Personal Branding; Fact or Myth?
Host: Isaac Mashman · September 1, 2021 · Episode 77 · 10 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, yo, yo, what is going on, everybody? Isaac Mashman here. Welcome back for another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the show that is all about helping you become a more capable individual, therefore getting better results in your own individual lives, businesses and careers. Now, today I'm doing an episode on a Wednesday. So we had episode 76, "Keep Up or Get Left Behind," that came out on Monday, the episode today, and the Friday interview coming up as well with Tristan Roberts, which I'm super excited for. I decided to record an episode midweek partly because I think I need to go harder with the podcast, and this is me being vulnerable with you.
I believe that in order to continue this momentum, to reach more people, to share more messages, I've got to put in more work, and I have to make more content for you guys to enjoy, listen to, be entertained by and ultimately share and get value from, because after all, that is the only fee that I'm ever going to ask you to pay, and that is to pay it forward.
If I'm providing you with value, share that value with a friend, a business partner, a family member, somebody in your life who you know can also get the value. So today I'm going to be talking about personal branding, a topic that I absolutely love talking about because, well, I got into the business of personal branding. [I'm not here] to sell you in this episode, but I am here to discuss the concept of building your personal brand. Is it truly something that exists, or is personal branding more so a myth? Is it something that is made up? Is it something that is fabricated? I made a post today on Facebook, as I do pretty much once every couple of weeks. I'll do a post that says, hey, what do you need help with on your personal brand?
The purpose of this post is to get insights into what people are struggling with, what I could touch on, what points I could discuss, and then to also see if anybody who's making a comment could potentially need to work with Mashman Ventures, if I can help them, if we could help them get results. So somebody, and he was the first person to comment on the post, and I'm not disclosing his name, though if you go to the post, you could find out who it is. He seems like a great guy, but he says that personal branding is a myth, that it's something that doesn't exist and is done out of a place of ego.
I had a rebuttal, and I said, well, why is there this conception that if you're building out your personal brand, it's not authentic, and that you're building it out of a place of ego? Why do you have to be coming from that place? You have the ego, the superego and the id, going back to English studies. If you ever took that course in high school or college, they talked about the superego and the ego and the id, which one is doing it for you, which one's doing it for other people, and then which one is basing things off of logic. I started thinking about it.
Then he commented back, and he's like, you're not being authentic if you're purposely building your personal brand. What he was getting at is, if you're going to be building your personal brand around somebody [else] or making it out to be better than you actually are, then you could in a sense be inauthentic, and yes, I have to agree with that. However, if you're building yourself into that character, and you're actually doing action steps every single day that are the equivalent of what you're posting about online, then that means that that is your highest self.
That means that that is your highest level of authenticity, because you're actually taking the steps to talk about the things that you're actively pursuing and doing every single day. Then I said, if it was only a concept, then how were pharaohs able to stay in control of ancient Egypt for hundreds of years, for generations, and be able to build pyramids and sphinxes and [harness] the Nile and build out a fertile civilization, one of the greatest civilizations, one that we're still [unearthing] and discovering new things about each and every year? Christianity was built off of the back of Jesus' personal brand. Now, I'm not saying this in a sacrilegious way, but if you look at what has kept the gospel and Christianity going, it is Jesus' personal brand, this idea that Jesus was a perfect human being.
He was half man, he was half God. Therefore, he had a very strong personal brand, and people followed him for who he was and his direct relationship with God. Now, I'm not here to say, hey, choose this religion or that religion. But Christianity is, I believe, the largest religion in the world, with over a billion people practicing it. Islam had a lot to do with Muhammad, the prophet Muhammad's personal brand. Then we talk about the monarchs in ancient Britain and the old days in Scotland and the Nordic countries. These people maintained control because they made it out to be their personal brand that they were direct descendants of God, and that meant that they had holy blood and they had to keep that blood pure, which is why they married other kings and queens and they married within rather than marrying outwardly.
Now, if the people understood what the kings and queens and the monarchs were doing, and understood that they are normal people, then they could have easily overthrown the governments. That's why coups have happened over the past thousands of years, because ultimately you get sick and tired of being controlled and told what to do, the taxes are too high, and the rules don't make any sense.
But because of the halo effect, the people perceived them as these god-rulers, these figures of authority that were greater than that. I discussed the halo effect in, I believe, episode 44. It was "Is Everybody Equal," because that effect has continued over the past 10, 20 years. It's something that has continued since practically the beginning of civilization. If personal branding was a myth, then that would mean that presidents, senators, congressmen, and all of the people we look up to, celebrities and people in Hollywood, aren't true. That means that they aren't people. That means that their personal brand has no weight. That means that even though Michael Jordan could sign any piece of memorabilia in his house and sell it for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, personal branding just isn't there.
It's not there. I couldn't disagree with that idea and that claim any more. That is one of the things that I disagree with more than ever now. Personal branding is a concept. It is not some firm thing written in pen and paper. It's not an object. It is a concept. It is a series of beliefs. It is a psychological effect that takes place. You are building your personal brand to be this public figure, to be this celebrity figure or this authoritative expert that has people following you. So it is a concept, but it is by no means a myth. If you're talking about a myth, you think about things that do not exist, that were stories passed down orally for hundreds of years: Greek mythology, Nordic mythology, the Loch Ness Monster, these different stories that were told in the ancient world.
There's a show called MythBusters. Hey, is this real or is this fake? They would test if this myth was real, and then if it was plausible, or if it was actually just a myth. Personal branding, I can assure you, is more than just a myth. It is a concept that, when understood and when properly leveraged and directed, has the ability to direct nations. It has the ability to change the entire landscape of the world and of the earth. It also has the ability to obtain riches and wealth and have massive influence and point people and civilizations towards movements and causes that you believe in and that you think matter.
Personal branding is something that is at the center of our civilization. We elect presidents, we elect politicians, we have business people, we have CEOs of companies and corporations that people elect and bring in on purpose because of their personal brand.
Just because you're building out your personal branding, making the conscious decisions every single day to do so does not mean that you're inauthentic. I believe that if you were to say that personal branding is not in existence, and that it's fake and it is a myth like you claim, you are leaving a lot on the table and you're shooting yourself in the foot. You're preventing yourself from really recognizing its true potential and attracting more of the things to you and to your life through your personal brand, through the means of organic and attraction marketing, which means that you are not going to be getting to your goals as quickly as you potentially could.
It means that you are going to be in your own way. Building your personal brand has very few cons, and to say that it does not exist in 2021, in the age of influencers and [social media] and all this other stuff, is to basically be lying to yourself in the mirror.