The “Me” Disease: Why Personal Branding Is A Lie (And How Some Of The Smartest People In Business Fell For It)

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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and fellow Pirate,

In 1997, entrepreneur, acclaimed author and founder of Skunkworks, Inc., Tom Peters, wrote a column for FastCompany’s print magazine.

The title of the article was, “The Brand Called You.”

This may very well be the first mention of “personal branding,” as Peters explains we now live (starting in the late ‘90s) in a world of brands: “That cross-trainer you’re wearing—one look at the distinctive swoosh on the side tells everyone who’s got you branded. That coffee travel mug you’re carrying—ah, you’re a Starbucks woman! Your T-shirt with the distinctive Champion ‘C’ on the sleeve, the blue jeans with the prominent Levi’s rivets, the watch with the hey-this-certifies-I-made-it icon on the face, your fountain pen with the maker’s symbol crafted into the end… You’re branded, branded, branded, branded.”

The solution?

According to Peters, the answer was to fight branding with branding; to stand out in a sea of brands with a brand of your own; to scream, shout, and proclaim yourself to be heard irrespective of message; shouting as both the means and the end and, well, let’s look where that’s gotten us 25 years later.

Personal Branding Today

A quick search on Instagram for the term “personal branding” yields 1.7 million search results. 

Within that search you will find an army of personal branding experts, coaches, “influencers” and agencies, all determined to help you be bigger and better and louder than you were yesterday. In fact, personal branding has become so widespread there are even personal branding experts and agencies who specialize in not just “personal branding” (that’s so yesterday) but “authentic” personal branding. (Have you ever noticed that the people who overuse the word “authentic” are often the least authentic people?) As if, within the category of you being you bigger and better than everyone else, there is a truthful and honest way of being “you,” which is different from the inauthentic way of being you, at scale, on the Internet.

There’s just one irony, and it’s a big one.

If Tom Peters believed, in almost nostradamus-like fashion, that personal branding would become as important to our society as almond milk, athleisure clothing, and working from home, then how come the very people carrying the flag and rallying the troops in the name of differentiation suck at differentiating themselves?

Here’s a case-in-point example.

“You are going to learn all the essentials leaders need to develop but don’t take the time to do. You will learn how to build a month by month plan, and build your personal brand with intentionality, authenticity, and results. The way you cut through the noise today is with a crystal clear brand story that rallies, galvanizes, and inspires the masses.”

Can you name who said this?

If the answer that comes to mind is, “No, that literally sounds like every single person preaching personal branding advice on Instagram or LinkedIn,” you’re right. Because that’s not the message of one person, known for a category or niche they own. That’s the message of Tom Peters, way back from 1997, copy/pasted by 1.7 million people who proclaim themselves to be “personal branding experts.” 

The same way companies fell for The Big Brand Lie, good-hearted, well-intentioned human beings fell for The Big Personal Branding Lie.

And it has become a pandemic.

A Brief History Of Personal Branding

Back in 2012, when Pirate Cole was just a young swashbuckler fresh out of college, he started working as an entry-level copywriter at an advertising agency downtown Chicago.

2012 was an interesting year for advertising and marketing. It was the year Instagram had reached the masses and been acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, which for the first time moved social media from people’s desktop computers into their pockets. Suddenly, social media wasn’t that thing you interacted with after a social event (uploading photos from last night’s party to Facebook). Social media was something you interacted with during a social event—and eventually, any event—through your phone. (And then social media became the main reason for having an event or experience….”If it’s not on Insta, then it didn’t happen...LOL.”)

As a result, everything (in the entire world) became “content”:

• Eggs for breakfast? Content.

• Out for lunch? Content.

• Unique architecture of a building down the street? Content.

• You, looking at yourself in the mirror? Content.

• Cats? Content.

The year was capped off with the “official launch” of Vine, a short-form video app that allowed users to create and share 6-second videos. The app had been originally soft-launched in June, 2012, before being acquired by Twitter just 4 months later (after seeing such rampant early user growth). The app, despite growing to more than 200 million users by the end of 2015 and being shut down a year later (2016), would go on to shape a handful of massively influential online trends. For example, Vine was the first time social media transformed from text and photos into short-form videos (and was the first time Facebook/Instagram blatantly copied another app’s functionality). And Vine gave rise to an entire cohort of social media influencers that would go on to dominate just about every other social platform, including: King Batch, Logan Paul, Jake Paul, Amanda Cerny, to name a few. These “influencers” wrote the playbook for how to build massive audiences and then leverage those audiences into five, six, and even seven-figure brand advertising deals.

Pirate Cole remembers this time well because, as a 23-year-old and the youngest employee at the digital agency where he worked, Pirate Cole built the company’s “influencer” department, helping national brands utilize professional mobile-first photography and short-form social video to deploy social media campaigns. And a few years later, in 2016, right before leaving the agency to become an entrepreneur, he launched the company’s personal branding department—something very few advertising and marketing agencies even had on their radars.

It was between this window of time, 2012 to 2016, that terms like “influencer marketing,” “personal branding,” and “vlogging” started to go mainstream. In 2014, wine entrepreneur turned advertising executive, Gary Vaynerchuk, launched his YouTube series, #AskGaryVee, and just 4 episodes in, he began preaching the importance of personal branding (this was the very beginning of Gary Vee-D... a digital transmitted disease). A year later, Tai Lopez’s infamous ad, “Here in my garage,” went viral, igniting an entire generation of “I-will-reach-you-how-to-be-rich” online gurus standing in front of lamborghinis and whiteboards explaining some simple 3-step process to financial freedom. 

Now, back then, much in the same way companies talk about “digital transformation” today, this idea of “putting yourself out there on the Internet” was a powerful differentiator. If 99.8% of people exclusively operated in the analog world, and you were courageous enough to turn on the camera and share what you knew, at scale in the digital world, that was akin to using email instead of sending physical mail—or today, minting digital art on the blockchain opposed to selling physical art in a showroom. The simple fact that you were using technology and being a “creator,” not just a consumer of social media, meant you were part of the top 1%.

But the Gary Vaynerchuk’s and Tai Lopez’s of the world took things one step further: it wasn’t enough to just “put yourself out there.” You had to put yourself out there relentlessly (or, in the words of another personal branding hustle pornstar, Grant Cardone, “Be obsessed or be average”). And millions drank the Kool-Aid. Today, you can’t go anywhere on the Internet without seeing the Gary Vee-D “how to turn 1 keynote speech into 30+ pieces of content” model being deployed by everyone from podcast hosts to life coaches to nutritionists to CEOs of 8, 9, even 10-figure businesses. 

In less than 20 years, Tom Peters’ idea of being a Brand Called You had mutated with mobile phones and social media to create a generation-defining aspiration and obsession: “Pay attention to me, everywhere, all the time.”

The “Me” Disease

A recent study revealed that 75% of children ages 6 to 17 want to become YouTubers when they grow up.

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