People, Personality and Personal Branding
Host: Isaac Mashman · September 26, 2020 · Episode 38 · 25 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
Yo, what is going on everybody? Isaac Mashman here. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the podcast that is all about helping you chase after your vision through sharing my own personal life experiences, knowledge, and things that I have learned along the way, and ultimately helping you become a more capable individual, helping you grow, minus all that guru BS, minus all the advertisements, minus me trying to sell you my Shopify course, because one, I don't have one, and two, I am not your stereotypical online guru. Like Tony Robbins said, I am not your guru. Like, seriously, guys.
Anyways, today's episode is going to be covering personal branding. Now, I was not expecting to do a third episode or a third part of my personal branding series, but after listening through my second episode of my discussion on personal branding, which is episode 37, I realized that I didn't touch on a major point that I wanted to touch on.
That was the entire reason why I was doing a part two to begin with. See, in episode 36, I talk about the fundamentals of personal branding. I talk about why it's important to have a personal brand, some of the benefits, what personal branding is to begin with. I kind of go in and talk about some of the basics. I cover things like, a lot of times people will tell you, oh, it's not important to have an online presence, or it's not important to have a personal brand, or I don't have a personal brand. I break all of that down in detail. If you haven't caught up yet, go back and listen to that episode before you listen to this episode and before you listen to episode 37, which is where I go and talk about the mindset of having a personal brand.
Not only just a personal brand, but a successful one at that. I titled that being a public figure because ultimately the only way that you're going to have a successful life and become anybody who's above average, somebody who's well known, somebody who's respected, somebody who is a leader, somebody who others look up to and follow and learn from and buy from and want to support, is if you have the confidence in yourself and if you treat yourself like a public figure, not in a cocky way, but in a way of confidence and in the energy of, hey, I know what I am working towards in life. That is another point that I really wanted to get across and convey in this episode that I didn't cover.
I don't think [I covered it] well enough in the last episode, which is that you have to know without a shadow of a doubt in your mind that you are going to the top, that you are somebody who has a lot going for you. You are somebody who just has such a high level of personal belief. You have such a high level of confidence. You have such a high level of certainty that there really is no other alternative to you not becoming successful. You have to become successful. Do or die, go all in or go all out. Yeah, that's just something I want to emphasize in the first couple of minutes of this episode.
It's not going to be a long episode. I know the past couple of episodes, the past three, have actually been near 30 minutes long apiece, 30 minute monologues of me just dropping value and talking to you guys from the heart and sharing my experiences and sharing some of the different things that I've noticed along the way.
But this episode is going to be a little bit shorter. It's going to be a little bit sweeter because it's not something that I feel like I have to dive into super deep on this episode, but it is something that I want to make you aware of. That is how most people, when building up a brand for themselves, build it based around their business and not based around who they are. I cannot express how many times I've gone through Facebook and seen the same exact person who builds funnels, the same exact person who sells Shopify courses, the same exact person who does Amazon FBA, Amazon KDP, the same artist who has the same profile picture, the same header, the same everything. Guys, if you're only building up a brand based around your business, you're not going to have longevity.
The ultimate goal with even building up a personal brand is to have longevity. You want to go and take your, I don't want to call it clout, but you want to take your reputation and direct it in whatever area you want to direct it in. If you have a reputation for being a very well-known speaker, you're able to go and speak for a variety of different people at a variety of different events. You're able to take that reputation and leverage it for more wealth, for more opportunity just because it is who you are. It is your social equity. It's how powerful, how important your brand is.
Right? I talk about how when people get features with other artists, like let's say you're getting a feature from Drake, you're speculating. The market is speculating that that song is going to do numbers simply because Drake is on the song.
It is speculation based off a name, just like how you speculate on the stock market. There are different ways to where you're able to increase the chances that you are correct. With the stock market, you don't just speculate based off of no information. No, you speculate and you take a guess: is the market going to go up, are the shares of this company increasing, is the valuation increasing or is it decreasing? Now, you look at actual numbers, you look at the news, you look at, okay, well, hey, I think that I want to invest in Apple stock, but before I spend my money investing in Apple, I want to make sure that this is a good investment.
Is the company going to go up? You're going to look at the quarterly reports, you're going to look at the previous track record, the reputation, you're going to take into account what is going on in the economy, you're going to take into account news coverage, was there something that happened in the past couple of weeks that was a horrible lawsuit?
Was something going on that could just affect the valuation of the Apple stock? It's the same exact thing with personal branding. When you meet somebody and when you start working with somebody, you got to look at their reputation. You got to look at, okay, well, have they been featured in any news reports? Or what numbers do they do if they're an artist? If you're trying to get an artist on as a feature, you're not just getting an artist on as a feature for their talent. You're probably getting their feature for their clout as well. I don't like using the word clout. Guys, we got to come up with a better word for that.
