Stop Copying People Playing a Different Game
Most personal branding advice isn't wrong. It's written for someone playing a different game.
I'm cleaning out my Dropbox and I find her.
2015 me. Old videos, half-baked experiments, thumbnails I would never let out the door now. Plenty of it makes me wince. But underneath the cringe there's a thing I wasn't expecting: she was fearless. She shipped stuff I'd sit on for a week these days.
I stayed in that folder longer than I meant to.
Because it wasn't a graveyard of bad content. It was a graveyard of old identities. Versions of me I built on purpose, leaned into for a season, then outgrew without noticing. Some of them took years to build. And I don't want a single one of them back.
That's the cost that blindsides people. Not a bad personal brand. A good one, aimed the wrong way, for years.
Most personal branding advice isn't wrong. It's written for someone playing a different game.
Post daily. Build an audience. Niche down. Show your face. Start a newsletter. All fine advice. For someone. The catch is they never say who. So a consultant who needs six good clients takes advice built for a creator who needs sixty thousand followers. Then wonders why the numbers keep climbing while the business stays flat.
Something it took me too long to say out loud: every personal brand is already growing something. The only question that matters is whether it's growing the thing you want.
There are four directions it can grow.
Authority grows trust. You want to be the name people quote.
Creator grows an audience. You want to be the name people share.
Rainmaker grows revenue. You want to be the name people hire.
Professional grows a career. You want to be the name people choose.
Same umbrella. Different direction. Different scoreboard. An Authority measures whether people quote her. A Rainmaker measures whether they book her. Run one scoreboard while you're playing the other game and of course it feels like failing. You're winning. At the wrong thing.
And this is the trap almost everyone falls into. Three of those four directions secretly envy the Creator, because the Creator's playbook is the loudest one online. So the consultant starts chasing reach. The expert starts chasing followers. The professional starts posting like an influencer. Everyone copies the most visible game instead of playing their own.
That's the whole mistake. It was never the headshot or the font. It's copying someone whose scoreboard was never yours.
So before you post another thing, before you rewrite your bio again, one question:
What is your brand actually trying to grow?
Pick the direction first. The strategy falls out of it. It's the difference between making great time and making great time in the wrong direction.
I built The Personal Brand Compass to answer that question. Four directions, one honest question, and a way to stop measuring yourself against a game you were never playing.