I was looking forward to reading this article as the concept (even just the name, identify diversification) immediately resonated with me.
What I found was an anecdote followed by a few hypotheticals. “What if you spend all your time sportsing and then you get hurt?” Really a minimal treatment of the idea unfortunately.
As a founder, I’m working on diversifying my identity by learning mandolin, reading more fiction, and running again. The funny thing is I’m actually more effective at work when I take time for myself outside of the company. In the moment it’s hard to give myself the permission, but I almost never regret it now.
This resonates a lot with me. I recently ran into a somewhat similar situation and I was grateful that I had read Mark Manson's article about the same topic[1] a while back. It allowed me to recognize and address the underlying issue fairly quickly.
If one has a cognitive distortion it's better to talk back to that distortion. Why should these aspects of so called identity be important to how I feel anyway?
Your interests need maintenance and care, you cultivate them like a garden. You can definitely find yourself uninterested in everything if you think interests should find you and not the other way around.
The article is less ambitious - find a couple more identities so you can get by when one crumbles. Buddhist thing is more radical - stop relying on identities and stop having them.
What I found was an anecdote followed by a few hypotheticals. “What if you spend all your time sportsing and then you get hurt?” Really a minimal treatment of the idea unfortunately.