If you have a better word, shoot me a DM, text me, because I seriously don't like using that word. But you speculate how well your song is going to do and how much traffic you're going to get based off of the reputation of the other person.
That is why somebody who has 100,000 streams is able to charge a lot more money than the person who has a thousand streams, a hundred streams or no streams at all. So, going into more of a business focused conversation, because I feel like in the last couple of episodes I talked mainly about creative people. I talked about artists. I talked about musicians. I talked about models. I talked about entertainers, but I really haven't dived in and talked about business people. Obviously with my podcast, I'm trying to cover all niches because I think that at the core, what I talk about is applicable to everybody no matter what career, no matter what path they're going down.
But I want to dive into more of the business owner. You see, for the past couple of years, really, I think for the past probably 10 years since Instagram got started, we've started to see this wave and influx of entrepreneurs online, of people who are trying to become somebody or people who are trying to convey that they are somebody.
Then with that influx, you're seeing the same exact thing over and over and over again. It's like Millionaire Mentor. Chances are if you follow any inspirational quotes on Instagram, you know who Millionaire Mentor is. He was kind of one of the first people to start that. Then from his page, you see millions of other Instagram pages that post the same exact quotes over and over and over again. The ironic thing about this is that that is actually how I got started. I realized that business was for me. You see, I always had those entrepreneurial tendencies of wanting to do hustles. I had a lawn business when I was in seventh grade.
I'd bike around the neighborhood with a little trailer hitch to my bike. I had the mower on it. I had lawn tools and I would just go and I would mow lawns. Like I actually did that. That's something I haven't talked about. This is the first time publicly mentioning that. I've always had those entrepreneurial tendencies, but it wasn't until I got on Instagram and I saw what these people were doing that I realized that was who I was. I wasn't able to put a name or a title to who I was.
But then once I saw all of these other people doing it, and having success online and establishing a name for themselves, I fell in love with it. I became addicted to the numbers. I became addicted to the thought of that reputation and the thought of me becoming somebody. It was me coming from literally a family that nobody knows and establishing a name for myself. I thought that that was something that is honorable, that is something that is respectable, and it is something that's a win-win situation for everybody who's involved. It gives you a dopamine hit. That's ultimately what it is. Justin Bieber, he took a couple of years off from social media and from posting and making music because his mind got so mixed up with dopamine and serotonin and all the different chemicals in his brain from touring the world.
He would go on stage in front of 30 or 40,000 people and he wouldn't feel anything because he became so used to it. We are human. We are human, and humans are not meant to be praised. Humans are not meant to be followed. They're not meant to be looked at as gods or idols in this particular regard. But we are living in the time where that is necessary if you want to become somebody who's above average and somebody who's great. So Justin Bieber, in this docu series that was on YouTube, I wanted to watch [it] because I learn from study. I like studying other people and their journeys and their processes.
But he had to take a break and get his chemicals and his brain realigned, so now he can actually enjoy things again. There's a dangerous aspect of doing this. I'm not going to lie to you.
This is why I'm even talking about it in the first place, to share some experience with you. Guys, you've got to be careful in the way that you're building this, to where you're not living so much on social media that you're not living in real life. That is something I ended up doing, and it's taken me a very long amount of time to start living in the real world again, just because my business is online, my brand is online. You know, my brand is also offline, don't get me wrong. Like your personal brand should not be stuck to just a virtual reality. It should also be in real life, like go out and network with people.
But because I was traveling so much, I didn't really see the point of starting to network and go out and meet a bunch of people only for me to leave a couple months later and travel and move to a different place. I've lived in like three different places in the past year and a half. And with covid, whenever I would have gone out and networked, that kind of slapped me in the face, like, I can't go out. So instead of going out and networking, you pivot. You focus a hundred percent on social media. But guys, going back to the business aspect, you've got to fall in love with establishing relationships and networking with people.
You have to fall in love with talking to other people and giving up a little bit of your privacy, giving up a little bit of your life or the privacy of your life and of your routine to share with other people. Be safe about it. Be cautious about what you're doing. But at the same time, others want to engage with you. They want to learn more about you. They want to feel connected with you. You can connect with somebody emotionally and mentally on a deep level, not as deep as you could in person. But you could really engage with somebody and establish a strong connection through social media and through talking and through FaceTime and through sharing experiences through talking, I said that twice, but through just having a one-on-one relationship.
