the school nerd. Unfashionable, very unpopular, in the same blue oversized hoodie I wore every day with my hair in a ponytail. Online however, I gradually studied which fashion and aesthetic posts performed well and which didn’t, learned how to take and edit pictures, write reviews, and eventually built up a following of about 40,000 followers— which for 2015 was quite a lot. I began affiliate marketing, and seeing as the sales and numbers I brought in were extremely competitive for my online friends’ stores, I started my own clothing line. I was fortunate my high school offered a credit union, which allowed students to open a checking account as a minor as long as they got parental permission. I was also fortunate they did not actually check for parental permission.

Using the money I earned from my affiliate marketing, I invested in my own business. I sourced suppliers, identified trends, and tried different marketing tactics while documenting it each step of the way. I gave hundreds of people their own affiliate discount code, back when having your own discount code for a store made you cool online. I tracked all the affiliates’ sales progress, made a website to display a leaderboard and their credits earned, and a page to submit payouts. I was having fun inventing the whole thing as I went along. It’d come to generate about 3k a month in gross profit as a sole proprietorship before I started college.

When I completed my degree for mechanical engineering, interviewers would glance at my résumé and ask me about my experience starting my own fashion business. “It looks like you’re a self-starter. We’re looking for someone with that quality,” they’d say, impressed by that more than the engineering curriculum or business minor.

I’d also notice how much I benefited from a wide array of hobbies. At the end of the interview for my first job, I asked each of the 3 interviewers simply what they liked to do for fun. Cars, specifically racing, was an answer they had in common. Luckily, I had joined the racecar building organization my senior year and had enough to talk about it.

While living in a hotel, I’d stay up live streaming before heading back into my engineering job the next morning. I’d film videos on the weekends. Learn a new musical instrument or a choreographed dance. I’d fly out once a month to LA to meet the people I came across online. I’d quit my job and spent time couch surfing in misery, saying yes to every event, working odd and sometimes dangerous jobs, and getting out of my Ubers in heels near Compton as the driver would raise an eyebrow, concerned, asking “here?” looking at the somewhat questionable warehouses surrounding us. Stream, film, work, edit or study a new skill during my lunch breaks, network and socialize, crash. Over and over again. I still maintained the same picture perfect, pink, cutesy mask I chose to portray as my image online. A privileged e-girl was the image I boxed myself into for a while. The pink new girl in LA that hosted some insanely massive party and showed up in a ball gown.

I won’t lie that the image I held and maintained brought me through countless doors, but the depth of my abilities and experiences earned me respect from those I met who recognized it. I’d see similar qualities mirrored in many of the creatives that became my good friends. We had been building our lives up with Identity Capital.

So I’ve continued to build my life by making decisions based on what would give me the most Identity Capital. I’ll attend classes or enroll in school for anything that intrigues me, take the job that scares me, say yes to learning something new, or say yes to some random adventure simply for the most interesting plot.

Dr. Meg Jay states that people who who take the time to explore and also have the nerve to make commitments along the way construct stronger identities. They have higher self-esteem and are more persevering and realistic. This path to identity is associated with a host of positive outcomes, including a clearer sense of self, greater life satisfaction, better stress management, stronger reasoning, and resistance to conformity.

I have made it a habit of full-sending my decisions. Rather than keeping every door open, explore and then just make commitments. That is the way you learn, through and through. And that is how it becomes an investment that you nurture with the depth it needs in order to become a part of who you are, and therefore Identity Capital. Making commitments does not mean you cannot pause to reevaluate and work to change directions when need be either.

I’ll invest in equipment and props if it means it’ll lead me to eventually shoot music videos and accidentally go viral online for yapping about video editing. Because then that’ll lead me to even more crazy friends, opportunities and adventures, that I must say yes to. Because I’ll end up in the same room with legends like Alexander Hirsch, the creator of Gravity Falls, in an all-paid Yosemite trip, or at some Creator Pickleball weekend where I am seen on an Instagram story and receive an email to interview to be a content creator. And I will pass the interview because I’d have already spent my afternoons at work learning how to film and edit, and my blogging years on how to make things look pretty for the internet. Drawing and graphic design would be a bonus and luckily I’d have already worked with hundreds of streamers to make their emotes and graphic designs, which was how I befriended streamers in the first place who convinced me to begin streaming myself with a gifted laptop I am still using now. And because of streaming myself, that was how I made the majority of great friends I have.

Each piece of Identity Capital offers a point of connection to even more doors. It’s not just about what goes on a piece of paper, and it’s not truly just luck.

So as you come across the different choices you make in your life, what do you think would make you richest in Identity Capital?

Maybe you should do it for the plot.

Sincerely,
Kristie