Titles are linguistic symbols that create psychological value

Conventional wisdom would tell us that titles are just words.

Constraints on our abilities. Limits on our expression. Unnecessary expectations for our work.

They merely emphasis hierarchy, disempower workers and distract us from our true potential. We don’t need a title to do something great. These arbitrary labels have no bearing on our ability to make an impact on the organization.

My favorite part is when people excessively proclaim how unimportant titles are to them. I suppose it makes them feel humble and virtuous and authentic by claiming they don’t care about titles.

But the reality is, titles matter. They affect how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. They impact how we approach the world and how it interacts with us. Titles are naming conventions that serve as an essential act of human communication. They’re linguistic signals, and they were invented for a very specific purpose in our culture.

As an example, founder is a title that has no official definition or legal ramifications. Technically, anyone can call themselves a founder. And people who refer to themselves as such typically do so for psychological and symbolic reasons, rather than operational and financial ones.

But that doesn’t make this label any less significant. A person dons the mantle of founder because they lay a foundation. They identify a real, urgent, pervasive and expensive problem in the world that needs solving, evaluate the potential for new ideas in new markets, and create solutions that are not just better, but different that the available alternatives.

Founders also expose themselves to the risk of creating something that didn’t previously exist. They put their balls on the line and make themselves vulnerable to criticism, competition and culture. Signing up for a grind that can’t be outsourced, only hustled by hand. In short, they take something from idea to execution.

Naturally, calling yourself the founder of anything creates a certain level of prestige. It carries weight. There are connotations of innovation and determination and vision. It doesn’t mean you can’t change the world without calling yourself one, but it certainly helps.

My story as a founder didn’t really start until age forty. I had already worked many jobs, run my own business and launched tons of projects before that time. But I never felt the psychological need to call myself a founder of anything.

But when I started building this new discipline of personal creativity management, and then converting my philosophy into a software platform, suddenly the title of founder became deeply meaningful to me. Declaring myself as such generated a new way of being. Founder became this a paradigm that provided me with a new source of power that I didn’t have and couldn’t have before.

Founder was linguistic symbol that gave me a new context for myself, one that changed the way I related to the world and empowered me to scale the impact I had on it.

Graham, the famous venture capitalist and startup founder whisperer, once wrote that if you overestimate the importance of what you’re working on, that will compensate for your mistakenly harsh judgment of your initial results. It helps to be slightly overconfident. This compensates for other sources in the opposite direction. Being slightly overconfident armors you against both other people’s skepticism and your own.

How does your title positively impact the way you see yourself? What linguistic signal might empower you to achieve greater things than you could without it?

If you haven’t found a title that helps you feel bigger than you really are, perhaps it’s time to stick a new nametag on your chest. One that’s different and bigger than anything you’ve ever called yourself before.

Sure, sometimes no labels means no limits.

But then again, sometimes all it takes is a single moniker to change the way we relate to ourselves, to each other and to the world.

What are you interested in accomplishing that requires you to rename yourself to accomplish?