I'm not saying you have to talk to every single person and go out of your way to spend 30 minutes every day to talk to everybody and get to know what their dog's name is, what cat they had when they were a kid, where they grew up, like all of that crap. But what I am saying is show that you care. Then if you show that you care, other people will show you that they care because they'll engage with your content. They'll follow you more. They'll go and look at your highlights. They're going to live for your stories. They're going to live for your posts.
They're going to get value from your content and they're going to start sharing who you are with other people. But the one difference between doing the methodology that I'm telling you to do versus what a lot of people online are doing is that most people are using other people and looking at them like they're just numbers. It's just another number. They're not a real person, and it's just that temporary dopamine hit. That's the wrong way of viewing it. The other way that people are viewing it is as, okay, well, the only reason I'm even building this brand is to base it around my business, and I'm only going to talk about my business. People don't want to only hear about your business.
They want to know who you are. If you establish this high level of trust and this high reputation for yourself to where just because you are somebody, your name is Isaac Mashman, somebody is going to want to work with you, or just because you are Johnny Cash, somebody's going to work with you, that's what you're working towards. You're working towards being, I'll use an example of a friend of mine. He's an artist, [Nest Julius]. Just because you are the artist [Nest Julius], people are going to want to fuck with you. That's how it is. It's like you being the popular kid in school, but do this with a level of self-awareness to where you know that you are not doing this to abuse your power. That Spider-Man quote, with great power comes great responsibility.
I think that's how it is. That is the truth. That is the God-honest truth. It's something that we need to see more of because I feel like a lot of people get the taste of success. They get the taste of clout. They get the taste of having money or having people follow them or walking in the mall and having somebody come up to them and recognize them, and it gets to their head. Then they turn into just cocky people who just think that they're better than everybody. Ultimately guys, these celebrities we follow and these people who we associate with are just normal people who, through the internet or through their careers, became successful and popular and well known, and who we for some reason view as idols. They're normal people.
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Talk to these people, share some of your struggles. This is part of the reason why I am open to sharing my struggles, where I came from, what I came from, because it is establishing an emotional connection. I'm able to relate with you guys. You are able to relate with me. That is how you become friends with somebody. You become friends by having common ground. You're not friends with somebody that you don't have any shared interests with. No. You aren't friends with, like, let's say you have somebody who is the complete opposite of you. Chances are you're not going to be friends with them. You're going to be friends with people who you are similar to or who you can talk with, who you can joke with. That's why, I remember, I had to cut off so many friends because they had interests and things that I didn't have interest in.
I love video games, but I wasn't into what they were into. I wasn't into the whole comic books thing. I wasn't into all that other stuff. I was into my own little avenue of personal interest. So I found friends who I could talk to about the things that really interested me and interested them. If you're able to take your social media presence and your personal brand and establish friendships with every single person and leave an impression of increase, of being somebody who is going to be encouraging this person, who's going to be inspiring this person, who's going to be helping them or giving them a form of entertainment, giving them maybe a free ebook or a free video course or a free whatever it is that is going to leave that person better off than they were before they met you.
That's what this is all about. If you just rinse, wash, and repeat this over and over and over again, you're going to establish a high level of momentum. I know a lot of people say that growing on Instagram or growing on social media is difficult. They're like, I just, I don't have the numbers. I'm discouraged about it. I can't get people to know me. Okay, think about this for a second. Imagine if you sent three direct messages to [random strangers] who are in your city every single day for an entire month. That's 90 new connections. 90 might not seem like a lot of people in the grand scheme of social media, but I want you to understand that 90 people would pack out a hotel room.
What I mean by a hotel room is like a convention room. Let's say you're having a hotel event, 90 people would fill that up. 90, that's a lot of people.
Don't let social media's numbers, and how we view numbers online, change the way that you view individuals. Like one person is still one person who has their own life. It's like when you're driving on a highway, you've got to realize that every single car that is passing you, that is in front of you, that is behind you, those people in that car have their own lives, they're going to their own jobs, they have their own hustles, they have their own families, they have their own dreams, they have their own visions, they're real freaking people. Like I have to remind myself, and I'm like, Isaac, man, I've got 10,000 people on Twitter who know my name, who know who I am. That would fill up a small stadium, literally, and I am mind blown.
Don't let somebody who has a million followers make you feel small. I'm not saying that numbers aren't important because they are, but at the same time, treat every single individual, no matter how successful you get, no matter how big you get as a real person, and show that you're interested in them. They will only show you that love and that reciprocity back if you give in the first place. You might have to give before you can expect to receive. Even if you're a musician and you put out a song, you're still giving somebody something, and then they'll give you something back if they like what you give.
It's like you're giving gifts to other people. Like you're giving, it's an exchange. It's a barter. You're bartering a song and they're giving you their time and their support.
