1 THE CASE FOR PERSONAL BRANDING

Many people believe that personal branding is a negative or selfish thing to do. There is a misconception that personal branding is about branding, packaging, and selling. This is not what personal branding is at all. Personal branding is self-awareness and self-preservation. I think of it as credit. You are not your credit score, but when you go to buy a house, your credit score will have a huge impact on your chances of being approved for a loan and what sort of interest you will pay. Your credit only matters when it comes into question for certain approvals.

Just as with credit, your personal brand comes into question only when someone is trying to approve your participation in something (a job, an event, or the like). And as with credit, having no personal brand can be just as damaging as having a bad one. The difference between your personal brand and your credit score is that you know when someone is looking to validate your credit score and you probably already know what they are expecting and going to see. With personal brands, most people have no idea when someone is looking for them online, what they hope to see, or what they will find. We give more attention to our credit scores than to our reputations.

Improve your personal brand the way you would improve your credit score. Personal branding is not just a promotional tool, it is the platform you stand on in front of the world. You have to know what the world sees, just as you know what the banks and landlords see when they check your credit.

≫ Make sure your credit report is accurate and the information about you online is accurate.

≫ When you find flaws in your credit report, you pinpoint what needs to be fixed. Do the same for your personal brand. Do you have too much debt or not enough? Do you have too much experience in one thing and not enough in another? How does that impact your next life goal?

≫ Create a plan to fix your credit. Create a plan to fix your personal brand.

≫ Build a strong credit age. Build your brand through experience.

≫ As when you apply for a credit card, ask for help from people. Think of credit as the asking and debt as the favors you owe. You don’t want to ask for too much from people, and you always want to return the favor.

≫ Just as you wouldn’t apply for a credit card with bad credit, don’t ask for favors for your personal brand that you haven’t earned.

≫ Set up alerts for your credit. Set up alerts for your personal brand.

Personal branding is for everyone. You have it even when you don’t. You have credit even when you don’t. Everyone in the digital age needs to be aware of their personal brand. It is no longer a choice whether to have one; the choice is whether you manage yours.

THE HISTORY AND PURPOSE OF BRANDING

Brands want to be more human. Why? Because brands want to connect with more humans. Brands fight to create a voice because they don’t naturally have one. People, on the other hand, do. We are the most natural brand. We connect with other people, we have a voice, and we are what brands strive to be and to connect with. Brands have always gotten so much recognition because brands have actively marketed themselves, and not all humans have. People are not trying to be brands; brands are trying to be people.

Let me explain by outlining the history of branding.

AD 500 to 1000: The word brand is derived from an ancient Norse word that means “to burn.” The word refers to the practice by companies of burning their marks (brands) onto their products.

AD 1500: By the 1500s, the word brand refers to burning a mark into cattle and livestock to show ownership and to identify lost or stolen livestock. Each livestock owner develops a unique “logo” so they can easily identify their livestock within the herd.

1820s: The world sees an increase in the mass production and shipment of trade goods. The larger the batches, the harder it is to distinguish one batch from the next. So producers stamp their logos onto the crates in which the products are shipped to demarcate their property from that of the competition.

1870: It becomes possible to register a trademark so that a company can prevent other businesses from using similar brands and logos to confuse consumers as customers discern one competitor’s products from another’s.

Early 1900s: Brands themselves become valuable. Brands start being associated with ideas and emotions. People begin buying brands that represent what they believe in. Advertisements show the benefits of brands.

1980s: Brand recognition becomes the most important focus for corporations, as competition starts to skyrocket and distribution channels become global. Corporate branding begins to evolve into culture creating. We start to see advertising agencies turn into branding consultancies, and corporations start working directly with political groups, nonprofits, and celebrities.

Late 1990s to early 2000s: The rise of social media changes the way brands interact with consumers. Branding is now about communicating with brands directly, reviewing them, holding them accountable, and using a new kind of celebrity—the digital influencer.

