Home > Articles > Business & Management > Personal Development

This chapter is from the book

The Five Universal Objectives of Personal Branding

Whoever you are, whatever techniques you use, whomever you want to reach, there are five basic ideas, five universal objectives, that are the same for everyone who wants to grow their personal brand.

Discover Your Passion. (Passion Is Fundamental to Achieving Your Goals.)

What do you love to do? What gets you out of bed in the morning, fires your imagination, and revs you up? What do you think about when you’re daydreaming and spend all your free time doing or pursuing?

Some people are passionate about their work. They love what they do, and that’s where they focus their time and energy. These people—usually entrepreneurs—have found a particular niche that makes them happy, and they want to find a way to make money from it. They wake up early, stay up late, and spend every waking minute thinking about, talking about, or actually doing their work.

In his book, Crush It!, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about how he spends hours and hours leaving comments on other people’s blogs talking about wine. It’s not because he likes leaving comments or because he wants to boost his web traffic. It’s because he loves wine. He loves selling it, talking about it, and writing about it. His love of wine has turned him into a celebrity and helped him sell plenty of wine for his family’s liquor store.

Others are passionate about their hobbies. Whether it’s painting, playing in a band, fixing up classic cars, analyzing baseball statistics, or collecting vinyl records, some people love their hobbies and pursue them with an obsessive fervor. They view their day job as a means to an end to fulfilling their passion.

And still others haven’t found their passion. Or they have no passion at all. They go to work, they come home, they eat dinner, they watch TV, they go to bed. And then they do it all again the next day. The idea of enjoying life has been drummed out of them.

These people are dead inside, whether they know it or not. The only thing that gets them out of bed in the morning is the alarm clock and the fear that they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t. They eat for fuel, not pleasure. They have friends out of habit, not because they love being around people. They watch TV not because there’s anything good on, but because they’re afraid of what they’ll learn if they’re left alone for too long with their own thoughts: There is nothing in their lives that is truly exciting or enjoyable.

You need to have at least one passion in your life. It can be something you are known for, something you build your personal brand on. Or it can even be something you never tell anyone about, preferring to do in private. But the great thing about sharing your passion is that you can get to know people who share your interest and create some beneficial relationships.

All this is our way of saying you need to find your passion if you want to achieve your goals. More important, your goals need to tie into your passion because that’s how you will achieve them.

If you want to be fulfilled and enjoy what you do, make sure your goals are achievable through your passions. For example, if your long-term goal is to own a million dollar home and drive an expensive car, you probably won’t get there providing knitting lessons to at-risk teenagers.

We won’t tell you to change your passions because that’s not something you should give up. If you love giving knitting lessons to at-risk teenagers, by all means pursue it. Just understand that there’s not much money to be made giving knitting lessons, so getting an expensive car this way is probably not feasible. But if that’s what you love to do, rethink your goals.

If your passion is to create a new social networking tool, and you devote every waking hour to programming and promoting it, there is a good chance you can achieve your goal of the big house and expensive car.

It’s a matter of making sure your passions and your goals are in alignment and that you can achieve the one through the other.

We hope you have already found your passion because this book is based on your actually being passionate about at least two things: 1) yourself and 2) something else.

Be Bold. (It’s Okay to Talk About Yourself.)

Despite what your parents and teachers told you, you can tell people about your accomplishments. Actually, we want you to do that.

We understand that it’s hard to do. We’ve been taught that talking about ourselves is bragging. We’re supposed to be humble and quiet about our accomplishments and let our actions speak louder than words.

Think about the past several times you saw somebody boasting about his success, his money, his love life (at networking events, parties, night clubs, and high school reunions). We can imagine some of the words you used in reference to that person, none of which were flattering, and none of which our editors will let us publish here.

In the movies—Mallrats, Karate Kid, Gladiator, The Princess Bride—the braggart always gets his comeuppance at the end, receiving some cosmic justice. “See?” we tell ourselves. “This will happen if I brag about what I do.”

The problem is that we associate self-promotion with bragging. We believe telling others about our accomplishments is the moral equivalent of bragging about how much money we make. We associate letting people know we published an article or are giving a talk as the equivalent of showing up at our high school reunion in a $70,000 Italian red sports car.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

We’ve found self-promotion seems to be especially hard for people from the Midwest, where we live. We’re your typical Midwesterners, only we got over it. We realized we had to be bold without being arrogant. We knew if we wanted to make a name for ourselves, and earn reputations to attract bigger clients and bigger opportunities, we had to overcome this Midwest shyness and be willing to talk about ourselves. A lot.

Self-promotion is just letting people know what’s going on in your lives, keeping people apprised of your special events, occasions, and accomplishments.

