Create A Personal Brand (I’ll Be Gentle)

In all my years of personal development, the one question that everyone tries to tackle for everyone else is the notion of, “Who am I?” Everyone who dares venture into the self improvement category of your local borders and begins to read the book synopsis is bound to lose their mind, literally. You could walk into a personal development aisle knowing that you loved being a firefighter and walk out not knowing left from right and questioning why the borders security team is asking you to step away from your fetal position at the base of the frappuccino machine.

Finding out who you are or define who you are trying to be by some fancy nouns or goals is a recipe for failure. Worrying about every single goal that you have and tyring to tackle them all in an effort to change your, “image” is like committing suicide. All of these personal development authors place way to much emphasis on find out out who you are and what your calling is. While it would be easier for someone to come down from he heavens and throw a dart at a board for you and determine the outcome of your life, it doesn’t quite happen that way. Instead a shift needs to happen in people where they stop looking and start creating your own brand for life (in a series of course). But how exactly does one look at their life like a Nike swoop or Ronald Mcdonald?

All major brands have some baseline for defining what they are all about, like certain keywords that are commonly associated with the brand (Read: MacDonald’s, think, throw up). Luckily this is something that I don’t want you to worry about at all because ultimately its a waste of time.

STOP TRYING TO BE THE NEXT PEPSI

The important thing you need to do is to stop trying to define who you are. Trying to through out some nouns or verbs to describe your life is like watching the Lord of the Rings on a TV from the 1960s or in a movie theatre, its as if you are cheating the production quality. Accept that your life, or your brand is a dynamic concept. By accepting that you and your brand are dynamic, you can accept the fact that you have a general format for who you are as a person, but just like Pepsi, you could change your look, interests, entire sexual marketing campaign, in order to better meet with who you are trying to be as a person.

This is the most important aspect of creating a personal brand and pretty much key to loving yourself and not banging your head against the wall chanting how much you hate your cubicle and your wife’s small dog. Having your own brand, or own take on life, is really as simple as knowing that you will never lead the same life as someone else, and run with the knowledge of understanding that you have total control over the details (Read: everything) that occur in your life.

This was the single biggest issue that I struggled with when looking in the mirror in the morning. And while i was simultaneously practicing and extreme body builder diet, writing a book, traveling around the world, and pretty much have my whole life up in tornado of self doubt, I realized that all of the details don’t matter. When someone asks me who I am/what I do for a living, I tell them I am a renaissance man, or I just parlay my current interests to them (which would currently be nutrition and cooking). When I took a moment to relax, and realize that I don’t have to have to fit into some preset notion of who I am and who I want to be, I was able to shift my focus onto doing the things in my life that will create those amazing experiences that everyone was so busy talking about. Imagine that? If you spend less time thinking about something, and more time just doing something, you will create those nouns and verbs that describe your brand, your life.

You may or may not hate me after this section coming up, I am going to ask you to break out your arts and crafts supplies and make something on a computer or *gasp* with your hands