Branding was once a simple and straightforward tool for companies to clearly identify one product from another. Over time, this tool has changed. Brands and logos are now used by people as ways of telling the world who they are, what they are, and who they wish they were. The irony is that while brands and logos were created and used to differentiate two similar things from each other, now they are used to relate two seemingly unique things to each other.

Brands connect us with each other and with a lifestyle. We use social media to talk to them and about them, we like them, we share them, and we use them as tools for self-expression—and with each share, we endorse them. We also hide behind them and let them tell our stories for us. We don’t have companies’ logos burned into our skin, but we do walk around with their logos on display. And every time we purchase a product from a brand, we are subscribing to their ideology and practices, whether intentionally or not.

Don’t believe me? See how quickly you can choose your preferences in this list:

Mac or PC?

Marvel or DC?

Coke or Pepsi?

Nike or Converse?

Tylenol or Advil?

Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s?

Uber or Lyft?

Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb.com?

I’ll bet you answered most of the questions in less than a second. How incredible is that? In each case, we have two companies offering the same service or product, yet we are able to choose between them within seconds. Mac and PC both offer computers; Nike and Converse both keep your feet protected; Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb are both websites that let you read reviews of movies written by other people. Why are we so quick to choose one over the other?

Because we want the world to know where we belong. We choose between computers to show that we are savvy and independent, or trendy. We choose between types of shoes because we want people to know that we are athletic or that we frequent concerts. We choose where to read our reviews because we want to trust the reviewers, and if they aren’t like us, well, how can we trust their opinions? So we find the website that speaks to the person we want to be and the people we want to be like.

Sure, we could say that we shop at Trader Joe’s because Whole Foods is more expensive. That is practical. Then again, many Trader Joe’s shoppers also choose an iPhone over an Android. If cost is the deciding factor, then an iPhone is impractical. In theory, it makes little sense that someone would avoid shopping at Whole Foods to save money when they also purchase an iPhone over an Android. In reality, we see this all the time.

A few years ago, people were boycotting a fast-food chicken restaurant because the CEO made antihomosexual statements in an interview. In response to the boycott, the opposing side (the people who agreed with the antihomosexual statements) decided to rally across the United States to all eat at that restaurant on the same day. Social media went crazy with posts of people eating chicken at that chain restaurant. Many of the pictures were taken with iPhones, but the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, is an openly homosexual man. In theory, it makes no sense that people would rally to support an antihomosexual CEO’s brand while also supporting a brand with a homosexual CEO. In reality, it happens.

WHY CONTRADICTION AND CHAOS ARE A NECESSARY PART OF BRANDING

People identify brands with other people, and just like people, brands are judged based on the best and worst things they have ever done in the eyes and perspective of the person judging. People who do not believe in a homosexual lifestyle can overlook using an iPhone, because hiring a homosexual is not as damning to them as the Apple products are useful. And of course, Steve Jobs, not Tim Cook, still represents Apple in the eyes of most consumers. On the other hand, those who believe in the rights of homosexual people may boycott a restaurant because the food is not good, not because the CEO makes bigoted statements.

Contradictions stem from the ways we naturally trust people for certain observed behaviors and traits, both negative and positive. For instance, let’s say you were a smoker and a slightly overweight person who quit smoking for your health and started working out. Then you hired a super-fit personal trainer who smoked after your workouts. You would naturally question whether smoking was really that bad for you or whether your trainer was the right person to work out with.

The other cause of contradictions in brand advocacy is assumption and natural association. When people are young and career driven, others might associate them with early rising, robotic tendencies, or an Ivy League education. If they don’t fit that mold, they run the risk of upsetting the people who have made assumptions about their personalities. But they also benefit by gaining the attention of people who see them as unique, so they can engage a separate audience that will now find them more relatable.

Think about it this way: Should people who have never attended college speak at an Ivy League college’s graduation? The answer: Only if they are more successful than the degree is valuable in the eyes of the students. Anything can happen if your greatest achievement is greater than the situation. This is how contradictory ideas, products, and people can coexist. If you want to speak at a Harvard graduation, you can do one of two things: go to college at Harvard and become more important than your degree or become more notable than a degree from Harvard.

