Transcription
Let's not tiptoe into the pool of controversy; let's dive head first into it. Let's talk about the Yus himself. Does he have an emotional bond, an irrational emotional bond with his audience, in his community? Yes, most definitely. The power of influence that he has in directing, capturing, and leveraging attention—that's one of the key components to having a personal brand. He doesn't go along with a mainstream opinion, which makes him a very divisive person.
Okay, so if you're picking up on all the clues that I'm giving, let's put it together here. I have some opinions about what a personal brand is and what it isn't, and so I'd like to share some of my thoughts and see if you guys can track along with what I'm saying. So if I ask you, like, what is a personal brand? Who has a really strong personal brand? I think the tendency is for you to say famous people or people who have great influence in the world. And then I ask you other questions about them, and then it will start to unravel. So let's try to, like, just break down systematically the things or the core components that you need to have a strong personal brand. Number one: is being famous a component of having a personal brand? So let's examine famous people that we know or we think we know, and then to ask ourselves, do we really know who they are? And the number one component that I keep coming back to is: do we have a strong emotional connection, a sense of knowing this person, that we know the story, that we can relate and identify with them, such that we would be willing to go out of our way to buy their books, to wait in line to see their movie, or to attend a concert or workshop that they're doing? This is critical.
So the first person I think of is someone who's relatively famous, who's a prolific content creator, who is a well-respected thought leader, and his name is Seth Goen—Seth Godin. Seth Godin has written over 22 books, has written a blog post every single day for over a decade, which is an incredible feat in itself. I have great admiration for Seth Godin; in fact, we've had him as a podcast guest here on this channel. The question is: what do we know about Seth Godin outside of his subject matter expertise? And the answer is very little. I'll ask you a couple of questions: Is he married? We think so. What's his wife's name? Does he have children? How many children does he have? What are their names? Does he have a pet? What are his interests and hobbies outside of observing things and writing about things that relate to marketing in the 21st century? Then it becomes really opaque. So Seth Godin, arguably, is a famous person, is a sought-after public figure who has lectured all over the world on some of the biggest stages in the world, but the question I have for you is: does he have a strong personal brand? I think this is a good clue as to how we start thinking about personal brands and why I think my perspective on this is so different than the vast majority of people who talk about having and building a personal brand.
Let's take another person, someone that you most likely know if you're watching this channel: Gary Vaynerchuk. Let's run him through the same test with Seth Godin. Is he famous? Certainly, he is famous. Is Gary a thought leader? Has he published books? Is he a bestselling author? Is he a sought-after speaker and also have spoken on the biggest stage of the world? And I would say probably, inarguably, yes, yes, yes, and yes. And he has one additional thing, as far as I know, that might put him above a lot of other people: he runs a large enterprise, a big business that does hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, according to him. Does Gary Vaynerchuk have a personal brand? Does he have this irrational emotional connection to you and I? I want you to pause and think about that for a second, and then answer the question of why or why not, and we can examine this together. I think Gary has a very strong personal brand, and it's going to give us our second clue: he has a strong point of view on things. So not only do you have to build a strong emotional connection, which he has, as evidenced by his collaboration with K Swiss, with his launch of his NFTs, and anything else he's hawking—Empathy Wines—because a person, and you can test this, who has a personal brand is able to take ordinary things and make them extraordinary by associating themselves with this. This is really critical. This is another test. So, by association with something, that thing becomes more valuable. And we, we're going to borrow language from the corporate world here: a t-shirt. You can buy a pack of three for like a few bucks, and if you're really—50 for not a whole lot—but you can go to Target, you can go to Costco, and buy a pack of three Hanes beefy T white t-shirts for probably 10 bucks for a pack of three, maybe a little bit more than that. So you're paying essentially for the raw material cost and assembly and the shipping that it takes to get it to the market and some waste built into that; you're not getting a lot above that. What brands are able to do is to charge a premium above and beyond the cost of goods sold. The higher that premium, the stronger the brand. So when Gary grabs a bottle of wine, perhaps it cost him 4 or $5 to make; he sells it for $55. You could say his brand, or the premium that he adds to it, is that $50 difference of intangible value, and that's really, really important. So we, we go back to Seth Godin. So Seth Godin says, "Hey, here's a line of mugs, here's a pair of shoes that I endorse and put my name on—the Seth Godin kicks." Does it command a higher premium for it? If it doesn't, then we're in trouble. And what he's doing there, Gary Vaynerchuk, is he's leveraging that emotional connection that you have with him, I guess your desire to reciprocate the value in which you've received, and you tell yourself you're supporting this artist, this designer, this creative, this thought leader by purchasing the things that they have endorsed or put their name behind. Really important. He can take a piece of information and send it through the Gary Vaynerchuk filter, and then produce a message that, in essence, has the same meaning but sounds very much like a Vaynerism. This is important. And there's Godinisms too, but this is one of those criteria. So that what we can't do is we can't say things the way that other people say them and expect anyone to believe that there's any credibility, that we have a personal brand. We need to have a strong point of view.
