Developing a Personal Brand
So this is my 10th post on my website so I thought I'd give you guys a little treat with this one. Many of you may have been able to pick up on it already, but I for one love the idea of personal brand building. Creating an image of yourself, much the way you can through the Dual Actor's Mentality construct I described in my last post, and "marketing" it out to the rest of the world is truly an enlightening and humbling experience. It really taps into your core existence. To look deep inside within yourself and figure yourself out even more may seem foolish or possibly even daunting, but the process of doing so through personal branding is truly unlike anything else that I have experienced.
Why go about creating a personal brand in the first place? Frankly, your personal brand is your chance to create an influence on those around you in the world. Change can only be inspired when something that has never been seen before is shown to people. That is the power you can hold with your personal brand. Everyone is trying to position themselves in a state of success by following a preconceived notion of an image you have to portray to the world. That is where the majority of the global population goes wrong and settles itself for what is just the norm.
What creates such a dilemma for people to build a personal brand and "put on a show" to the rest of the world is this misconception that "what you are" and "who you are" are both the same thing. Trust me when I say that I was under the thought that the two were the exact same for quite some time as well. It wasn't until I really got to college here at Cal that I started understanding the dichotomy and beauty in the separation of the two. As mentioned in my previous posts, who you are is something inherent that cannot be tampered with. The real fun stems from "what are you" in your given arena of work.
Bringing it all back to personal brand building, you have quite the power with the brush in hand to stroke away at the canvas that asks, "What are you?". How you paint that canvass will be displayed to the rest of the world, but it will be you at the center of it all. In doing so, it will be you putting on a show for the crowd, so make sure to mold the image to the way you want it to be. This may be getting super confusing now with such abstraction of a canvass and show-business/acting so let me make things more concrete with one of my favorite examples of a personal brand.
As many of you have likely gathered throughout my blog, I am a huge fan of Kobe Bryant. I've studied Kobe Bryant's career in quite some depth, as can be seen in this post. From a viewer's perspective, Kobe was one of the best at putting on a "show" for the world through his persona conveyed through his basketball career. His personal brand, known as the Black Mamba for his cold, killer instinct out on the court, is what really made him leave an imprint on the world and next generation of NBA basketball players and athletes as a whole. With his background and specific encounter with a kid in the cafeteria in middle school, Kobe grew up in isolation and with a rage inside of him that was unleashed onto the basketball court. It wasn't until many years later that he found out that he would learn so much about himself through this persona upon entering the NBA draft in 1996.
This persona of a relentlessness and laser sharp focus and drive soon paved the way to the personal brand of the Black Mamba to be identified back in 2003. Sure, the natural origin may have stemmed from some issues that were going on off the court at the time, but the core of the identity and brand stems back from much earlier. His brand elevated him to heights that even he may have not imagined possible but left an even greater legacy that stems far outside his arena of work.
Looking at this example of Kobe Bryant, it is prevalent that the creation of a personal brand is very useful to separate personal and professional lives. Sure, it will definitely keep things in line between those two lives but can have an even greater impact when it works to mesh the two together with the passing of time. It leads to greater clarity within yourself and the extension of yourself to the rest of the direct community you are involved within. I know that this may take a few years, maybe even a few decades, to happen just due to the nature of the human mind over time in relation to how it looks at introspection. When that time and realization does takes place though, it leads to one of the most satisfying feelings in the world.
Taking time to reflect over this past week as I finally exit out of my teens and begin my journey into my 20's, I started to realize how much I have followed suit in developing a personal brand such as Kobe Bryant. It has definitely helped me discover a lot of unique qualities and traits of my own that I never thought I had within me. With time, it has also instilled a great deal of confidence and direction/purpose that wasn't really there when I first started freshman year back in high school. Though, it has left me pretty injured in the past few years as I carried on for a few months with a major back injury back in high school that cut my professional athletic dreams short and these past few days with a very recent ankle sprain that probably has left me with a torn ligament, but that just aids to the beauty of it all and some sort of connection I can make with one of my indirect mentors in Kobe Bryant I guess.
"At the center of your being you have the answer: you know who you are and you know what you want." - Lao Tzu