WHY NOT YOU?

In his speech at Rice University in 1962, John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would be sending people to the moon. The first man landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. Ever since President Kennedy delivered his speech, twelve people have walked on the moon (most notably Neil Armstrong).

Whenever I hear, “That is just the way it has always been,” I hear an excuse rather than a viable explanation. This type of thinking represents the acceptance of the unknown as forever unknown, and it can lead to an unquestioning belief and trust in those whom we appoint as leaders. There is nothing in this world that exists as it has always been. There is always a beginning, everything requires evolution (change), and in most cases there is an end (or simply another evolution). So if everything is constantly changing and evolving, why do we become complacent and accept things as they are in the present? Acceptance of the way things are stops us from asking “Why?” and “why not?” It stops us from seeking change and challenging ourselves to grow.

From a very young age, people are taught to obey rules and follow instructions. We are programmed to fit into the world as it exists and told to do our best within a structure that was created before us, which is often presented as if it were created for us. We are told directly and indirectly that many of the rules in life are set and that our main goal is to live and prosper according to these predetermined guidelines. In many instances, our metrics for success are also predetermined. We are taught to find a job, start a family, build a life, and obey the law. The majority of us will follow this path and build our lives within this construct because, well, that’s the way it is and the way it has always been.

What about the people who do not follow these rules—the people who ask the world and themselves the difficult questions, who break away from the norm and see the potential for a life beyond preset limitations? These are the people who get to make new rules, remove old ones, and create a legacy. They are the ones, like Neil Armstrong, who are willing to take a leap of faith and believe in a world that differs from the one we see now, and who believe in themselves enough to take the first step. We remember these people because they help us challenge the criterion and they propel us forward to discover the unknown on our own. These people achieve personal autonomy, freedom of thought, and the euphoria that comes with freedom of expression. They are able to release themselves from the control of external influences and achieve a self-directed freedom that most of us don’t even dare to dream of.

There is a scene in the film The Matrix in which Neo and Trinity are preparing to save Morpheus from the Smiths. Trinity looks at Neo and says, “No one has ever done this before,” and Neo responds, “That’s why it will work.” That line has stuck with me since I was a kid, when I used to watch the film on repeat. I love that almost every scene requires a character to make a choice. In my mind, this is reality amplified.

HOW WE DIFFER FROM BRANDS

We are different from brands because we don’t need people to wear our names or put our faces on their belongings. But we do have followers, connections, images with tags, groups, clubs, co-workers, personal connections, and more. When we connect with people online or offline, we are telling the world that we subscribe to them and that they subscribe to us. We are saying that we have something in common or share beliefs. The stronger and clearer your personal goals and ideals are defined online, the more the people who may not know you in person are inclined to subscribe to your personal brand.

Personal branding is not about packaging yourself to sell yourself. It is about bringing focus to your actions so that the right kinds of people can find you and subscribe to your message, and vice versa. Brands want to be people. They strive to evoke the same emotional connections that people create naturally. So you have a head start in that you already have a brand, and you have ownership over yourself. When you think about it from this perspective, “personal brand” is a misnomer; the words “personal autonomy” are more accurate. That said, the world has come to use personal brand to describe the result, and we will, too.

Personal branding starts with the ability to think for yourself as you make choices about what you buy, do, and represent because you like what you’re choosing, not because you need to make those choices. Brands need people to help define their message, create a culture around their products, and carry their messages forward. Personal branding is about being yourself out loud. When we are truly ourselves, we contradict the norms, confuse people, intrigue them, and shift their thinking by shifting their perspectives.

We are different from brands because we are relatable. If you want to be heard, you need to understand why people will listen. You have to understand your own value proposition. You can change and sway it over time, but initially you have to understand what it is about you that will open doors. You also need to understand which rooms you should be in and which rooms are out of your league. Personal branding takes time, just as anything that really matters should.