You're bartering a service and they're giving you money back. Don't build it just based around what you do though. Like base it around your personality and who you are. That's how you're going to have a very, very strong personal brand. One that lasts for a long time. I've got my eyes on a couple of different people right now on social media who have built personal brands over the past couple of years. I'm just paying attention. I'm curious to know if they're actually going to have longevity and long-term success or if it was a short span of a couple of years and they'll be in and out and they'll fall off.
But an example of somebody who has based their brand around their personality and not their career is the Rock. You know who Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is.
You don't know him for just one specific area and one specific thing. You know him for his personality, his looks. He's a gigantic dude who's ripped. He has a lot of muscles, he has tattoos, he has a pearly white smile, and he's bald. You know the Rock for who he is. You don't know him for just WWE. You don't know him just as an entrepreneur or as an investor. You don't know him just for Teremana Tequila. You don't know him just for acting in movies. No, you know him for a variety of different things, but at the core, you know him for who he is, and that's why he's had a successful career. He is somebody you can relate to. If you go to a social media page, you are able to relate to them.
The people who are most relatable are the people who have the most success. There are some people who might be exceptions. You can't relate to the Kardashians, but they're super successful. I think that the reason they're successful is mainly because they show and flaunt the life that they have that most people desire but feel like they cannot obtain. I'm here to tell you that you can have that level of success if you work hard enough and if you are smart enough about what you do. Don't feel that somebody, just because they have the number, just because they have the dollar sign and their bank account, is any better than you.
But with that thinking, just know that you are not better than anybody else. You're just working to become somebody who's great. That doesn't mean that you are not human, because you are.
Go into this with a level of humility, but also with a level of pride. Go into this with a level of confidence. Go into this with a level of understanding of why you're doing this and what you're doing this for. Guys, you've got the world at your fingertips. I'm not some motivational freaking spiritual guru, none of that crap, but I'm being dead ass honest with you when I say that we can have everything that we really want. I've done everything that I've been able to do. I've traveled more than anybody in my family in the past couple of years. Yes, I've had help along the way.
I've [met] a lot of amazing people, but at the same time, I've been able to do a lot of these things with a lot of different struggles and a lot of pressure on me mentally and emotionally.
So I just know that what else is possible is beyond my wildest imagination. I've seen a lot of people who have a lot of talent who just lack that confidence and who lack the tools. If you lack the tools, you go out and buy the tools. You go out and find the tools. You ask and find somebody who has what you need. Then you work with them and then you go to the top. That's the importance of having a mentor. You won't have all the experience. You won't have all the knowledge. So you find somebody who does, who you could go and get underneath their wing or who you can study.
Most all of my mentors are virtual. Most all the people I study, most everything that I learned has been through the internet. It's been through listening to podcasts. I did a tweet the other day and people wanted to argue this point. This was the tweet, actually. I said, you should spend more time listening to podcasts and personal development than you should be listening to music. I had people trying to argue the point. I had musicians trying to say, well, I need to listen to music. Yes, you need to listen to music. But if you are not growing as an individual, then how do you expect your career to grow as a musician?
You see what I'm getting at, guys? At the center of all success is personal growth and personal growth directly correlates with personality. If you have a good personality, if you have a personality to where no matter what goes on in your life, you know that you're okay and that you will be okay, other people will be drawn to you. You'll have that magnetic aura about you, that magnetic aspect to where people just can't get enough of you. You walk into a room and all the energy goes to you because you're somebody who's doing great things, who other people know, if they follow and learn from you, they're going to be on the same and right path.
Be a leader. Take the path that is less taken: the path of leadership, the path of business, the path of becoming somebody who isn't taking the traditional route. It is scary. It is hard.
It is not easy. It is something that will give you times of loneliness. It'll give you times of stress and anxiety and confusion and, I don't know if I should do this, but trust me, guys, at the end of the day it will pay off. This is what I am working towards every single day, and this is what I know you should be, and desire to be, working towards as well. That being said, guys, share this episode with a friend of yours. If you got any ounce of value, share it with your brother, your aunt, your fiance, your girlfriend, boyfriend, whoever it might be. If you got value from it, go ahead and make sure that another person will also have the opportunity to get as much value. That being said, follow me on all social media at @isaacmashman, and go to my website, isaacmashman.com.
If you want to learn more about personal branding (this is the last episode on personal branding I will be doing for probably a month or two), go ahead and shoot me a DM. Let's talk. I'll sit down with you, figure out what your goals are, what your aspirations are, and we can see about really helping you get on the right track. Have a great day, and just know that the world is literally at your fingertips.