To Hell with Personal Branding

Hey, Personal Branding, I have something to tell you:

I don’t care.

I just don’t care anymore. You have prevented me from having fun for the last time.

I bought my URL domain and secured a couple of social media profiles. Your job is done, I’m moving on now.

Because really, all that you’ve ever really taught us is stuff we already knew. Did we really need someone telling us how to be authentic or respectful?

Don’t tell me about those drunk girls that upload their pics on Facebook for everyone to see, or about those employees that publicly say that they hate their job. In reality, the problem is those people are just being themselves. The problem isn’t, “You’re awesome but because of that photo of you peeing on a dog while getting high, the company decided to go another way.” You were a mess to begin with. Do you really go showing that picture to everyone you meet?

This is not Personal Branding; this is common sense.

The two most harmful consequences of Personal Branding:

1) It makes you afraid. Not only afraid to speak up, be confrontational and even curse, like everyone does offline, but it also makes you afraid of taking life into your own hands. Personal Branding bases most of its points on not upsetting potential contacts, your interviewer, your boss, or anyone else who will decide if you “live or die financially,” depending on what they find out about you online. To hell with that: authenticity means upsetting people. Only by disagreeing and even fighting others will you do something worth talking about.

This does not mean being scandalous, this means being human.

2) It has made us so calculated, that I wonder how many people are able to live up to their online personas. Meeting online contacts in the real world has been very disappointing in many cases. What’s interesting is that the people who haven’t played the personal branding game, have been amazingly fun, interesting and wise.

Sadly, with all this forced authenticity, people are actually becoming fake. That’s why we love those people who speak their mind without worrying about the scandal. We envy them because they don’t over-think the repercussions.

To be honest, I’ve never been as fake as when personal branding was my top concern.

My advice: Do whatever you want. Your intuition will take you through the best path for you.

The funny thing about intuition is that it’s magnetic. When you trust your gut, you attract people that like what you do, what you say and the way you think. You attract the people that you need, the people that will help you. Yes, you also upset those that don’t– deal with it. There’s no shining without conflict.

Once I started not worrying about the repercussion of every word I said online, I truly connected at an emotional level with others.

Once I embraced my personality, I strengthened the connections that mattered and cut ties with those that didn’t.

Once I stopped caring, I started to actually have fun with social media.