Listen to your natural instincts and desires. Don’t adapt or mold yourself to be the “next” anyone. Unlike brands that are desperately trying to become more like people and copying trends to do so, you are already a person; your brand should focus on being authentic instead of a manufactured version of what you think everyone else wants you to be.

PUBLIC RELATIONS IS PROPAGANDA IS PR IS NEWS

Propaganda is defined as information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda. Edward Bernays was a twentieth-century journalist, author, and philosopher who is considered to be the father of propaganda. (Bernays renamed propaganda as “public relations” to sidestep the negative connotations associated with the word following World War II.) Bernays handled public relations for many noteworthy clients, including President Calvin Coolidge, Procter & Gamble, CBS, General Electric, Dodge Brothers Motor Car Company (as it was named at the time), and, most famously, the American Tobacco Company.

In the 1920s, while working for the American Tobacco Company, Bernays told the press that women’s rights marchers would be attending the Easter Sunday Parade in New York City and lighting “torches of freedom.” Bernays knew that by sending attractive women to a march with cigarettes, he would reframe the idea of women’s smoking (it was taboo back then), freeing more women to smoke as an expression of their freedom and, consequently, radically increasing the market for cigarettes.

Instead of finding a group of women’s rights activists, the media saw models (gathered by Bernays on behalf of the American Tobacco Company) marching in the parade and lighting up Lucky Strike cigarettes. The media didn’t know the difference, and on April 1, 1929, the New York Times published images of the models under the headline “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of Freedom.” The event and the headline helped break the taboo against women smokers and smoking in public.

From this point forward, Bernays went on to craft many successful campaigns, to become the author of numerous books, and even to influence other infamous public relations professionals such as Ivy Lee, publicist to the Rockefellers.

Bernays was not just a publicist; he was also a philosopher and a nephew of famous neurologist Sigmund Freud. So it is no surprise that Bernays combined theories of crowd psychology with his uncle’s psychoanalytical ideas to create an unstoppable concept of his own: public relations. You may be asking yourself what this has to do with personal branding. Well, this has everything to do with personal branding.

Bernays did not just take on a project and consider, How can I sell this for my client? He knew that selling something with the potential for great impact, whether an idea or a product, requires more than just a message. It requires a complete understanding of the buyer. You need to know what your buyers think about your commodity, how they think about it, whom they trust to learn it from, and what they are passionate about foremost. If you want to be influential, successful, and thought of as a leader, the first step is realizing that you have to think for yourself, not about yourself, in this process. The key to influence is realizing that it is not about you; it is about the people you are influencing and how the message affects them.

For example, no one cares that you think you are the next Steve Jobs. In fact, no one cares if you actually are the next Steve Jobs, until they hear it from someone else. This is the power of third-party authorities—or as you know them today, influencers, thought leaders, executives, corporations, and, of course, the media. If TIME publishes an article that declares you “the next Steve Jobs,” then people will start to believe that you may in fact be the new innovator of your day.

The idea of using third-party authorities is not new. In fact, Bernays used this method often and as early as the start of the 1900s. Bernays wrote his theory in his 1928 book, Propaganda. He is quoted as saying, “If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway.” So if the business publication Bloomberg can sway the opinion of the people who purchase stocks, then there is no need for you to go after everyone who buys stocks. Instead, sway the opinion of Bloomberg, and everyone else will follow.

Branding is about making brands more human, and personal branding is about making humans more authentic. Personal branding is about personal autonomy, personal growth, and individual thought. It is about being more human, not more brand-like. Brands have always strived to be more human, because the more human a brand is, the more people identify with it. When it comes to personal branding, however, it isn’t so much about being more human as it is about strategically accessing an audience. That is why influencers can charge brands so much for their support: the brands need them. People want the opinions of those they trust. The way to build trust with other people is effective communication. Fortunately for us, today we have plenty of resources we can use to create conversation and demonstrate trust. That has not always been the case. There was a time when word of mouth, printed news, and snail mail were the only tools we had available for reputation management and personal branding. Of course, those tools were mainly utilized by the elite.

