How We Define Ourselves Is Not Branding

Advice column #10

A girl sits in the office of a female teacher at a school, Juarez, Mexico, late 1980s. (Photo by Mark Jay Goebel/Getty Images)

I’m embarking on a little challenge to produce as many of these this week as I can. Don’t worry, we’ll return to once weekly emails on 10/12. Until then, you’ll be seeing these every day or every other day or however often it shakes out to be.

Today, we talk about figuring out what your personal brand is.

How does someone figure out what their personal brand is?

Unless you’re trying to build a social media following (or are already a public figure), I caution against trying too hard to answer this question.

I think sometimes we use “creating a personal brand” as a stand in for things like finding personal meaning, discerning what our values are, or even just figuring out what we like. But the thing is, that’s not branding. If you spend the first 18 years of your life as a Catholic, and then convert to Judaism, is that a rebrand or just the natural course of a human life? It’s a useful distinction to make. Most of us are not businesses, or products. But then again, some of us are.