Let's not tiptoe into that pool of controversy; let's dive head first into it. Let's talk about the genius himself, the one and only Yay. We're talking about Kanye West here. Does he have a strong personal brand? If we use the same metrics in which we've been looking at, let's run it through and see how strong his personal brand is. Undoubtedly, with the drop of Donda, Volumes 1 and 2, his collab with Tai, $, his fallout and rehab, and then fallout again with Adidas, and with the line of clothing and the shoes with Yeezy, and his genius marketing plan, let's kind of figure it out. Number one: does he have an emotional bond, an irrational emotional bond with his audience, in this community? Yes, most definitely. How do we know this? How do we know that? Well, because every time he does something, we all care. We care about it in the trades; uh, we see it in the tabloids; we go to concerts; we read articles about him; we'll watch videos about him; and there's this constant feed of Kanye West news. He's lost his mind; he's battling mental health; he's in and out of relationships; you know, he's, he's dabbling as some kind of O.G. with music and now with fashion. So most definitely, we care. There's a hyper sense of attention or focus on whatever Kanye does. So clearly, he has mastered personal branding, because whatever he wants to talk about is what we'll be talking about. That's how powerful he is. Put aside all the crazy stuff he said; this—we're not here to, to judge whether or not what he's saying is, is, is good or bad; it's just the power of influence that he has in directing, capturing, and leveraging attention—that's one of the key components to having a personal brand. Does he have a strong POV? Clearly has an emotional bond; does he have a clear POV? You can't get no clearer than this, and I'm trying my best to speak proper English here, because he has a conspiracy theory on everything: about drugs, about Jewish people, about media, about Adidas, about holding back Black people in slavery. He has an opinion about everything, and he doesn't, he doesn't go along with a mainstream opinion, which makes him a very divisive person. So having a strong point of view means that you're going to make some friends, but you also make some enemies along the way. And to, I think, to a degree, he has hurt his music part by saying, I guess, the relatively outlandish things that he's been saying. I think he's lost over a billion dollars in sponsorships and brand deals because of the things he said about Jewish people; it is seen as anti-Semitic, and so that's very, very problematic in today's culture. But he's okay with that; he's accepted that. I will say this: I'm not going to apologize until you can challenge me with a better rational argument. I'm going to believe what I'm going to believe, because he has enough money now that he doesn't have to worry about this. It's like, it's good to be so rich, you don't care if you get canceled, because it don't matter at the end of the day.