THE ROCKEFELLERS: ONE OF THE WORLD’S FIRST PERSONAL BRANDS

Ivy Lee, the second-most-infamous person in public relations, was greatly influenced by Edward Bernays and was the publicist to the Rockefeller family and Standard Oil. He also happened to be the uncle of the famous novelist William S. Burroughs (who wrote Naked Lunch). Lee was hired by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to represent his family and Standard Oil after a coal mining rebellion in Colorado, known as the Ludlow Massacre.

To understand the need for Ivy Lee and personal branding, it is important that you understand the Ludlow Massacre and how the Rockefellers were associated with it. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, railway trains were popping up all over the United States, and they needed coal to operate. This of course made coal a valued commodity of the time. In the early 1900s, Colorado was home to the largest coal operator in the West, Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, purchased by John D. Rockefeller in 1902 and given to his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., in 1911. John D. Jr. lived in New York City and managed the operation from his office on Broadway.

As we know today, coal mining is extremely dangerous, and in 1912 the labor laws were effectively nonexistent. Miners in Colorado were not paid by the day or by the hour but by how much coal they produced, which naturally led to being overworked in dangerous conditions just to put food on the table.

When welfare capitalism—the idea that coal-mine owners could subsidize the cost of living for their miners by essentially owning the towns they lived in—entered the scene, it meant better health care, homes, and education for miners’ families. But then the miners’ lives became almost completely controlled by their employers, with little opportunity to escape once they grew accustomed to the lifestyle. These days we call that scenario a company town—or, dare I say, Googletown? But in 1912 Colorado coal-mining towns, the company towns were not run by Google. The towns imposed rules on the personal lives of the miners, in the same way they did while the miners were at work. This meant curfews enforced, no strange guests allowed, and guards with guns on patrol to make sure everyone obeyed. The coal miners were understandably frustrated by these working conditions, so they started to unionize nationally. The unions wanted labor laws, better working conditions, and fewer work-related deaths. The Western Federation of Miners, the union responsible for unionizing the western states, decided to focus attention on Colorado first, starting with none other than the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The coal company’s response and plan to stop the progress of unionization was to hire strikebreakers to work for a lower wage in place of the striking workers. The strikebreakers were mostly from Mexico and Eastern Europe.

The strike took place in 1913, and the union presented the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company with the following list of demands on behalf of the miners:

≫ To recognize the union as a bargaining agent for the mine workers

≫ To pay miners for digging every two thousand pounds of coal, not every twenty-two hundred pounds

≫ To enforce the eight-hour workday law

≫ To pay miners for the work that did not result in producing coal but aided in the process, such as laying track and cutting wood

≫ To hold a workers’ vote to select the weight-check men who kept track of the weight of the coal to be billed (like managers) and to remove those who were dishonest

≫ To give miners the right to choose any store, doctor, education, and home they wanted

≫ To enforce the laws of the state of Colorado, such as work-safety rules, and to remove the guards

This all seems pretty fair, right? Well, the company refused to comply with the union’s demands, and the workers went on strike. Men who went on strike were immediately removed from their homes (along with their families) and went to live in tents on land leased by the union. The company hired more strikebreakers and a private detective agency to protect the working miners from the strikers and to harass the strikers. Yes, this really happened; just think for a minute how much has changed when you consider that “chief happiness officer” is an official job at some of the most influential companies today.

On April 20, 1914, the guards from the mines came to the union camps and demanded the release of a man they believed was being held by the union against his will. The union denied the accusation, and the guards (mixed with men from the detective agency in guard uniforms) opened fire on the union tents. Trains came by and picked up some of the families to move them to safety, but many did not make it. Along the tracks lay the bodies of more than a dozen men who had died in the attack. Fire was set to a tent where eleven children and four women were sheltering, taking the lives of all eleven children and two of the women. The leader of the union was found shot in the head, his body dumped beside the railroad tracks in full view of the passing trains. It remained there for three days before a local demanded that the body be moved for burial.

