I was listening to one of my favorite episodes of the ChessMood Podcast from my friend GM Avetik, How you can perform at your peak like top athletes do | Todd Herman on ChessMood Podcast, and around 01h07 one small idea from it kept following me around.

He said he prefers verbs to nouns when he talks about himself.

Not “I’m a coach,” but “I coach.” Not “I’m an entrepreneur,” but “I build.” Not “I’m an author,” but “I write.”

The more I sat with that, the more it explained a tension I’ve felt for years.

There are days when “developer” feels too heavy a word for me. I can ship something useful in the morning, get stuck on a dumb bug in the afternoon, and end the day feeling like I should hand back the badge. The same thing happens with writing. If I tell myself “I am a writer,” every weak paragraph feels like evidence against me. But if I say “I write,” the whole thing softens. I wrote today. Some of it was good. Some of it wasn’t. Both can be true.

That’s what I like about verbs: they leave room for motion.

Nouns can be useful. They help other people understand roughly where you live in the world. But they also freeze you at strange moments. They can turn yesterday’s result into today’s identity. “I am this kind of person.” “I am this level.” “I am this role.” And once that sentence hardens, you start protecting it. You hesitate to be bad at something new because it might threaten the name you’ve chosen for yourself.

Verbs don’t ask for that kind of defense. Verbs ask for practice.

“I write” means I can write something sharp one day and clumsy the next. “I code” means I can build a feature, break something obvious, learn, fix it, and keep going. The verb doesn’t collapse because the performance wasn’t perfect. In a quiet way, it’s a more merciful grammar.

What stayed with me most from Todd Herman’s framing was that this changes across contexts. The verb that describes how I work is not always the same one that describes how I love people. In one part of life, maybe I build. In another, I listen. In another, I encourage. The noun tries to gather everything into one static identity. The verb asks a better question: what am I actually doing here?

That question feels closer to how life is really lived.

I don’t want to be trapped by a title that only describes me on my best days. I’d rather use words that still fit on ordinary days. I wrote bad code today. I rewrote a paragraph five times. I explored an idea without being sure it would go anywhere. None of that cancels the practice. It is the practice.

And there is something quietly reassuring in that. If a title disappears, the verb often remains. If one day I stop calling myself a developer, I can still build. If I stop calling myself a writer, I can still write. The label may change with the season. The work can keep moving.

So I find myself trusting verbs more.

Not because nouns are evil, and not because language alone can save us, but because verbs keep me closer to the living part of things. They remind me that I am not a finished category. I am a person in motion, practicing.