Rethink Your Personal Brand

Let's get the first order of business out of the way. A personal brand is not about self-promotion above all else. A real personal brand is about providing a service to an audience you really love and care about. I rarely see an exception to this rule when it comes to thought leaders.

What a personal brand fundamentally is

At its core, a brand is a story that directs attention to create a specific expectation. One of the most persistent personal brands of our time is Steve Jobs. He has been described as many things, good and bad, but we tend to have a singular version of him in our minds because that is how he directed the attention around him.

The question you have to ask yourself is what are you directing attention to? There are two layers you can work with. Your identity, which is how you direct attention to yourself. And your perspective, which is how you direct attention to the world. A personal brand sits somewhere in between these two things.

When it comes to the service you are actually providing to your audience, here is what I see time and time again, and what I believe naturally happens if you approach your thought leadership from a genuinely expansive place: the best brands tap into a latent emotional experience that isn't being expressed, and when you name it, people feel relief and recognition.

Rick Rubin gives us permission to blend creativity, spirituality, and commercial pursuits. He recognizes a desire people cannot quite name, to treat all of those pursuits as sacred rather than keep them separate, and giving them permission to do that is his service.

You have to grow. There is no way around this.

You need to be a trajectory. We follow thought leaders because as they grow, we grow too.

If your job is to help people evolve, you have to visibly evolve yourself. Scott Galloway started as the business school professor with a sharp tongue who turned into the tech industry truth teller, who then turned into the guy that told you how to live a good life, and who is now proposing a new model of masculinity.

Kyla Scanlon and Casey Newton used to provide dry reporting on tech and the economy, but look at their writing now. They are providing content that acts more like sensemaking, that helps you orient yourself both intellectually and emotionally in the world around you. When they grow, we grow. It is that simple.

Do not get stuck in one domain. You have to be continually crossing over into new territory. Hank Green was a science communicator, but now he is the internet's dad. Get comfortable with the fact that you will always be in a state of change. That is usually not an easy thing to do. It is awkward. It is risky. Often it is tiring, but that is part of the service you provide. It is legitimate emotional labor.

What underlies all of it is vulnerability. You will have to, by definition, make yourself vulnerable to criticism and exposure. That is simply the cost of being someone with a meaningful personal brand today. Vulnerability is the most fundamental precondition for growth.

Skin in the game is the only credential worth having

Mr. Chazz is deeply, personally invested in healing the emotional bonds of children and parents today because of what he experienced growing up. Your Rich BFF uses her own life and finances as a case study that is always evolving. Alex Hormozi is an in-the-trenches operator who is candid about his sacrifices.

None of these people lead with their credentials or degrees or certifications, and even if they had them, it would not matter because nobody would care. Our information ecology has shifted in some significant ways. We used to perceive people through status from a distance, but now we see them through the lens of sacrifice and vulnerability.

We are wired to read each other at a startling resolution. Tears of sadness are slightly more viscous than tears of joy, so they roll down the cheek slower and give someone else a better chance of noticing. We are one of the only animals with visible whites around our eyes, so others can track exactly where we are looking. We are sophisticated social detectors by nature, and personal branding runs entirely on that machinery. It is also why audiences can sniff out a brand built on nothing, because we have been reading each other this closely for a very long time.

Sacrifice has become the language of trust, and you have to show you have closed other doors or given something up to earn it.

Information is infinite, but true skin in the game is not. Skin in the game means you are going to get dinged up. People who are risking something, who have a deep personal investment in the thing they are chasing, cut through the noise.

On balance, that is a good thing, because it means personal branding today is less about creating distance between you and your audience, and more about sharing an experience with them. But it is also a much higher bar to aspire to. This is why so many rebirth brands fall flat, the founder who sold the company, made a fortune, and now wants to give back or reinvent themselves. The reason people do not buy it is because there is no sacrifice.

Remember the guy who loved trains, built a huge following on it, and landed a Gucci collaboration because of that love, until it came out that his persona ran through an LLC and was not what it seemed? What scandalized people was not the business side of it, but the sudden doubt of whether he actually loved the trains. That is what people are asking. Do you really love it, and can you prove it?

The service you actually provide

The service is a form of release. It can be intellectual, emotional, or relational release, but it is something that makes your audience feel witnessed. You will start to get messages from followers that say things like, I was thinking about that, but I couldn't find a way to express it. Or, it feels good to know that somebody understands what I was feeling but couldn't articulate. This is the goal of a personal brand, for people to be seen, because when people are seen, it gives them access to a new model of being.

We all need stories to understand ourselves in the world. In fact trauma is often defined as the inability to form a narrative about yourself, and healing is the formation of a cohesive narrative where there wasn't one before. When you give people access to a model of being where they can see their experiences, their beliefs, their perspectives, or their emotions through your shared lens, you are closing a vital loop for them.

When you come in that way, you can see how shallow the previous era of self-promotional personal branding was. Why settle for that when you can bring something so much more meaningful forward?