The Ludlow Massacre left twenty-four people dead. John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the Rockefeller family were widely criticized for this event. Under the guidance of their publicist, Ivy Lee, the Rockefellers started a campaign that became the first of its kind. Lee sent the Rockefellers to Colorado to meet with the coal miners, listen to family members, host events in their honor, and inspect their working and living conditions. It was a campaign that would humanize the Rockefeller family in order to repair their damaged reputation and ultimately save their businesses. The idea that the people being held responsible for such a massacre would face the families of the deceased was unheard-of and drew a lot of media attention. Lee pushed the Rockefellers to create the Rockefeller Center in New York City and put their name on the building. He understood that one of the primary reasons it was easy for the public to blame the Rockefellers was because they were known for being wealthy and nothing else.

Humanizing the Rockefellers made them relatable to the masses. It is easier for people to hate a business than to hate and publicly attack a fellow human being. How does this work? Because your personal brand is not about you: it is 100 percent based on others’ opinions of you. If you are a billionaire who sits in an ivory tower and never comes down to say hello, then you are probably seen as a greedy jerk. If you are a billionaire who speaks directly with people, owns your success, and tells others that you believe they can find similar success, then you will be relatable (and, as it turns out, you can even become the president of the United States of America). The more time you spend communicating with your audience and relating to them, the better they will think of you and everything you are associated with thereafter.

Here’s another way to think of it. Have you ever heard a story about someone who met a celebrity or famous person? They say either, “He/she was lovely,” or “They were so rude; they must be full of themselves.” The difference in the opinion is all in the communication. If the person stops to say hello or acknowledges you, then they are lovely. If they rush past you for any reason (and we all have our reasons), then they are rude. Communication is key, and no communication at all is as much a choice as overcommunication.

The Rockefellers were able to win the hearts of people whose loved ones had died as a result of the company’s poor business practices, simply by showing up and listening. But that is not enough for personal branding today. If you are able to build an audience and a recognizable brand, you will then have to put in the work to manage it.

HATERS DON’T REALLY HATE, THEY JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND

Many people, media outlets, and even some educators have been painting a picture of personal branding as a self-interested, millennial-created phenomena. Not true. Yet some thought-leaders, such as Facebook’s chief operating officer and author of Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg, have come out against building personal brands.

I like what Sheryl Sandberg has to say on many other topics. I think she is honest and intelligent, hard-working, and a great role model for women and men everywhere. She genuinely wants to help inform and is truly a person to look up to if you want a career similar to hers. But I disagree with her completely on the topic of personal branding. First, brands are not products; brands are symbols for what the products represent. Brands are created by businesses to represent the value the companies are trying to bring to the market. Second, personal branding is not about packaging an inauthentic version of yourself. It is claiming your voice and becoming more authentic by removing the logos, imprints, stereotypes, and perceptions to take control of your own images, reputations, and freedom of thought. Third, what we don’t say can be as telling as what we do say and how, where, when we say it, making personal branding about more than simply having a voice.

Sandberg’s view of personal branding is understandable—she may not be aware she has a personal brand because hers was built almost circumstantially, not out of necessity (though she has done a great job maintaining it). Sandberg joined Google in 2001 (Google was founded in 1998). She joined Facebook in 2008. (Facebook was founded in 2004 but was limited to college students, until it became available to anyone over the age of thirteen in 2006.) Fast-forward a decade, and we live in an era where everyone is online, everyone expects you to be online, and people will search for you long before they will ever accept a meeting with you. Sandberg has helped get us here by leading the top information, communication, and media-distribution tools that have made personal branding not just a reality but a requirement.

Put yourself in the shoes of people who enter the job market after years of posting on Facebook, who have their LinkedIn profiles viewed before they’re ever asked for a résumé, who re-enter the job market after losing a job in the career they’ve had for decades, or 
who are returning to the workforce after having children and have no online presence as they search for a new job. It’s not just an advantage to develop your personal brand; it’s a distinct disadvantage if you don’t.

