I spent two years in what used to be Bedlam, and I’ve got through some twenty thousand pills since I was ten.
Then I built a career out of rebuilding other people.
THE SHORT VERSION
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I’m Jack Goodson, a.k.a. The Identity Consultant. I do identity work for oddly ambitious people — founders, the sorts whose names move things, content creators, and artists with ambitions larger than they’ll admit at a party. I write essays, fiction, and aphorisms. I co-founded an agency. And I keep a lexicon of terms I had to invent myself, on account of the available vocabulary lying to me.
THE LONG VERSION, IN WHICH VERY LITTLE GOES TO PLAN
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I was going to be a doctor. Medicine, Oxford, the whole respectable trajectory mapped out and paid for in advance. Then Oxford rejected me, and it turned out the trajectory was the only thing holding me together.
What followed was two years inside what used to be Bedlam, a pharmacy’s worth of pills, and a long stretch spent impersonating strangers and, rather more embarrassingly, myself.
But there was no self to go back to.
Everyone wants the breakdown to have been secretly the best thing that ever happened to them. It wasn’t. It was two years of my twenties I’d rather have spent almost any other way. But it did teach me one thing nobody in that building intended: when they told me to go back to being myself, there was no self there to go back to. Not a damaged one. Not a hidden one. None at all.
So I built one. Badly at first, then less badly, then on purpose.
You don’t find yourself. Nobody ever has. You design yourself, and the only real question is whether you’re doing it deliberately or letting the world do it for you.
WHY THIS BECAME A METHOD
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Rebuilding a person from parts turns out to be a repeatable process. I did not expect that, and I’d rather have discovered it somewhere with better lighting.
You establish what’s actually driving you, including the parts that don’t flatter you — especially those. Then you collide it against how your world really works: who holds power, what gets punished, and which myths you’re expected to repeat with a straight face. What survives the collision is something you can use in an actual room, in front of actual people, with money on the table.
Fourteen years of doing that for other people — founders, executives, content creators, artists, and a few consumer brands who wanted a world rather than a logo — and it’s still the same job. Pop culture, philosophy, and business, in a blender.
That’s the method now. Four sessions, a deliverable, and ninety days of it going out into the world.
The method →
THE BUSINESS FINGERPRINTS
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Branded a venture capitalist as “The Fixer” — the one you call when the AI startup is on fire
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Directed a top-0.01% creator into new audiences, media deals and actual influence
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Worked with a founder building infrastructure against coordinated narrative manipulation, on the identity that lets him say so without reading as partisan (he knows who he is)
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Repositioned a $35M+ agency’s executive team mid-acquisition, for valuation
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Positioned a robot dog as a new lifeform rather than a piece of hardware
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Led 40+ global campaigns for the world’s largest digital content studio
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Ghostwrote 75+ C-suite articles into Forbes, Vogue and Entrepreneur
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Wrote award submissions that won 20+ prizes and a stack of Webby nods
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Helped 7+ APAC brands cross into Western markets without losing the plot
THE OTHER WORK
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There is a second building.
There’s a second half to this: essays, fiction, poems, and the philosophy underneath the consulting. None of it’s for sale. It’s where the thinking happens before it becomes method.
Enter The Madness →
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