Table 1.1 shows a few key differences between bragging and self-promotion:

Table 1.1 The Difference Between Self-Promotion and Bragging

Self-Promotion Bragging
A Twitter message that says, “I just published my book.” A vanity license plate that says, “Gr8 Writer.”
Announcing the birth of your child. Announcing the birth of your eight children at a national press conference.
Telling your friends you’re engaged. Telling people how much he spent on the ring.
Telling your colleagues about your promotion. Demanding undying fealty from your underlings.

The biggest difference between self-promotion and bragging is the motivation behind why you’re telling people. If it’s something you’re proud of, something you’re excited to tell people about because you “just gotta tell someone,” that’s okay. That’s self-promotion. If it’s something you want people to do, see, visit, or even buy, that’s self-promotion.

If you announce something so other people will be envious, jealous, or just think you’re cool, that’s bragging, and people won’t like you.

Creating your online personal brand means showing your personality. What makes you unique and interesting? Why should we want to spend time with you? Why should we care what you have to say? If you’re a fun person, show it. If you’re interested in a lot of different things, share them. If you like to create new relationships, seek out other interesting people.

The important thing is to realize that a) people are interested in what you have to say and b) it’s perfectly all right to say it.

Tell Your Story. (Your Story Is What Makes You Special.)

This is the tricky part. We just told you it’s okay to talk about yourself, but now you have to do it without talking about yourself.

@kyleplacy: Huh?

@edeckers:  Be patient.

Effective personal branding isn’t about talking about yourself all the time. As much as we’d all like to think that our friends and family are eagerly waiting by their computers hoping to hear some news, any news, about what we’re doing, they’re not. Actually, they’re hoping you’re sitting by your computer, waiting for news about them.

Believe it or not, the best way to build your personal brand is to talk more about other people, events, and ideas than you talk about yourself. That’s because if you talk about other people and promote their victories and their ideas, you become an influencer. You are seen as someone who is not only helpful, but is also a valuable resource. That helps your brand more than if you just talk about yourself over and over. Then, you’re just seen as boring.

But there are other ways you can tell your own story, without saying a word. You don’t tell people what you believe; you show it by living it.

The next chance you get, watch people. Study what they wear, what they eat, what they drive. Play a little Sherlock Holmes to see if you can make any deductions by what you observe. You can get a clue to their personalities by noticing simple things like clothing and cars.

That woman over there wearing the New York Knicks T-shirt is probably a basketball fan. The skinny guy wearing the running shoes is a runner. The guy wearing a Green Lantern T-shirt likes comic books. And the woman who drove by in the Toyota Prius with the “Love Your Mother (Earth)” bumper sticker wants to help the environment.

We’ve learned a small part of their personal stories, but they didn’t say a word. These symbols we wear and brands we support tell a story for us. They let other people know, “This is something I believe in, and I want you to know about it.”

It’s the same for telling your own story. Rather than wearing a sign that says, “I love comic books” or sending daily emails to your friends about your obsession with comics, you could write a blog about the comics industry and your favorite titles and characters, or you could publish your own web comic. You could produce a weekly podcast about comic publishing news, cover the news from local and national comic conventions, and even interview other comic artists and publishers. By blogging or podcasting about your favorite topic, you tell the world your story—“I love comic books”—without actually saying it over and over or being a pest about it.

Besides, the sign starts to chafe after a while.

Create Relationships. (Relationships Lead to Opportunities.)

The thing that we have marveled about social networking and real-world networking is that you never know what kind of opportunities are going to come your way as a result of using it. Without sounding too mystical or cosmic, you must leave yourself open to the opportunities that may arise because of your efforts.

Erik jokes that this is “faith-based networking”: You will meet the right person at the right time for the right opportunity. As long as you continue to put yourself in the situations where those possibilities can arise, sooner or later, they will eventually come.

The creation of this book is a prime example of the right people meeting in the right place at the right time. We both belong to a social network called Smaller Indiana (www.SmallerIndiana.com; see Figure 1.1), having joined within the first couple weeks of its creation. We met at the first event that the founder, Pat Coyle, organized on Martin Luther King Day 2008.

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.1 The front page from SmallerIndiana.com

During our initial meeting, which was already filled with friendly teasing and Kyle accusing Erik of carrying a “man bag” (something Erik flatly denies even now)—

@edeckers:  It was a leather messenger bag, I swear!

@kyleplacy: Okay, whatever.

we arranged to get coffee together the next week. In the following months, we continued to bump into each other, get coffee, get lunch, attend the same networking meetings, collaborate on projects, and refer speaking and work gigs to each other. Eighteen months later, Kyle asked Erik to help with another book he was working on, and that led to this one. But it all started with being at the same place at the same time in January 2008.

