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 of the day. It's about personal branding and why it consumes personal and physical resources without producing value for anyone. Keep in mind that this opinion is unfounded and that I am stupid.
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 feature 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 America’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.
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 in earlier eras. It’s just that they would’ve lacked the
awareness of something better 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?
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