REALLY LISTEN

In the early 1980s, the world found itself in the midst of a health epidemic with the discovery of HIV and AIDS. The disease was first observed and reported by the media within the male homosexual community in Los Angeles and New York City. We knew little about the disease at the time, other than that it was extremely contagious and was rapidly spreading within the male homosexual population.

For years, it was believed that touching someone who had the AIDS virus without protection would put you at risk for contracting HIV. People with HIV and AIDS were quarantined in dedicated hospital units and interacted only with doctors who were in full protective gear. Those suffering from the disease and the entire homosexual community were faced with a stigma that stemmed from the fear of not knowing. Then something incredible happened.

In April 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, walked through the newly opened AIDS ward at Middlesex Hospital in London with the media in tow and shook hands with an HIV-positive man without wearing a glove. At the time, the patient did not want to be named or photographed because of the public’s perception of the disease, so the photographer took the picture with the patient’s back facing the camera. With this single gesture of kindness, Princess Diana told the world that compassion and understanding for people affected by this disease were more important than fear and ignorance. She unexpectedly changed the future of HIV and AIDS research, awareness, and the stigma associated with it.

Princess Diana did not have to take an interest in this cause or the suffering of this community. Instead of following royal guidelines and maintaining her royal distance, she thought for herself about the well-being of others. She challenged the status quo—not only for herself but for people all over the world.

So many people think that personal branding is for those who want power and influence, but it is really for people who want freedom from being influenced or overpowered by others.

In a recent study on power from the University of Cologne, the University of Groningen, and Columbia University, each institution presented two different concepts of power—power as influence and power as autonomy. “Power as influence is expressed in having control over others, which could involve responsibility for others,” the researchers wrote. “In contrast, power as autonomy is a form of power that allows one person to ignore and resist the influence of others and thus to shape one’s own destiny.”1

Princess Diana knew the power she possessed and understood her reputation, so she knew exactly what message she would send when she shook hands with a man who was HIV positive. She knew because she was really listening to the patients and understood at a deep level what a handshake would mean to that man as well as how it could help many people in the world overcome their fears. She took control of the situation, and in turn, she took control of her brand and the way the world perceived her and HIV patients.

LISTEN MORE THAN YOU SPEAK

Even smart, well-informed people can be misinformed or send the wrong message by being misunderstood. I prefer to research the reasoning behind positions and practices myself.

We often hear experts cited who have finished studying or have retired, sometimes many years earlier, yet they are still considered experts. Shouldn’t it be a requirement to stay relevant if you want to remain an expert at something? Are they really experts now, or are they more like historians?

The more I learn about some of the most common things in our society, the more I realize how many opportunities there are for change and how much room there is to create it. This discovery has influenced my own personal branding as well as the advice I give my clients. The more we learn about things that are widely accepted but aren’t true or don’t make sense, the more it reinforces the little voice in our heads that says, Why doesn’t anyone listen to me? If no one is thinking for themselves, then who is doing the thinking? You can do the thinking, and that is what informs your brand. Here are a few examples that underscore this.

Case One: Two Pennies to Rub Together

In 2014, a single penny cost 1.7 cents to manufacture.2 That means it cost 1.7 times the value of a penny to mint one (the commodity metal value plus the cost to mint). That same year, it cost the United States government (US taxpayers) 8.1 cents for every nickel that was minted, according to the United States Mint. That means that five pennies cost more to make than one nickel. Don’t take my word for it, do the math: 1.7 x 5 = 8.5 cents, compared to the nickel that cost 8.1 cents in 2014.

What’s the best part of all of this? US pennies were the most-produced coin in 2014, representing 61.3 percent of the year’s production total. There were 8.1 billion pennies produced in 2014, which is worth $81 million in pennies. The grand total spent to make pennies in 2014 was approximately $137.7 million. That is $137 million to produce $100 million in pennies. Yet we leave pennies all over the ground, in those little trays near the registers at convenience stores, and in fountains throughout the country. Our parking meters won’t even accept pennies. Americans pay taxes to produce a coin that we lose money on, and then we leave that money on the ground and even throw it in the trash.