Whether you’re online or out in the real world, treat every person you meet as a possible future resource. You never know if the person you meet at the Chamber of Commerce meeting will become your next employer. The person you have coffee with one day (or even the one who serves your coffee) could become your business partner. And the person who connects with you on Twitter could end up hiring you to speak at an event two months later.

You need to treat each of these new relationships with care. Nurture them, help them grow, and tell people your story.

“But how will we have time to grow those relationships?” people usually ask. “We have work to do.”

That’s the beauty of social media. It lets you stay in touch with people in between the times you meet face to face. It lets you share your story without doing a big information dump in the first 30 minutes of a one-hour appointment. It lets you find out about a lot of other people all at once, without buying lunch every day. It lets you learn about the details of your lives so that when you do get together, you get to spend more time talking about deeper issues and bigger ideas. And that is where those opportunities are going to come from.

Take Action. (Even a Small Step Is a Step Forward.)

There’s an old saying that if you hit a rock with a hammer 1,000 times, it wasn’t the 1,000th blow that broke the rock; it was the 999 that came before it.

All the plans in the world don’t amount to much if you don’t actually put them into action. If you want to be someone notable or be considered an authority in your field, you have to start somewhere.

Although you’re not going to become famous with a single blog post or a single YouTube video, you can’t start without your first one. It’s a matter of writing post after post, creating video after video. It’s publishing those 999 posts or videos that makes the 1,000th so effective.

Ask people who found some success in what they do. All of them will tell you that they worked hard—harder than anyone else. They got up earlier, stayed up later, and worked longer in between.

Earlier, we mentioned “faith-based networking” and the idea that you will meet the right person with the right opportunity at the right moment. Whether that meeting was divinely inspired, you also met the right person because you’ve been to hundreds of meetings talking to thousands of people and communicating the same thing: the kind of opportunities you’re looking for.

Just like the rock that took 1,000 blows to break it, you had to meet 999 people before you finally met that one person who changed your life.

We wish we could tell you the secret phrase or handshake that would let you meet that 1,000th person in the first 24 hours of your new personal branding adventure. Unfortunately, we can’t. There isn’t one. But if you follow even half the steps outlined in this book, you’ll eventually get there, and you’ll have fun doing it.

InformIT Promotional Mailings & Special Offers

I would like to receive exclusive offers and hear about products from InformIT and its family of brands. I can unsubscribe at any time.

Overview


Pearson Education, Inc., 221 River Street, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030, (Pearson) presents this site to provide information about products and services that can be purchased through this site.

This privacy notice provides an overview of our commitment to privacy and describes how we collect, protect, use and share personal information collected through this site. Please note that other Pearson websites and online products and services have their own separate privacy policies.

Collection and Use of Information


To conduct business and deliver products and services, Pearson collects and uses personal information in several ways in connection with this site, including:

Questions and Inquiries

For inquiries and questions, we collect the inquiry or question, together with name, contact details (email address, phone number and mailing address) and any other additional information voluntarily submitted to us through a Contact Us form or an email. We use this information to address the inquiry and respond to the question.

Online Store

For orders and purchases placed through our online store on this site, we collect order details, name, institution name and address (if applicable), email address, phone number, shipping and billing addresses, credit/debit card information, shipping options and any instructions. We use this information to complete transactions, fulfill orders, communicate with individuals placing orders or visiting the online store, and for related purposes.

Surveys

Pearson may offer opportunities to provide feedback or participate in surveys, including surveys evaluating Pearson products, services or sites. Participation is voluntary. Pearson collects information requested in the survey questions and uses the information to evaluate, support, maintain and improve products, services or sites, develop new products and services, conduct educational research and for other purposes specified in the survey.

Contests and Drawings

Occasionally, we may sponsor a contest or drawing. Participation is optional. Pearson collects name, contact information and other information specified on the entry form for the contest or drawing to conduct the contest or drawing. Pearson may collect additional personal information from the winners of a contest or drawing in order to award the prize and for tax reporting purposes, as required by law.

Newsletters

If you have elected to receive email newsletters or promotional mailings and special offers but want to unsubscribe, simply email information@informit.com.

Service Announcements

On rare occasions it is necessary to send out a strictly service related announcement. For instance, if our service is temporarily suspended for maintenance we might send users an email. Generally, users may not opt-out of these communications, though they can deactivate their account information. However, these communications are not promotional in nature.

Customer Service

We communicate with users on a regular basis to provide requested services and in regard to issues relating to their account we reply via email or phone in accordance with the users' wishes when a user submits their information through our Contact Us form.