So I know what you're thinking: Chris is talking about these celebrities, so I guess it's unfair—they're good-looking, they're rich, they're famous, gosh, and they have personal brands too. But here's the thing, though: in the world of people that are famous—actors, musicians, uh, designers, whatever famous person you're thinking of—ask yourself if you have an emotional connection to them. And there's a good chance that most of them do not add value to something by lending their endorsement or attachment or association with, because there are a ton of actors out there that they can't sell a vodka line, they can't sell a tequila line, they can't raise money to start a coffee bean company, or they don't move pairs of jeans if they just say, like, "I'm associated with this," because this is not how we see them, and it's not the relationship we have with them. So I think there's something that's going on here, and it's the first thing that we need to kind of break down. And I use that word very intentionally. Think about the wall that exists between you, your content, your beliefs, your values, your ideas, your message, your story, and your audience. How much will you let them in on that stuff will determine that connection that they have with you.
All right, so naturally, we have to talk about the queen bee herself here. Who am I talking about? I'm not talking Beyoncé; I'm talking about Taylor Swift. The Eras Tour, the most successful tour that's ever existed in the history of tours—a multi-billion dollar juggernaut, and the stats are ridiculous. People reporting that the Swifties were shaking the ground by jumping up and down, that it registered on the Richter scale. I mean, you're talking about seismic activity of personal brand, literally felt. You can't get no better than this; this is ridiculous levels of personal branding. She's done a lot of beautiful things in order for her to achieve this kind of status. Now, first of all, I think there is undeniable talent there—a gift for storytelling, for writing hooks that are catchy, and being able to consistently produce chart-topping singles. What I saw in the Eras Tour, which is a 3-hour-long concert film, is someone who's a master at their craft. She's brought you into her stories—her heartaches, her love stories—and she is able to make women and men of all ages feel like she is their champion, that she creates space for them to be them, and she invites you in on this thing that, despite being a globe-trotting mega-superstar at the highest order, she still gets down on one knee and looks at you eye to eye and says, "Thanks for being here; you mean so much to me." That is super powerful. And I think in terms of, like, the way that she designs her personal brand, I would challenge you to find someone else who's playing at that level, to the way in which Taylor Swift is doing it. We've seen her go through all the controversial things—from Kanye West stepping in and saying Beyoncé should have won the Grammy, and dealing with that—and the latest controversy that I, I think is just a brilliant genius business move, in that she tried to buy back her catalog, but people prevented her from doing this. The Swedish revenge was: she re-recorded all of her songs, and because of the strength and connection she has with her fans, now that is selling like crazy, and she's done such a power move by being able to do this in an unprecedented way—re-recording, remastering all of her songs. So now you have a choice to choose to listen to her version of it or the label version of it, which she doesn't have access to. And this culminates in this beautiful moment that she launches into the Eras Tour, which is a three-hour-long concert that is doing billions of dollars, that is quite literally shaking up the world.
Before I get into the tactics on how we do this, 'cause I'm dropping clues—if you're paying careful attention, you'll start to see a pattern happening here. Okay, so if you're picking up on all the clues that I'm giving, let's put it together here. I think there are three essential traits that make for a very attractive character—not in physicality, but attractiveness like we're drawn to them like magnets; we're just drawn to them, or as they say, moths to the flame. Number one is they have high self-awareness, and on top of that, they have high self-acceptance. So they need to know who they are and to love the parts about them that are both good and bad. The problem with some celebrities is they have self-awareness, but they don't have self-acceptance; they're fighting that, so they're, they're building a barrier, that wall that keeps us away from them; they don't want us in there. It's a close cousin, but number two is this idea of self-confidence, and self-confidence is not what you think it is. Self-confidence is a belief in your skills to solve a problem; you have a process and way of looking at the world that you know you can solve most problems. It's not about having a high opinion of yourself or being arrogant or treating people poorly; it's not about that at all. And number three, probably the most important of all, which is a theme you're going to see here, is a degree of vulnerability. You feel like they're not going to keep anything away from you. So there's another word for vulnerability: it's called transparency. There are good things that happen in my life, and there are bad things that happen in my life; I'm going to dish both out to you in equal measure, so you know what's going on. The opposite of which is like you're some kind of sociopath, where we can see that there's a person behind the eyes, but they feel dead to us, like we don't understand. So you need to know this: if you want to build a strong personal brand the way that I'm talking about here, you have to be willing to let people in into those low moments as well as the high moments; we have to dance with both.
