177: Your Next Identity Is Already Inside You with Kaj Larsen

I guess as you were saying it, I was thinking about my own experience of doing the hard stuff, let's say military or police or something.

And then what I do nowadays today and spending time with clients or the podcast or writing blogs, it's not the hard stuff, which is why I sometimes have these thoughts of going to be a state trooper or something like that, because I still have kind of that, I even looked into OSI again, but I still have that kind of gene going in me.

But there is something to be said for recognizing that you can operate in a different kind of identity.

That is another piece and probably where we will land the plane.

You shifted multiple times.

All right.

So you just gave an arc and it's not the full arc, but military service, junior officer, Navy SEAL, war correspondent, executive producing.

There's a shift to starting a veteran's financial advocacy platform of some sort.

It's a shift.

Your identity shifted a couple of times.

I'm wondering what it was like for you to go from one identity to another, now that external identity, I don't know what you felt like from the inside out, I have no idea, but you went multiple external identities of how people described and identified you, The folks listening, like they're afraid to give up being partner at a firm.

They don't want that title or they want they don't want to stop being the street cop and go do X because then who they were is not who they were anymore.

How did you manage all of that?

So there's this really.

I think important physical metaphor idea.

And I think it's where most people fall when they make a pivot or a transition.

Just because you pivot or transition, it doesn't mean that you have to start from zero.

You are not starting now.

At the bottom, you still have all that experience of being a street cop or an investigator and all of the wisdom that comes from that accumulated experience.

So the key is the key is is to use that past experience.

Right.

And use it.

to leapfrog across verticals and to enter at a higher level than as if you were just starting from the bottom.

And I'll give you an example of what I did.

So when I entered media, right? And forget the journalism piece.