Any title written in a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and dots. Particularly when it exceeds three letters in total. You know the ones.
Self-bestowed titles such as Expert, Guru, Aficionado, or Hero. Here is the distinction worth making: if someone else calls you that, you earned it. It means you created enough value for that person that they felt compelled to say so. That is a meaningful thing. But the moment you apply it to yourself, unprompted and unearned, it becomes self-inflation. The same word, in the same sentence, means something entirely different depending on who said it first.
Futurist deserves its own paragraph. Can you shape or predict the past? No. And consider that the present is simply the accumulation of multiple pasts, which means there is only one direction any of us are heading. In that sense we are all futurists, advancing into the future one second at a time. Calling yourself one is not a distinction. It is a statement of basic physics.
What all of these titles have in common is that they are a substitute for results. Grand-sounding words placed in front of your name to create an impression that your track record has not yet earned, or that you do not trust your track record to create on its own. The same applies to the alphabet soup of non-academic certifications and dot-letter abbreviations that trail behind so many names on LinkedIn. Passing a course or obtaining a certificate says something about your willingness to sit an exam. It says nothing about what you have actually achieved for anyone.
Academic titles are not immune to this either. A Professor, a Doctor, a PhD commands respect within their field and rightly so. But the title travels further than the expertise tends to. A doctorate in one discipline does not confer authority in every discipline, and a research paper, however rigorous, is not the same as a track record of real-world results. Schopenhauer identified this cleanly in his unfinished work The Art of Winning Arguments, where he described the appeal to authority as a rhetorical device used when stronger arguments are unavailable. The title is deployed to win the point rather than the evidence. The logic has not changed.
That is not confidence. It is the opposite of confidence, dressed carefully to look like the real thing.
Let your results introduce you. If you are goodenough, others will supply the titles. And those will actually mean something.
