I was reading someone’s advice on personal branding on LinkedIn recently. Oy. Part of that advice was to first get in touch with yourself. The personal brand advocate then suggested listing people you admire, and articulating the traits you admire most about them. Ironic much? 

After a boil down of all those traits, one assumes the job is to cobble together a path forward for oneself — a strategy for one’s personal brand. Still with me? 

As if one could study, copy and paste together a life. Or personal ethos upon which a life is built.

They had me shaking my head at the idea of personal branding, but tools for personal branding?  Try inputting that one into Chat GPT.  You’d fry AI forever. Hee hee.

At What’s The Idea? all customer care-abouts and brand good-ats go into the stock pot. What come out when the process is done is one claim and three proof planks. It’s a bloody horrible process. Important things must be boiled away to get the equation to three planks. People are too complicated to get to three. Products not so much.

Don’t wrestle with personal branding. Don’t do it. It’s a fool’s errand.

Peace.