On building your personal brand

Be helpful to others

✨ Hey there this is a free edition of next play’s newsletter, where we share under-the-radar opportunities to help you figure out what’s next in your journey. Join our private Slack community here and access $1000s of dollars of product discounts here.

---

There’s a lot of advice on the internet about how to build your “personal brand.”

I find most of it pretty ineffective. And worse, I think a lot of it advises you to be rather untrustworthy.

The result I think for many people is a lot of wasted time and partially destroyed reputations. It turns out that “Winning Friends and Influencing People,” at least in my opinion, can very easily come across as quite manipulative and disingenuous. And doing that over long periods of time is negative (to yourself and those around you).

I would like to propose an an alternative approach. A way for you to build a “personal brand” that can positively change your life (without compromising your personal integrity).

I think it can be useful for people in the tech world. It can help you find jobs. Build new projects. Hire people. And make new friends.

It’ll sound really simple but here’s the general idea.

Step 1: Be yourself

Step 2: Be helpful to others

And…

That’s it. That’ll be your personal brand.

If you are rolling your eyes thinking “well thanks for the pretty obvious general advice” hold on. I’m about to get into more detail.

Why I’m writing this post is not because I think you have never heard the advice to “be yourself” and that you should consider “being helpful to others.” I am sure you have. Many times.

I would also take the bet, however, that most of you have probably not thought very seriously (or for very long periods of time) of what it means to do those things extremely well. How good are you at helping others? How “yourself” really are you?

I bring this up because I believe that if, after reading this essay, you were to spend an hour thinking deeply about those questions (and perhaps writing out some answers), you could make decisions that would lead to radically better answers than you’re doing currently. And that investment would be well worth your while.

---

On being yourself

The mistake I see people sometimes making is that they try and scale their personal brand before they actually have any idea around who they are and what they want and what is important to them. Sure it’s the sort of thing you figure out over time but imagine how much harder it is to evolve and adapt once you’ve created an audience for yourself. Now you may feel the pressure to act a certain way that’s grounded not in your own beliefs but rather the expectations of others. That’s a recipe that I’ve seen fail many many times.

If I could write a specific formula for figuring out how to be perfectly self-aware, trust me I would. But I don’t believe such a thing exists. Instead, my main guidance here is to try different things and use them all as signals or input into figuring it out for yourself. But at the end of the day, take the extra time to ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing. It’s a small step but can make a big difference. You can do this in your head. You can do this by meditating. Or you can write it down. Or talk about it with others.

So obvious right? So few people actually do this. Instead I think many people are just copying what they see others doing without pausing to reflect on if it makes sense for themselves.

You can take this further. You could pause now and answer some questions for yourself:

• What do you think is important? Why?

• Who do you find impressive? Why?

• What does the world need now? Why?

Those are intentionally vague and broad. Try answering them by writing them out. There’s no right answer. And your answers can be temporary of course. But even thinking about these things once a week and revisiting them often can help you sharpen your mentality.

Also note that “understanding yourself” is not a one-time exercise but rather a life-long journey. Something that’ll evolve and change over time.

Being helpful to others

Once you feel like you have a better grip of your own opinions, the next thing I suggest doing is simply helping others. I think it’s one of the best ways to build a strong flywheel for your personal brand.

This can take many forms, as I’ll document below, but starting from this place I think can really set you up for success.

The alternative would be to start from a place of how do you capture as much as value as possible. I think this approach is short-sighted and misses out on the bigger picture. Leading from a place of how do I help others in one way or another can really help you with your own personal brand.

We wrote a whole essay about this so if you want a deeper dive feel free to explore it here:

Ways to actually be helpful to others

The summary I’ll give you, though, is pretty straightforward. We basically make the case that helping others is not as hard as you may think. And the returns come in the short and long-term in all sorts of ways. We also put together some ideas you. can use to actually practice being more helpful to others, but invite you to try and come up with your own.

---

Now if you want some specific ideas you could use today that would lead to what I think would be an interesting personal brand, here are some:

• Always send physical thank you notes/letters.

• Create a food review youtube channel focused on reviewing the food at different tech startups.

• Survey your friends or people all the time by asking interesting questions and share the findings.

• Create a book but make the books very rare.

• Write a book where you interview the parents of very successful people and ask them how they think about parenting and what their childhoods were like.

• Create a daily blog where you interview a stranger every day. Commit to doing this for 365 days.

• Build a blog where you review new consumer software companies. Here’s a guide to writing frictionlogs that you could follow.

• Create a video series where you do a sort of MTV style cribs but for tech companies.

• Become known as an expert in a growing niche. Do this by building a community and helping others. For example FDE.

• Design a museum of tech company swag/clothing/merch. Can be physical or virtual.

---

Thanks for reading! What did you think of the essay? Let us know: hi@nextplay.so.

If you have a moment please upvote and share with your friends.