Is Your Personal Brand Killing You?

Next time, think twice before being interested in too many things.

I'm an inconsistent producer of content. Since no one reads what I write, it hardly matters. However, I think that when writing a blog you're supposed to spool out your thoughts little by little so people keep coming back. Good thing that no one comes to visit me in the first place, because I write at my own pace. Some days will see a few blog posts and some weeks will see none. Rest assured that if my blog experiences a season of silence that I am okay. I live in the real world, after all. Well, it's realish.

This is my second post in the last 12 hours. It's about personal branding and why it consumes emmotional and physical resources without producing value for anyone. Keep in mind that this opinion is unfounded and that I am eminently silly.

There’s a lot of fuss among knowledge workers about personal branding. Note that I called it fuss, not hype. There’s no hype – personal branding is an essential tool in the white collar worker’s chest and it’s here to stay. I’m of two minds about personal branding. On the one hand, the tools available to us now are the most efficient means for professional development society has ever invented – assuming that you are a knowledge worker. It helps us to solve the problem of increased specialization, where it is not as easy as describing your career as “20 years in carpet installation.” Companies often want specific skills, and personal branding allows individuals to advertise those skills.

Another attribute of knowledge workers is that we often move around among different jobs or different assignments within the same job. A comprehensive personal brand allows us to synthesize these diverse experiences into a single identity that goes beyond the stock job descriptions previously available to us.

That’s too bad, because personal branding is bad for our health. What’s more interesting is that it’s yet another sign of the industrialized world's economic self abuse. As sure as the Internet distracts some while Rome burns, personal branding deludes the Internet’s savvier users into believing that they’re doing something about the fire. All those empty buckets have got to be useful for something.

Do you know what I mean when I say “personal branding”? It’s one of those things that’s been around forever but looks fresh with a new name. For example, there’s probably someone in your family appointed (by himself or others) to give everyone advice on cars. This guy is known as the “car guy”. If he creates a Twitter feed on the subject of car buying and car repair, then he has created a personal brand. This is typical for celebrities, such as The Car Guys themselves.

The Internet now offers all of us the chance to turn our expertise in personal brands. It is more than a hobby, however. Career advisers tell us that we better increase our competitive edge by starting blogs, writing tweets, participating in discussion boards, writing articles for webzines and paper-zines, and doing whatever else we can to give hiring managers the impression that we are respected authorities in our fields. Writing useless drivel (such as this blog) about your 5-point business strategies isn’t just for bored CEO’s anymore. You want to go into that job interview with more than references; you need followers. I am all for living by the sweat of you brow, but is this work?

Max Weber introduced the concept of “The Iron Cage”. Lest I seem too melodramatic, I see this as a frying pan and fire situation. Pre-industrial life was far from idyllic. After all, would you rather be a beaureucratic cog with leisure and a health plan or share cropper with hookworms? To paraphrase Walter Kaufmann, one of the side effects of universal education is that it gives average people enough ambition to lament their uncreative lives, though surely those lives would’ve been even less creative and free in earlier eras.

It’s just that they wouldn't have entertained fancies of unobtainable heights back then. Surely you’ve read Flowers for Algenon? But shouldn’t technology give us more than it takes? And what happens when the Iron Cage leads us down the path of ruin rather than prosperity?