You’re not sure who you are without the title, the office, and the firm name behind you.
Prestige is armor. The title, the office, the company in your signature: it tells people who you are before you have to prove it. It buys credibility on credit. The fear is what happens when you take it off, that without the suit and the glass behind your head there’s nobody worth listening to. It isn’t a stupid fear. Credentials are real signals of competence, and pretending they don’t matter is its own kind of vanity. The point was never anti-credential. It’s anti-hiding.
The cost is that armor is a useful shortcut right up until it becomes a substitute for the thing it was supposed to signal. If the armor is doing the talking, you never find out whether the person underneath has anything to say, and neither does anyone else. And in a world where AI can polish any memo or deck into something that looks expensive, the person who shows up with nothing but themselves and skin in the game is the rarest thing in the room.
Name where you hide behind prestige; take it off once and show up with only your help. Could you deliver without the title?
Find where you’re using armor: the title in the signature, the firm name, the over-polished deck, the conference room. Pick one meeting this week and take it off, on purpose. Show up with nothing but your actual capacity to help. It will feel uncomfortable; that’s the point. Afterward, answer honestly: could you deliver without it? If yes, wear it lightly from now on.
Armor: the suit, the title, the glass office, set aside to see whether the person underneath can still deliver.
If an idea does not fit on a napkin, it is probably not an idea yet. Redraw this one on your own.
The system is free and it works alone. If you want a second set of hands on the wheel, that is what the Purpose Pit Stop is for.