Now I'm going to point out something here: we might have mentioned in this previous video, but Pixar has this rule—it's the 22 rules of storytelling—and they're the most successful studio of all time, with multi-million, multi-billion dollar hits, and their 22 rules of storytelling. Guess what rule number one is? Rule number one is that people admire characters more for their struggles and their failures than they do for their success. This is why it's important to have a character that is working through their problems, is not perfect. And I think this is why characters like Superman are not relatable, but characters like Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker are highly relatable. We can see ourselves in some small way in these characters, 'cause they're just dealing with problems just like us. If self-confidence, self-awareness, and self-acceptance and vulnerability, transparency are the most important components that I'm saying about becoming an attractive character, these are things you're going to have to define in yourself if you want, if you want to have a shot at developing your personal brand. This is not easy work; this is the work of a lifetime. And I do want to say this: this is not an indicator of age, 'cause there are, are some people who are very young, like chronologically speaking, maybe even in their teens, who have high self-awareness, high self-acceptance, and I can't explain how they're able to come to this place. And then they, conversely, people that are much older, in their 50s and 60s, who are still wandering the Earth not knowing who they are, not knowing what their beliefs are and what they stand for; they haven't done that work. I can't explain why, but it's not an indicator of age. And there's this great line, because Dune is happening right—there's a line from Dune that has followed me since I was first introduced to Frank Herbert's work, which is this line: it's very important—"The sleeper must awaken." And we think it's a lesson from, um, Paul's father, Duke Leto Atreides—at least it was portrayed, portrayed that way in the David Lynch version—but in Denis' version, it's like his mom repeating this line—"The sleeper must awaken"—and I think that's such a powerful line that I think, and you've heard me say this before, we're all just sleepwalking through life; we're not really aware and awake in the present moment. And it's a wild thing, because I ask people, "What'd you do today? Did you notice this thing that just happened across the street?" And I, I do this with my children, I do this with my wife, I do this with my friends; they're like, "What are you talking about?" They're not noticing things; they're not paying attention to what's going on. And I think they're just sleepwalking through life. So the sleeper must awaken. How do you awaken? I was having a debate with one of my friends, uh, who thought they had high self-awareness, when actually they were really high on self-conscious, and there's a difference between self-conscious and self-awareness. Okay, allow me to enter this into the debate: when you're self-conscious, you're thinking about yourself through the lens of yourself—like, "Am I being too loud? Am I important? Am I beautiful? Am I ugly right now?" But self-awareness is being able to perceive yourself from the eyes of other people. So when somebody says, "I have low self-awareness," it means that you're talking, but no one's interested, but you just keep talking more and more; you're, you're not reading the audience; you think you're funny, charming, and you're telling captivating stories, but they're all falling asleep, but you can't see that, so you keep going. Like the opposite of this is people who are on the spectrum—like one of the guys that used to work for me, he's a cinematographer; he would literally walk in front of the crowd, block the band, take the shot, and not feel any sense of the heat that most of us would feel, which would cause us to sweat. He had low self-awareness. How do we develop this? Well, we can be more observant and ask people what they're thinking and feeling, and we have to be able to pick up on some of the social cues that most of us are able to develop, I guess, in the neurotypical space—can develop. If you're neurodivergent, it's going to be a little bit harder, but you can learn these skills as well. What comes natural to people may just require a little bit more effort from you to, to be able to figure this part out. So when you have high self-awareness, you know how you're coming across to people, and you have to make certain decisions—like, "Am I okay with this, knowing that sometimes I say things that can be a little bit abrasive? Am I okay with that?" And that's the next step, it's because I think one of the most attractive things that a person can have, outside of self-confidence, is high self-acceptance. Do I love me for being me?