Additionally, in 2016 the United States Mint produced 9.16 billion pennies. Yes, in 2016 the penny cost only 1.5 cents to make (down from 2014), but we aren’t saving any money. The Mint does make money on the production of dimes and quarters, but we produce significantly fewer of them than pennies. (In 2015, the Mint produced only 2.87 billion dimes and 2.65 billion quarters.)

So why are we still using pennies? The argument for keeping them is that we need them for rounding off prices, so people can sell things for ninety-nine cents. Businesses would lose money if they rounded prices down to ninety-five cents, and consumers would end up spending more if retailers rounded up prices to a dollar. But we already leave our pennies everywhere, and we are paying more to make pennies than they are worth. Who would mind if we paid a penny more?

Case Two: The Value of Anything Is the Value You Give It

When I was about seven years old, I stood on the side of the street outside my aunt’s house with my sister, who was only three or four. I collected a bunch of rocks, painted faces on them, and had my sister ask passersby if they wanted to buy a rock. Many people laughed, and some gave us money but left the rock. I got in trouble for making my little sister sell rocks to strangers. I understand why my mom was angry. It took me awhile to understand why potential buyers laughed at us, but I accepted that our idea was a dumb one and moved on.

It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realized I may have been onto something. That was the day I heard about a man named Gary Dahl, a creative person who owned an advertising agency in California. In 1975, Gary Dahl got tired of hearing his friends complain about their pets, so he invented the Pet Rock.3 He wrote an instructional manual on how to take care of a Pet Rock, packaged it nicely, and sold 1.5 million of them for four dollars each that year. His profit? Three dollars per Pet Rock, quickly making him a millionaire for selling rocks.

Let’s look at the value of our labor. If you were told today that a rock could sell for more than you make in an hour or even in a day at your job, would that surprise you? Well, in December 2016, Nordstrom’s put rocks on sale.4 They had two versions of the rock wrapped in leather pouches—a small one for sixty-five dollars and a larger one for eighty-five dollars. Both rocks sold out on their website. The online description of the leather-wrapped rocks read: “A paperweight? A conversation piece? A work of art? It’s up to you.” At least Gary Dahl had told us what the rock was used for: his rocks were pets. The overpriced Nordstrom’s rocks left the use of the rock for buyers to determine. Think about this the next time you’re pricing your labor and messaging your value.

If rocks can make people millionaires and sell out in 2016—when they were more expensive than a tank of gas—then anything is possible.

Case Three: Does an Apple a Day Keep the Doctor Away?

I was in Dubai as a guest at the World Government Summit. The huge event was packed with industry and world leaders, and we could attend a variety of functions each night. One of the options I attended was the Gourmet Waste dinner, with ambassadors, executives, and people from the local government. We were there to eat food that had almost gone bad but had not yet spoiled. This was a difficult dinner for me, because I am not a foodie and have difficulty stomaching food that I know might be spoiled. To be fair, the food was fine. It was my preconceived notion of what I was eating that was the problem. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to finish my dinner at an event about not wasting food.

Then the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Minister of Climate Change and Environment, Dr. Thani Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, stood up and introduced the chef and the scientist in attendance. The scientist asked us how long we thought it would take for the average apple to arrive on the grocery store shelf after it had been picked. We all threw out random guesses. We were all wrong. “Nearly a year,” he answered, 
adding that by the time a store-bought apple reaches our homes, much of the nutrition is gone, depending on how long it was stored.

What the scientist said is true: apples can take up to a year to get to your local grocery store.5 Depending on where you get your apples, how you eat them, and what you eat them with, they may not actually keep the doctor away. (Is anyone else a little annoyed with their mom after reading this?)

What am I getting at here? In a world where pennies cost more to make than they are worth, retailers are selling rocks and making a killing, and apples are less healthful than we’ve been told, anything is possible. When we think beyond what we think we know, we need experimental thinking—individual thinking. We need to question our experts and be fearless in challenging the norms that keep everyone moving in the same direction. When you think for yourself, your ideas become the base value of your brand.