I think there is a fine line you need to tread. I agree with what paul has to say but sometimes what we care about is what drives us.

For the longest time i worked as a consultant but i never cared. When someone said to me so what do you do, i just said i work with computers, my rank didnt matter to me, my role , my status nothing. I wouldn't come to work in a suite or tie or even a shirt (i came in just a t-shirt and jeans) and it was very weird to many who were watching. I guess cause they cared and wondered why i didnt ...

They would say , "your a consultant, for a big4 how can you wear those clothes, cause i personally cant".

I would respond by saying, well i dont care , just wanna make sure customer is happy regardless of what my official role is, that way i could do my work , not have to redo things and then go home. Also one of the important things i think is i detached myself from being a consultant, i was nothing, not a manager, a consultant, a senior consultant , who has certain things attached to them so i felt free and just wore what i wanted with the one rule that the customer needs to be happy.

When i found out that i could get away with that i experimented with a few other things too, like if i was tired during lunch i would sleep on the park bench if it was a nice sunny day. I stopped thinking hey im a professional and cant be seen sleeping on a park bench cause thats what bums do and once i got over it and i thought , hey who cares, it was easy and i would come back to the office invigorated cause of a 20-30 minute quick nap :)

However the caveat is when you CARE enough about say programming . If you start to tell yourself you dont care anymore you loose a certain desire which if you care about it, isnt very good. if you keep telling yourself hey i am a programmer then that comes with certain things such as , writing code, being half decent at math, being logical etc etc and being good at those things isnt a bad thing.

So i think i get what paul is saying when he says "i am nothing" but i think you cant apply that to things you care about cause it will cause you to not care. But applying that way of thinking to things what you might care about but deep down know its just for perception or is kinda silly or even not really important has some surprisingly good results :)