Other Collection and Use of Information


Application and System Logs

Pearson automatically collects log data to help ensure the delivery, availability and security of this site. Log data may include technical information about how a user or visitor connected to this site, such as browser type, type of computer/device, operating system, internet service provider and IP address. We use this information for support purposes and to monitor the health of the site, identify problems, improve service, detect unauthorized access and fraudulent activity, prevent and respond to security incidents and appropriately scale computing resources.

Web Analytics

Pearson may use third party web trend analytical services, including Google Analytics, to collect visitor information, such as IP addresses, browser types, referring pages, pages visited and time spent on a particular site. While these analytical services collect and report information on an anonymous basis, they may use cookies to gather web trend information. The information gathered may enable Pearson (but not the third party web trend services) to link information with application and system log data. Pearson uses this information for system administration and to identify problems, improve service, detect unauthorized access and fraudulent activity, prevent and respond to security incidents, appropriately scale computing resources and otherwise support and deliver this site and its services.

Cookies and Related Technologies

This site uses cookies and similar technologies to personalize content, measure traffic patterns, control security, track use and access of information on this site, and provide interest-based messages and advertising. Users can manage and block the use of cookies through their browser. Disabling or blocking certain cookies may limit the functionality of this site.

Do Not Track

This site currently does not respond to Do Not Track signals.

Security


Pearson uses appropriate physical, administrative and technical security measures to protect personal information from unauthorized access, use and disclosure.

Children


This site is not directed to children under the age of 13.

Marketing


Pearson may send or direct marketing communications to users, provided that

  • Pearson will not use personal information collected or processed as a K-12 school service provider for the purpose of directed or targeted advertising.
  • Such marketing is consistent with applicable law and Pearson's legal obligations.
  • Pearson will not knowingly direct or send marketing communications to an individual who has expressed a preference not to receive marketing.
  • Where required by applicable law, express or implied consent to marketing exists and has not been withdrawn.

Pearson may provide personal information to a third party service provider on a restricted basis to provide marketing solely on behalf of Pearson or an affiliate or customer for whom Pearson is a service provider. Marketing preferences may be changed at any time.

Correcting/Updating Personal Information


If a user's personally identifiable information changes (such as your postal address or email address), we provide a way to correct or update that user's personal data provided to us. This can be done on the Account page. If a user no longer desires our service and desires to delete his or her account, please contact us at customer-service@informit.com and we will process the deletion of a user's account.

Choice/Opt-out


Users can always make an informed choice as to whether they should proceed with certain services offered by InformIT. If you choose to remove yourself from our mailing list(s) simply visit the following page and uncheck any communication you no longer want to receive: www.informit.com/u.aspx.

Sale of Personal Information


Pearson does not rent or sell personal information in exchange for any payment of money.

While Pearson does not sell personal information, as defined in Nevada law, Nevada residents may email a request for no sale of their personal information to NevadaDesignatedRequest@pearson.com.

Supplemental Privacy Statement for California Residents


California residents should read our Supplemental privacy statement for California residents in conjunction with this Privacy Notice. The Supplemental privacy statement for California residents explains Pearson's commitment to comply with California law and applies to personal information of California residents collected in connection with this site and the Services.

Sharing and Disclosure


Pearson may disclose personal information, as follows:

  • As required by law.
  • With the consent of the individual (or their parent, if the individual is a minor)
  • In response to a subpoena, court order or legal process, to the extent permitted or required by law
  • To protect the security and safety of individuals, data, assets and systems, consistent with applicable law
  • In connection the sale, joint venture or other transfer of some or all of its company or assets, subject to the provisions of this Privacy Notice
  • To investigate or address actual or suspected fraud or other illegal activities
  • To exercise its legal rights, including enforcement of the Terms of Use for this site or another contract
  • To affiliated Pearson companies and other companies and organizations who perform work for Pearson and are obligated to protect the privacy of personal information consistent with this Privacy Notice
  • To a school, organization, company or government agency, where Pearson collects or processes the personal information in a school setting or on behalf of such organization, company or government agency.

Links


This web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects Personal Information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this web site.

Requests and Contact


Please contact us about this Privacy Notice or if you have any requests or questions relating to the privacy of your personal information.

Changes to this Privacy Notice


We may revise this Privacy Notice through an updated posting. We will identify the effective date of the revision in the posting. Often, updates are made to provide greater clarity or to comply with changes in regulatory requirements. If the updates involve material changes to the collection, protection, use or disclosure of Personal Information, Pearson will provide notice of the change through a conspicuous notice on this site or other appropriate way. Continued use of the site after the effective date of a posted revision evidences acceptance. Please contact us if you have questions or concerns about the Privacy Notice or any objection to any revisions.

Last Update: November 17, 2020