ABSTRACT
The editors of this volume wanted me to tell my story—how Jim Côté became the Professor James Côté of today—and to do so in a creative fashion. I take up this charge with relish, but also with trepidation because part of my biography has required me to carefully control information about myself, in part by segregating various personal and professional audiences. One of the advantages of being a late-career academic, however, is that some things no longer matter, so I can now feel free to disclose information about myself to diverse audiences. Nevertheless, it is precisely that need for information control and audience segregation in my personal life that has provided some of the most valuable insights in my academic work on identity formation, and especially in developing the identity capital model. These real-world experiences taught me to require that any ideas and theories I endorse academically must pass my personal “sniff test,” namely, that they make common sense and they are not so ill-defined as to ascend to some sort of intellectual Neverland.
