Field note
Working identity
Ibarra’s finding: people rehearse a next life in small experiments.
Herminia Ibarra’s Working Identity (2003) followed people who changed careers. The useful ones did not wait for certainty. They tried a class, a project, a conversation, a temporary role, and they watched what the trial did to their sense of themselves. Identity updated after the evidence, not before.
Side projects on an Interest Map are those experiments, whether or not you have called them that. A night class in letterpress is data. So is the friend who keeps asking you to edit their essay. The chart’s career suggestions are hypotheses about which experiment is worth a longer run.
Ibarra is also a warning about the grand announcement. Quitting on a mood is a different instrument from a six-week trial with a witness. Let the overlap earn a bigger claim after it has survived a few ordinary Tuesdays.