Identity My New Problem Space

In the past few weeks, I took a step back to reflect, not just about what’s next in my career, but what frontier I’d like to explore over the next 5 to 7 years. I’ve been trying to connect the dots between my experience working for social enterprises and billion-dollar companies, and what keeps showing up for me, quietly, but consistently… is the ideae of identity.

Yes, identity.

I haven’t always thought deeply about this, probably just like you. But now that I’m paying attention, it feels like my career has somehow been tilting me in this direction, slowly preparing me for thiss kind of problem. And maybe now I’m ready to explore it more intentionally.

So, why identity?

Maybe it’s boredom. Maybe it’s curiosity. But I found myself wanting something deeper, foundational—something not directly tied to the hype cycles. Seven years ago, I got into data and how people can make decision based on other people’s behaviour, not because it was popular, but because it was a tool that helped me understand problems better. Back then, it was about managing, collecting the world data and seeing patterns. But it was never just about the tool, it was always about the domain, the problem space and my experience span, electrification (urban planning), retailing, to travel and experiences.

That’s what draws me in.

And when I think about where we’re headed, from privacy to self-expression, trust, verification, personalization, freedom, border, social construct, and even politics…identity is at the center of it all. It’s a century old problem, that has showed up in various form. More about this, later.

I used to envy subject matter experts, the real OGs. The ones who know their domains so deeply they could write 1,000 pages about it without blinking, the people engineers have to rely on to digitalize and represent their domain as accurately as possible. And every time I’ve spoken to people wanting a career change, I always find myself saying: pick a problem space that fascinates you and then think about how learning the tool will help you in that space. The tools will change, AI will shift every five years, but the problem stays rich. Think about it, if you understood commerce—how buying and selling worked, pre dot com. Then you will realize that e-commerce(amazon, shopify, jumia) is the same thing just done online via the internet. And now, there is something called Agentic commerce or agentic e-commerce, the jury isn’t out yet on the name.

That’s why, for me, it’s not “why identity?”

It’s why not identity?

Morgan Housel’s Same As Ever talks about the tension between prediction and preparedness. And if you’ve lived long enough, you know prediction almost always fails. We try to predict markets, careers, global events. But most of it is noise. You can’t control the world, or the system.

What you can do, what I’m trying to do.. is prepare.

And preparation takes time. Often years. Sometimes decades. But it changes you. It builds something internal. And when the moment comes, you’re ready; not because you predicted it, but because you’ve grown into someone who can *hold/*recognize it.

And that’s where identity comes in.

If I’m preparing for the next 3-5 years of my life and career, I want to choose a lens I can keep exploring, something interesting, something fun, something useful.

And lately, I’ve been waking up obscenely early, just to read. I don’t even have a plan for it. Some mornings, I fall off completely and sleep in. But the strange thing is: I like it. It’s not work. It’s working out. I’m learning new things, stumbling into concepts I never cared about before, and enjoying it deeply—even cryptography.

That’s the signal.

Fun is a signal.

And the reason I’m drawn to identity is because it connects across five big models or domains—Security, Liberty, Data, Relations, and Capability, a framework by Joe Andrieu that I’ve found incredibly helpful. My hope is to understand these more deeply, connect them, maybe even contribute to that body of work in my own way. Because when something is both fun and difficult, you know you’re onto something.

After fun comes usefulness.

And usefulness is always tricky. We tend to measure it in economic terms, how much money can this make? But sometimes the most useful things take years to compound. In fact, what you’re learning today might look like it has no commercial value, until one day it suddenly becomes everything you needed to know.

So yes, I think identity is useful. For me, personally. But also professionally. Because the world, especially the digital world, runs on identity systems. Knowing how those systems work might become more important than we realize.

In the past few weeks alone, I have taken an eclectic approach in learning identity, I’ve had conversations with social activists in the Liberty space, gone back to old mathematics texts, skimmed through books from 1937, revisited geography, and found strange overlaps between all these things. And slowly, it’s helping me understand the world just a bit better.

And then there’s application.

This is where everything gets tested.

How do you apply what you’re learning? That’s where learning becomes knowledge, and eventually wisdom. Sometimes you don’t know how to apply something immediately. But you can start by connecting it to what you already do. You know things. You’ve experienced things. You can plug your learning into that.

Application also gives you room to stay in sync with the world, without drowning in hype. Like, you could fuse your foundational learning with AI. Use it to prototype something, validate a framework, or even just automate your research. That’s what makes it exciting, you don’t need to abandon the hype. You just need to channel it into something longterm, or connect it to knowledge you have accrued.

And that’s what I’m trying to do with identity. It’s a thread that takes me back to my early career and also weaves itself into my current work. And hopefully, it’s one I can follow forward.

Now, here’s the thing.

I could be wrong.

This entire project might lead nowhere. And I’m okay with that. Because right now, it feels right. It feels like the kind of slow research journey I’ve always wanted, where maybe every 14 months I can publish something, write a paper, or probably give a talk/presentation.

It’s like I’m designing my own personal PhD. A slow, internal doctorate in thinking, reading, writing, and applying.

And here’s where Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point comes in.

He reminds us that big changes don’t always happen with big moves. Sometimes it’s the small, invisible shifts that create the curve. You don’t always know what tiny action caused everything to tilt. It’s a phenomenon. And often, it catches everyone, including the person who started it, by surprise.

So when you’re deciding what to do next… when you’re choosing a chapter, a path, a domain… ask yourself:

What’s the alternative?

You could chase the hype. You could try to keep up with the noise. And sure, maybe that leads somewhere too.

Or

You could try something slower. Something foundational. Something that gives you energy, even if it doesn’t give you certainty.

The outcome isn’t guaranteed.

But the process?

The process is where the magic is.