Transcription
Hello my friend. Welcome back to the channel. This is season 2 episode 4 and I'm going to start this episode off by saying something pretty controversial and bold and that is forget personal branding. It can be fake and limiting and from my perspective the whole thing just feels a bit cringy.
So today I just want to offer a different perspective, a different way of thinking about this where we can begin to express ourselves more authentically and freely and actually feel good about what it is that we're doing here online. And this is how I've been approaching this channel from the beginning. I started this channel just 5 months ago and I've grown the channel to almost 13,000 subscribers. So, there might be something valuable on here, so you might want to stick a bump.
So, personal branding is a topic that's blown up on the internet over the last few years, and everyone's talking about it. And um there's a lot of creators giving advice and insight about how to build a personal brand, and there's a lot of good stuff that I've taken into this channel, but there's also some really bad advice out there that I just think we need to let go of. And one of the pieces of advice that I'm focusing on today is this idea that you need to find your favorite creator and just copy them. I think this is just terrible, terrible advice and something I totally disagree with.
And the reason I think this fundamentally doesn't work is because it's kind of saying that you're not good enough. So you need to find somebody else out there and be more like them. So it's kind of like really sort of leaning into these limiting beliefs that many of us have that we're not good enough. And unless we actually copy somebody else, we're not going to succeed in this online space. And I just I just that does not connect with me. Um so so yeah, I think that we we need a new way to think about this. We need a new way to communicate this.
So I don't think um it's all bad, you know. I think like you can look at your favorite creator and be inspired by what they do. Look at their formats, look at their structure, look at their aesthetics, and be like, "What is it that I like about this?" as opposed to just like copying them because they're doing good. You know, their channels are blowing up or whatever. It's just like really finding the people that are representing themselves in a way that feels more closely to you.
So, the big switch that I want to offer here is moving from personal branding to personal presence. So, personal branding when we speak about it like I just have, it's more of an external thing where we're looking out into the external world to find a way to reflect our ourselves. So personal presence is more of an inward reflection where we look at who we really are and we create from that space.
So a way that we can start to think about this is when you think about yourself staring at a mirror. So what you see is the reflection of yourself. This is how the world sees you. But it's actually not the experience of you. Your experience of you is not the reflected version. It's the person that's actually looking out into the world. So it's the experience of you. what it feels like to be you and nobody else knows what that is. They just see the external image. So now imagine if you were looking into that mirror and you had a mask on or if you dressed up in some random stuff and it didn't represent who you were at all. This is kind of what this bad advice is telling you to do to actually just put on a different skin and be somebody else. And yeah, it just doesn't work. So we want to be looking when we look into that mirror that that whatever it is that's reflecting back at us needs to be directly linked to our inner world to the experience of us so people can really begin to know who we are feel who we are and see who we are and connect with that.
So another way that I would like to sort of bring more clarity to this is offer a story in my own life where this light bulb moment turned on where this became a lot more clear. So it was about 13 years ago when I released my first ever feature-length film. This is a film called The Salt Trail. It was a surf film that I made with zero budget with me and my girlfriend. We traveled around Indonesia and I shot this thing and it had its world premiere in London at the London Surf Film Festival and it was a special night because that night my whole family was there. My dad was there sitting next to me. My dad has passed since so he died 10 years ago. So it's really lovely to bring him into the story and kind of keep him alive you know somewhere out here in the world. But once the film had finished uh he came up to me and he you know big smile on his face expressing you know how how stoked he was to kind of be there and and kind of watch this whole thing and experience it with me. Uh but the thing that he said which stood out to me the most was um the thing that I connected with while watching the film was that I could feel you in the film. I could feel you behind the camera. And I was like, that's such a different way of thinking about it. He's like, yeah, you know, there's all these pretty images about landscapes and waves and cultures and portraits and all this sort of stuff, but I couldn't help but just feel you behind the camera. And in that way, he explained how it was that he felt like he was seeing me and that is who I was.
So, what was reflected on that screen was a reflection of who I am. And this is a really cool way to start thinking about creation, anything that you create. If you're an artist, a filmmaker, a content creator, whatever you are, um the stuff that you make, when you can actually express it in a way that feels authentic to you, it's a direct expression of yourself, then people really get a window into who you are as opposed to them thinking that you are the person that they see on the outside. So your work really becomes a reflection, a deep reflection of your inner world. And when we can begin to create like this in this way, you know, it comes back to this quote from Nv Ravikant where he says something along the lines of if you can produce and market something which is a direct extension of you, then nobody can compete with that. So you become one of one.
So there's a few different ways that you can start to think about this, a few different questions that you can ask yourself. And one of them is if I was a song, if the experience of me, the feeling of me was a song, what song would that be? And if I was a color or a palette of colors, what would the those colors be? And if I was the quality of light, what would that light be like? Would it be hard light, soft light, reflected light? If I was going to balance a frame like this, how would I balance that so it felt like the experience of me? If I was going to edit my videos, how would the pace feel which aligns with a direct direct expression of myself?
So these are all the kind of questions that you can begin to ask yourself. And these questions actually came from, you know, my relationship with my partner. And when we first got together, we would go on these long road trips and she would always ask me these questions, you know, like if if I was a car, what car would I be? If I was a color, what color would I be? And it's really fun and funny when you play in a group because everyone seems to have different perspectives of what that is, of what car you would be. But when things start to align and everyone agrees, you would be that car, you'd be that color, you'd be that song, then you're actually expressing yourself in a way that feels more authentic.
So everything that I've done on this channel, from the way that I framed this, the way that I've lit this, the way that I've color graded it, the tone, the lack of editing, the lack of music, all of these decisions are a direct extension of my inner world. So this isn't something that I've copied from the outside and try to, you know, try to make it my own. This is just stuff that's been developed throughout my life that has become more of my sensibility because this reflects who I am. So it's just a cool way of thinking about it. And if you're looking for a new way to to create that feels more aligned with you, then I would suggest trying this out and thinking about it in this way.
And I'd love to know from you guys like what are your thoughts on personal branding? What are your thoughts on personal presence? Does this make sense to you? I'd love to hear I'd love to hear from you guys about the kind of things that the sparks inside of you. You know, be real. Be honest in the comments. You know, I want to hear I want to have conversations with you in the comments. Not just that was cool. I want to hear from you. I want you to reflect yourselves in a way that you feel when you watch these episodes. That's a good way to start. And if you haven't already, you can come join me in my school community. I'll leave a link in the description below. Uh it's pretty cool. We got one and a half thousand subscribers in there. It's growing. And I hope to see you there.