Some Fundamentals of Personal Branding

I used to believe that personal branding is personal.

It’s not.

Personal branding is tailored.

It’s tailored to the subjective experience of whoever engages with your work.

Everyone perceives the world in their own way. And your audience experiences your work in their own way, as well.

Alice reads a blog on productivity because she wants to learn how to get more work done. But Joshua reads the same blog as Alice because he’s a productivity fiend. Not only is Joshua looking for ways to be more productive, he’s seeking the hottest productivity tricks to share with his friends. Same product, different experience.

Personal branding isn’t exclusive to the entrepreneur, or the YouTube star. Personal branding is the feeling you get after eating your favorite meal. It’s not about the actual work while it’s happening to or around you. Because that’s when you’re actually in the thick of it, and you’re not aware that there’s magic happening. But afterwards? After you’ve complimented the chef? After you’ve left an unusually generous tip? That’s when you know you’ve experienced something remarkable.

And as an artist, or an academic, or a well-groomed professional, you have a personal brand. You have a stamp. You have a footprint to leave behind.

Doing personal branding well is like saying, "this is the work I’ve done for you. I’m proud enough of this work to put my name on it.”

You can do personal branding even if you don’t leave your name on it.

Consider the work of an anonymous Japanese chef. Anyone who eats this chef’s curry udon, without knowing the chef’s name, knows who cooked it. The branding is in the hard-work of delighting the customers after they’ve finished their meal.

Personal branding is how your readers think about your blog while they’re daydreaming.

It’s how your audience geeks out about your work behind your back.

There's a paradox in personal branding that I want to clear up. This whole talk of turning ourselves into media companies and our friends into customers borderlines on "late-stage capitalism."

People are people - not brands

Consider the work of my friend Chris Jordan. Chris Jordan isn't a brand. He's a person. But the feelings he leaves us after we've watched his videos - that's his personal brand. Chris wants to take you on a journey from here to there.

Personal branding isn't about turning relationships into transactions. The stories you want to tell, the feelings you want to convey, all that stuff happens as a byproduct of doing good work. Where will you take us?

When you lean into yourself, you create a body of work which becomes an obsession for your fans. This is why artists sometimes respond with, “I don’t know, it just sort of happened” when asked how they got the ideas for their best work.

No great works of art are made by force. They “just sort of happen.”

Your true fans are those who obsess over the work that “just sort of happened.” And when you have thousands of those kinds of fans, that’s when you know you’re good at personal branding.

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