When I was a young man I enjoyed a brief, accidental career as a business executive. In my surprising success, I discovered skills and aspects of my personality — my self —that I hadn’t previously known I possessed. Because all along I felt my true self to be, very differently, what I ultimately chose to become, a writer and professor of English, I sometimes felt like an imposter. Who is this person making decisions, issuing directives, strategically angling advantages in corporate maneuverings — perceived, in his small world, as important and powerful? We categorize and label identities, of others and of ourselves, even when the categories may be incommensurate to our various selves acting in the world, and this produces discordances. Central to a discordant sense of identity is that defining human attribute we call self-consciousness. Consider that as part of my work, I often had to persuade clients, partners, and employees to do what I wished — sometimes needed — them to do, in order to advance my and my company’s objectives, which didn’t always, for various reasons, precisely align. I always believed in what I was doing, and I didn’t seek to disadvantage anyone. But sometimes the course of action I argued, not necessarily always by my own choice, didn’t appear on the surface as advantageous to the other party as I suggested it could be. Sometimes they were right. Initially, it might not be. I had to persuade them, against their self-protective mistrust — using the personal trust I had earned from them, in conjunction with my persuasive skills — that in the longer run, it would be. And I understood how they might perceive the matter differently or at least fear that there was something they weren’t seeing, information they didn’t have, maybe even that I was withholding. Such situations opened up substantial space for speculation about motives, projection of one person’s intuitions onto another’s character, and so on. The more naturally inclined business personality might spend little if any time in this discordant mental space of self-conscious questioning of its own authenticity. A more naturally introspective personality might spend a lot of time there — time better spent becoming a master of the universe.