Four Steps to Brand Yourself

All this time you must be searching for the weapon, the one which makes your life - an experience. What if I tell you that it's You!

Let’s start with a small activity: What happens when you Google the following names; Albert Einstein, you get - The man who redefined genius; Muhammad Ali, you get - The Greatest, Marie Curie, you get - A woman of Firsts; Bruce Lee, you get - The man, The myth; Steve Jobs, you get - The man who thought different; Mahatma Gandhi, you get - The man who became one with the universal being; Bill Gates, you get - The richest man on Earth; Elon Musk - The man who wants to colonize Mars; Gary Vaynerchuk - A dude that loves the hustle, people & the NYjets

Now google yourself. What did you find?
Nothing on mine :( Just the social media.
Want to change this?
Build a Personal Brand.

At this point, some of you may have thought, ‘Wait! Why do I need a significant google search results on me?’
To simply put it, the internet is your new resume. For better understanding, I may put it like, with strong google search results, you are one click away from reaching 3.5 billion humans and vice versa.
Conclusively, a google search result can be considered as a digital asset of yours. And the tool to sculpt this asset is personal branding.

Tim Ferriss quotes it for a wider perspective,

Personal branding is about managing your name — even if you don’t own a business — in a world of misinformation, disinformation, and semi-permanent Google records. Going on a date? Chances are that your “blind” date has Googled your name. Going to a job interview? Ditto.

Furthermore, the best part of this tool is, anyone can possess it. How? By creating your own content. Content can be anything in the written format, video format or voice format.

After you choose upon the content you will be creating, then comes the task of branding your content. Keep reading to know how you can get started.

Steps to achieve your goal:-

1. Create content and use the Internet for Leverage

There can’t be a better way to start this point, than Archimedes’ quote

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

Here, the internet is the lever and content is the fulcrum. There’s never been a time in human history where you can reach billions of individuals in the press of a button.
How to use the Internet for leverage? David Perell puts it - “Create your Serendipity Vehicle”
That is, create your own website.

Now, you can create and post anything you love to do in any media format you want.

The internet could be considered as an abundant source of information, even if you end up restructuring the bits and pieces of information into a self-explanatory systematic document, people will love it.
Generating harmony from the noise is a thing now.

The second point worth mentioning is that content has a compounding effect. Once you put something on the internet, people read, watch and hear it when you sleep, when you eat or when you are on a vacation. You only need to create it once, wholeheartedly with everything you have got.

2. Learn to Read, Write, Speak and Listen

These four are the most undervalued skills you would come across on this planet. I call these - the hardware skills - because they are directly linked with our bodily senses.

To create your serendipity vehicle i.e your website, you need all four of these. Though being the most foundational skills, it may surprise you that - no one is a master of all, everyone’s still learning them.
And if you search more deeply for validation on how important these skills are, you may find that the mysteries of Sir Arthur’s Sherlock Holmes were all solved using the hardware skillsets.

3. Be open, meet new people and again listen

I am saying this because being social is the programmed quality of our species and if you want to use your powers to the fullest, don’t put resistance into your circuitry.

One more barrier most people create for themselves is by believing in the introvert and extrovert debate. There’s nothing like an introvert or extrovert, it’s only in your head. If you can’t speak with people, learn to - once you start utilizing it, you will equate it with a pirate opening a treasure trove.
Similarly, if you speak too much - try to listen - let the treasure trove show its brilliance.

The second most valid reason to meet new people is - the perspective. Perspective can help you solve the most difficult science problems as well as life problems.

Getting perspective and meeting new people can be termed as an intelligence-gathering move, the more data you have, the more you could predict.

4. Be an Optimist

We already have a blog on how to be an optimist, Jayesh talks about how exercising, creating a sustainable plan and persistence can help you be a definite optimist.

Optimism is the key because it’s about your belief in a particular thing. If you don’t believe in something it gets 1000 times difficult to work on it.

An optimistic point of view can help you find better solutions.

Conclusion

All this for a Personal Brand? Can’t life be happy without it?
Oh, certainly it can. It’s again what you perceive happiness for - it’s again a perspective (like everything is).

Personal branding is more about why kings fought in the old ages, why warriors followed, why leaders developed, why writers wrote, why singers sang.
To be alive, in the minds if not in their bodies.

Two centuries down the line archeologists won’t be digging graves, they will be digging datasets. That’s what the digital age has to offer. It’s up to you if you want to stay alive for a thousand more years or get buried in the noise.

Brand Yourself.

- Pranav

P.S: If you like the content please comment and do subscribe :)

Further reading:

1. How to be a Definite Optimist - Jayesh

2. Writing Syllabus - David Perell