Surviving Your Personal Brand

The new rules of seeing and being seen.

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If building a personal brand feels like a slog to you, it’s because you misunderstand what it actually is. A personal brand is a service.

And here is the simplest way I can describe what that service needs to be today:

People need a release, and your job is to give your audience the kind of release they need.

It might be intellectual release or emotional release or relational release, but no matter what kind it is, it requires a deep acknowledgement, for people to say, “I didn’t even realize I was thinking that!” You need to give their unspoken insights and feelings a name, which is the ultimate release in a world where people feel increasingly estranged from each other and themselves.

Naming something invisible is what allows us to see it.

And when it comes to personal branding, if you name it, you own it.

I’ve helped build many personal brands in my career. I’ve worked with people who had smarts and people who had vibes, but neither of those things are really going to make a breakout brand that spreads across audiences and niches. The biggest personal brands of today and tomorrow will be those that surface new truths. You don’t need to be a genius or a painfully cool person to do that, you simply need to be chasing a bigger idea.

I say “simply” jokingly because it’s a lot harder than it seems. It means openly wrestling with ideas before you have the meta-answer. I, myself, find that so many of my articles are circling a bigger idea that I haven’t articulated yet. They’re like celestial bodies orbiting a black hole. It’s there, I can feel it, I just haven’t reached the event horizon. And part of me is scared of when I’ll get close enough to be sucked in because I don’t know what I will find at the center of it all.

Your personal brand needs to be chasing something just as big and unknowable. You should feel its gravitational pull and its mystery should terrify you a little bit.

When I first interviewed Tressie McMillan Cottom in 2020, she was talking about Thick and gender, but it was only the beginning of an inquiry into class, taste and capitalism. Today she is unearthing a much more profound conversation on the nature of visibility. Music producer Rick Rubin has somehow become the artist’s messiah. Our favorite nerd Hank Green is the internet’s new father figure. Artist and activist Alok Vaid-Menon’s message is reaching near-spiritual heights.

All of these personal brands are about seeing something for the first time, and they release the tension of something we know and feel to be true, but cannot locate.

There are plenty of personal brands that cash in on grievance porn or intellectual aspiration, but release does not come from commiseration or gatekeeping. Commiseration and gatekeeping are traps for personal brands.

Release comes from being witnessed.

With that baseline in mind, let’s build.

1. Write to unleash.

Don’t wait to figure out your personal brand before you start writing. You will arrive at your personal brand through the writing.

Your personal brand is not something you create. It’s something that reveals itself to you. Part of it is positioning, but a more important part of it is unleashing.

Do the research and planning to position yourself so that you create contrast against other voices in your space, but also do the hard work of writing every day so that you dig down to the core of who you really are - the part of you that you haven't accessed yet - and unleash that into the world.

You will know you unleashed your deeper identity when people stop responding to you with their brains and start responding to you with their hearts. You will see them connecting more emotionally with your work regardless of how intellectual it is. They will feel it before they understand it. That’s what being witnessed looks like.

Do people follow Ezra Klein from the head or the heart? It’s easy to think he’s simply speaking truth to power until you start to realize how much of himself he has revealed through his work over the years. We’ve seen him change the way he interrogates topics, the way he frames the emotions around his subjects and headlines. Every year that Ezra Klein has brought us insight, he has also brought us a piece of himself.

2. Be a trajectory.

Know you will (and should) change, and the only way to change is to keep creating.

There are lots of great personal brands out there that will always be about one domain - marketing, social, leadership, whatever - but they will always be speaking to the lowest common denominator, and they will never really be huge.

Don't forget that people start following you for expertise, but they continue following only if you help them grow. And the only way they grow is if you grow.

Scott Galloway was the marketing guru, then the big brand whisperer, then the algebra of happiness guy, then the hero of America's young men and troubled youth, then the guy giving you wealth advice, and now, mark my words, I believe he is gearing up for a political run based on how his writing has changed yet again. If you followed him, you were growing alongside him.

Sometimes people are afraid their audience will find them before they find themselves. But trust me, having your audience find you before you’re ready is the ideal. When people watch you grow into who you were meant to be, they are far more invested in your success. They come to see the full scope of your thinking and evolution.

The people who find you later see you as an expert and expect you to prove yourself, but the people who find you earlier see you as a peer and expect you to share yourself. It’s a very different relationship.

3. Inhabit a tension.

I wrote last week about how Tension Branding is the highest form of branding at any given time, and we’ve just entered a new era with new rules and new contrasts begging to be smashed together. This is the age of existential tension where brands need to play with chaos vs. coherence, agency vs. surrender.

You don’t need to go that biblical with your personal brand but you do need a tension, and it does need to hint at the mood of our time. Is your audience critical but secretly hopeful? Are they chronically online but spiritually hungry? Do they walk the tightrope between self-optimization and self-abandonment?

People are magnetized to figures that inhabit a tension between opposites. There’s something about a person who can hold that kind of tension that draws us in… likely because it gives us the courage to be honest about ourselves.

Timothée Chalamet, Zadie Smith, and Donald Glover are all totally relaxed and totally serious. Ballerina Farm, Bernie Sanders and Trump inhabit both power and exile.

This is the mask-off era, after all, and that cuts both ways. If other people can embrace their contradictions, so can you. Contradictions make us human, and they make life interesting. It’s a great time to go for it.

4. Inflate, deflate, and get dinged up.

If you want to get to a point of rich, generative progress, you have to first indulge in getting very lost and confused.

One of my favorite studies ever proves this:

"Periods of failure can be periods of growth, but only if we understand when to shift our work from exploration to exploitation [...] If you look around you at this very moment, you will see people in your field who seem wayward and unfocused, and you might assume they’ll always be that way. You will also see people in your field who seem extremely focused and highly successful, and you might make the same assumption.