Now I'll tell you this: I was reading a book by Brian Tracy, The Psychology of Selling, and he says one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century in psychology was the development of this concept called the self-concept—"Who am I? And what makes me me?" This is a tricky thing, because we can spend most of our lives not knowing who we are, because we haven't taken the time to reflect on the things that we think about; we just experience life without reflection, and this is a really important component of it. So one thing that you can do is you can probably to start journaling, to start making a habit of cataloging your ideas and your experiences, and then taking a break and then looking back on what you wrote two, three weeks ago and asking yourself if those things are true—"Is this how other people saw you? Or is this you leaving your own head?" I think that's an important first step is to be able to start to audit, record, and reflect on your thoughts on a daily basis. There are going to be people who are born with this natural, innate talent in understanding who they are, who are full of self-love; maybe they're raised a certain way, but that doesn't mean that the rest of us—ugly, short people—are just—so they don't mean that. So what I've noticed is that if we study things from literature, especially in fiction, there are certain commonalities, certain patterns that exist that allow us to fall in love with characters. Just think about this: when we read a book, a novel, a work of fiction, or when we watch a movie or TV show, when the character is harmed, we feel hurt ourselves; when they're hurt emotionally, we feel great sorrow for them. And how is this? It's because the authors, the people who create these universes, these narratives that we're immersed in, understand how to create characters for us to fall in love with them, for us to care; otherwise, we wouldn't have read their books, watched their shows, or sat in a theater in a darkened room to kind of be taken on a journey. I find that there are four key components; we won't have time to go through all of them in this video, but let me outline for you what they are, and we'll go deep into one of them. Number one: every compelling character has an origin story. This is really important, and the origin story has some key components—your backstory, where you're born, basically; it's called your cultural currency; they say a lot about you and who you are, your beliefs and your values; they may not be true, but it's what the world accepts from you. And then in the origin story, there's this moment, an inflection point, an inciting incident in their life that everything changes. There's the ordinary world that happens before; if something happens to rock their world—it's a car accident, losing of a parent, getting accepted to university, being adopted—something happens that radically transforms their lives, and they're a whole different person; it's called crossing the threshold. If you're a fan of Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey, the monomyth. And lastly, there are the ongoing trials and tribulations, because no one in the real world has a solution and never falls back; it's like the drug addict who continues to struggle with remaining sober; it's the gambling addict who struggles with not gambling again. So it's referred to in the hero's journey as the relapse and the resurrection—well, how we fall back, but we emerge a little bit stronger, and that's the story for the rest of our lives. You don't ever—once you're an alcoholic, you never become not an alcoholic; you just learn to live with it. Now, number two, which is community and culture—the people who support you, your tribe's people, your village; this includes your mentors, coaches, your teachers, sidekicks that help you to form your beliefs, your values, and your customs. Number three: the defining attributes of who you are and your personal brand. So if we look into the world of fiction, I'm not going to miss on this opportunity to talk about comic books and pop culture. If you think of the most enduring characters, the ones that have lasted decades long—from your father's father to your father to you and to your children—we think of superheroes, and we think of, like, what, what is it that they have?
Well, they have a CREDO, the things that they believe, sometimes referred to in the modern era as a catchphrase—like Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” or “Leaders Eat Last.” He has so many of them. People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.
The characters have a duality of both strengths and vulnerabilities, almost in equal measure. So the characters that are really relatable, as we’ve talked about, in real life have a lot of vulnerabilities, things that they know aren’t perfect about them. And those things make the character more complete, more textured, and more real. And we can then see ourselves in their story as opposed to at arm’s length—like, “Easy for them to say; I cannot relate to you.”
