A few things are adding up these days:
- Being an employee isn't so great anymore. It no longer gives you job security, a role in the decision-making, or a share of the company's identity. That means that people are navigating a course through one role after another, for one company after another.
- Our marketable skill base continues to diversify. People can't tell how focused they should be with their skill-building, and are aiming for the sweet spot between being the best at a trade that may disappear at any moment, or being a "jack-of-all-trades, expert at none." Of course I believe that one's implementation of their set of skills and talents forms their proficiency.
- The focus of prescribed youth culture has alighted upon discovery of and promotion of one's personality and skillset. From what I can see, it's been a collective effort of our societal focus on individuality and personal growth, as well as the dominating effect of hip hop culture which encourages youth to be their own biggest advocate, unabashedly singing their own praises and beating their own drums.
- All this focus on individuality is a bandwagon in itself, and the culture and language of self-promotion has spread and standardized itself. It's become the collective mantra of the next generation. I think that, paradoxically, it hampers creative individual discovery.
I'd like to come to my point now: I'm concerned that personal development can easily get overshadowed by self-promotion. When somebody can say "I've been working on this and have learned how to do that," it expresses something that is real, and that is beyond speculation. It's not bragging and it's not formulated specifically to influence other people's perception of a personal brand.
Really, we're all just people with unique combinations of activities and interests. If I develop an approach to some field of work, then that approach itself can be seen as a brand. If I use it to deal with several different services or products, each of those could be branded and promoted on its own, but what's the point in setting oneself up with more branding responsibilities than is necessary? If, on the other hand, I decide that I myself am the brand, and everything I do falls under one umbrella, that's another impossible branding challenge, because a personality just isn't tangible enough, and slapping a unifying label on everything I do would change the way I think of myself and develop. That just creates other problems.
So what I'm proposing is a middle-path solution to branding and self-promotion:
- The pursuit of one's own interests and curiosity adds value to a uniquely diverse skill-set, whereas the construction of a prescribed, generic skill-set tends to limit one's opportunities.
- It's easier for a person to talk about the things they're actually doing or curious about doing than to discuss their own qualities and proficiencies. It also makes it easier for others to set them up with opportunities.
- It just looks better from the outside to see someone working hard on the things that excite them, than it does when they're working hard to get others to get others excited.
- It's better to be known as an accomplished and active person than as a driven and ambitious one.
- It's often easier for someone to excel at doing something in their own way, and to deal with the challenges of communicating that unique approach, than it is to make a generic and common approach work for them. It's also easier to find one's niches, and it seems like niches are where all the value is.
I certainly know both kinds of people.
I have a friend who's doing tremendously well with developing her career in production. She's not afraid to switch gears and learn new things even if it puts her back into the position of being a novice, because she knows that new skills add value to old ones. She never runs out of interesting things to talk about because she's always focused on doing rather than saying. She gets discouraged by setbacks but doesn't stop doing what she's doing, because to her it's not all about "me: the brand," it's about "the work I'm doing."
And I have a friend who's always talking about what he's going to be doing, asking people around him to recommend him to other people, and talking about the future. About the company he's building, about how he deals with people, about all the obstacles and people trying to keep him from achieving his goals. Meanwhile, not a lot of work is getting done on his actual materials. Hours are wasted on the phone, and months go by without any actual development being done. He's stuck, and because he's being told by people on all sides that he's got to "sell" himself, and because that's all he's ever been told, he feels really isolated and just digs himself in deeper, ramping up his self-promotion efforts instead of developing what he's offering for sale.
I've always felt like, in terms of my music career, I'd prefer to have a few really serious fans, who absolutely love my music and will love it forever, than a ton of fans who are just kind of into it. And it's the same with anything else.
Here are some rules of thumb that relate to this:
- Quality over quantity
- Show me (don't tell me)
- It doesn't have to be perfect (just better)
- Don't stop doing what you're doing ('cause you're doing it right)