But… consider the possibility that many of today’s wanderers are also tomorrow’s superstars, just a few months or years away from their own personal hot streak. Periods of exploration can be like winter farming; nothing is visibly growing, but a subterranean process is at work and will in time yield a bounty."

In other words, your life will have its winter seasons when you seem to amble alone through hibernating landscapes where nothing grows. Then you will have spring seasons when the world is alive, ideas blossom, and you interact with everyone you see.

Both seasons matter. Every winter and spring season of life has its purpose. The key is to not get stuck in one or the other. Keep cycling between them.

When you’re building alone, thinking alone, obsessing alone (like I was for so many years), it’s easy to convince yourself you’re operating at some elevated tier of focus. You’re not distracted, there are no obstacles to slow you down, and you’re not entangled in other people’s emotions, needs, or timelines.

That’s fine, and it will help you learn a lot about how you think, but we are not meant to be lone wolves forever. We are not complete individuals in and of ourselves. We are the sum parts of all of the experiences we have with others. You gotta bump into people and let them mold you a tiny bit. Ding you up. Dent you, expand you, inflate you, deflate you. You have to be in and of this world if you want to reflect this world back to others.

The greater your surface area in touching others, the greater your personal brand will be. Not only do people feel that kind of bigness, they can locate themselves within it.

Someone who has let them themselves truly experience others carries a different kind of energy.

5. Eat the cringe.

Cringe is a tool of control created by the insecure masses. But you better get used to it because cringe will be a requirement.

As Steven Bartlett says, "Embarrassment is the cost of entry.”

There is perhaps no truer, more honest phrase about success and building something meaningful. The entire experience and secret is in that quote.

Researchers say that what makes "cool" people and brands is the perception that they're free thinking and autonomous. Meaning embarrassment doesn't affect them because they're following an internal compass.

Your audience can feel that.

It’s not cringe to try. It’s cringe to care about what other people think when you do try.

If you do this long enough, trust that you will reach a point where doing embarrassing things will get you excited. You’ll quickly learn that every risk that pays off, whether it be an experimental piece of content, making a big pivot, or trying something you have no experience in, started with swallowing your pride first.

Eat that cringe for breakfast, friends. Eat it ‘till you crave it. I promise you’ll develop a taste for cringe once your brain connects it to the payoff.

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Get A Life

Here's what we've been consuming.

The Death of Partying in the U.S.A.—and Why It Matters (Derek Thompson): “Many of us spend hours every week with our favorite TikTok stars, YouTube gurus, Instagram influencers, Twitter gadflies, podcast buddies, Reddit friends, and other people we kind of know and sort of care about, even though they might not even know we exist, at all. Keeping up with these people—watching them, listening to them, giving ourselves over to them—necessarily requires pulling our focus out of the world of flesh and blood. To be a citizen of the Internet is to spend hundreds of hours inside the minds of virtual people we couldn’t party with, even if we desperately wanted to.”

How to Start Researching as a Hobby (Sarah’s Substack by Sarah Schauer): “You want to fall in love with research in a way that works with your existing default mode network (natural tendencies, habits, dispositions). Work with, not against. Maneuver, not collide. I would also strongly recommend picking up reading at the reading level (grade level) where you started to do “not so good” in school. Pick up where you left off, not where you want to be, and build.”

Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (Escaping Flatland by Henrik Karlsson): “There is a difference between knowing what you need to do (be independent and true to the potential in your ideas) and something else entirely to know how to embody that. Orienting in the right way to your thoughts is a skill. Like all skills, it takes practice. You also need to have a rich mental representation of how it is supposed to feel to embody the state so that you can orient toward that. This feeling is what you use to measure the relative success of whatever techniques you employ.”

Etsy Witches Charge for Jobs, Sunshine and Knicks Wins. Business Is Booming. (Wall Street Journal): “Etsy, an online marketplace for crafts and vintage, has long been home to psychics and mystics, but the platform has enjoyed new callouts from TikTokers as a destination for witchcraft. The concept of hiring an Etsy witch hit a fever pitch when influencer Jaz Smith told her TikTok followers that she had paid one to make sure the weather was perfect during her Memorial Day Weekend wedding. The blue skies and warm temperature have inspired TikTok audiences to find Etsy witches of their own. Smith didn’t respond to requests for comment.”

AI & Our Unconscious: Using Dream Data To Decode Culture (ZINE by Matt Klein): “A significant share of AI-related dreams cast the technology as commanding or dictating the terms of human life. This motif was especially common among AI enthusiasts (identified through their other online activity), who were more likely to dream of AI in divine roles. In this large cluster of dreams, omnipresent AI issues laws and enforces punishments. The emotional tone is often awe or resignation. AI appears not as evil, but as inevitable.”

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Read any good history book and you start to realize what historian Will Durant was saying all along: Every vice was once a virtue… and I think it’s fair to say many virtues were also once a vice.

Oftentimes forecasting the future is about predicting which rules are evaporating. We only ever have so few rules to work with - who gets to have power, where we place the locus of trust, what deserves care. When one of those rules disappears, there are many downstream effects, both big and small.

‘Mother knows best’ used to be a rule, but how many pregnant women call their mothers for advice on what diapers to buy today?

‘Don’t air your dirty laundry’ used to be a rule, but now it’s a lucrative influencer business model.

‘Listen to the experts’ used to be a rule, but experts are regarded with a heavy dose of suspicion right now.

Every generation inherits its virtues and vices, but also gets to decide which ones they keep and which ones they change. Culture evolves by revision. What we choose to unlearn matters just as much as what we create.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

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