They also have a way of showing up. This is their uniform: the colors that they wear, the symbols and the iconography that make them who they are are the lexicons that define them. Superman—if you see the red cape, if you see that curly cue up front—if you see Batman’s just his jawline or his ears, you know it’s him. It’s makes him who he is. And you can think, “Well, yeah, in the world of superheroes, that’s pretty easy to do.” But you know, I just had this happen to me literally today. I’m sitting at a cafe; I’m talking to my friend who’s a professional speaker, and somebody comes walking around. I don’t notice them until they walk right up to me and, like, “Hey, are you Christo?” I’m like, “Yeah.” And he says, “You know what? I was sitting behind you, and from the back I can recognize it’s you.” I’m like, “That’s pretty powerful,” then, right? You want to be able to develop your uniform, your wardrobe basically, how you look—from your eyeglasses to your hat to your shoes—such that someone can recognize who you are purely based on your silhouette, or from 30 feet away they know it’s you.
So part of this is your voice: the quality, the timber of your voice, the tone, how you speak, how much energy you have—transmit a signal to the world but also create what they call sonic branding. It’s your signature sound; it’s your signature look. Okay. And lastly, it’s the enemy.
So we have a community and culture that supports us; we must be able to have an enemy. Alan Dib writes about this in his book, *The One-Page Marketing Plan*. He says we have to identify the enemy in common. It’s like things that we hate: we hate bureaucracy, we hate waste, we hate pollution, we hate selfish people. So if you can identify this—and I’ve mentioned before in my Adobe Max talk on personal branding—I said Andrew Tate has an enemy, and the enemy he labels as the Matrix. Donald Trump has an enemy: mainstream media. You notice what they’re doing here? They’re labeling their enemies; you’re calling it something. So there’s a reason why I think Donald Trump is so successful in the modern political era is because he doesn’t have to tell you what he believes in; he just needs to tell you that we hate these things together. If we hate enough things together, we can rally around that. So anger, as well as love, are two powerful emotional drivers to building your tribe.
So when we think, “You know what? I’m Mr. Rogers; I don’t want to hurt anybody; I don’t want to say anything negative,” then you don’t really truly have a strong personal brand because we’re not rallying against the same things. So the enemy can be your nemesis, the one person who represents the equal opposite version of you. Then there are people, organizations, and ideas that you’re against. And the bigger the cast of characters, the more people that you’re trying to take down, the more that we have in common—the enemy in common—the more powerful your personal brand is.
On a personal level, people ask me this all the time. They say, “Chris, you’re anti-education.” I said, “No, I’m anti-crippling student debt. I’m all for education.” The problem is not the education part; it’s about how much it costs us to acquire some information for jobs that may or may not exist in structures that don’t account for individual learning styles that are atypical. I have a problem with that, and that is my enemy. So that’s why we see the future is like private art school without the crippling debt. As soon as I say that, shots are fired, and I’m okay with making some enemies, and you need to as well.
Just to recap, there are four key components, with sub-components, but the four key components are: your origin story; the community and the culture that support you; your defining attributes, which includes your lexicons and icons; and then the enemy. Oh, the enemy. I want to make these other videos, but I want to make sure that you’re enjoying this video and getting value from it, and that we’re not talking to the best. I’m going to ask you to do two very specific things: first, like this video; drop a comment, so it’s good for the algorithm, so more people can see it—apparently that’s how YouTube works. And number two, copy the link; send this to someone you know and care about who needs to see this video and tell them why they should watch this, because that would do tremendous things for our channel.
Within the constraints of a video, not to—to fry your brains and make you bleed out of your eyeballs—I’m going to go over the four key components to building a strong personal brand, and in subsequent videos, if so willing, we’ll go do a deep dive on each one of these four core components.
So now you know the four essential components to building a personal brand that connects with people, and it relates to all the things we talked about before about celebrities or famous people or authors or influencers that we like and have built an emotional bond with. They have high self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-confidence; they’re willing to share publicly, transparently, the vulnerable things—so the highs and the lows. And I want you to do something: pay attention now to the people that you see, look up to, and admire, and the ones that you feel a connection to, and run the test with me to see if it holds true, and let me know in the comments if you’re like, “Hey, I found somebody that where this isn’t true,” or “I found someone where this is absolutely freaking true.” Keep me honest and accountable. Thank you. Until next time; see you in the future.