Can you build a personal brand as a Polymath?
I really hate the idea of 'personal brands', but the truth is, as you live your live online, people associate certain things with you and that becomes your personal brand. Fair enough.
Some people lean into this a lot and build authority – thinking about @rosiesherry who instantly comes to mind when I think about 'Community'. Thinking about @bentossell when I think of no-code, thinking about @csallen and @rrhoover when I think about the maker/startup community.
I'm currently struggling to find 'my thing'. I am building a career in Machine Learning, I am a strong advocate of remote work, I build a marketplace for mentorship. Doing all these things that don't really hang together makes it difficult for me to find the ONE thing people would associate with my personal brand.
Do you know people who built a personal brand in a lot of different industries? Is this even possible?
I dabbled with "personal brand" years ago when I opened a consulting business in my own name. As it turns out, it worked well in the beginning when my customer base was small, but then it grew to a point where I needed to scale and I no longer wanted to be the "face" of my business. I was stuck in a spot though where the customers only wanted to talk to me, and wanted to bypass any staff I tried to bring on because they felt they were paying to have my time exclusively.
I closed that business and re-branded when I wanted to pivot and add tech to my offering to back away from the personal assistance. The parallel I'm trying to draw is that I portrayed myself as the expert in a subject and then couldn't escape from it without drastic measures, so chose wisely.
I’m In a similar situation. But the topics you described are well connected so they are not a distant as you might think so just go for it and talk in you blog/newsletter etc about all of them. Many people appreciate others wide interests especially if you can point out the connections between fields.
My husband (fairly recently) discovered and started calling himself a 'multipotentialite'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipotentiality
Where as I'm all in on 'community', he covers a wider ground.
He has no interest in developing a brand, but is awesome at tech/dev. Managing money. Building and growing of businesses. And more recently investing. Ministry of Testing wouldn't be where it is without him, stuff gets complicated pretty quickly and I just can't cope with that.
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