Personal Value Creation
Inspiration
May 1, 2009
Mike Henry
Operations and IT Consultant
Topics
Accomplishment, Growth, ValueAre you a producer or a consumer? Do you evaluate your own output?
You can read much today about your personal brand. It's no accident. The Internet, rather than revolutionizing marketing, is institutionalizing it. Not only must we market our companies and our products or services, we are each individually something that must be represented, marketed, and even protected. Articles abound on how to create, define, polish and protect your personal brand. You're a product. Let that sink in. And if so, what are the ramifications of that idea? What type of product are you?
Since you are a product, you have consumers. Your family, friends, people in your sphere of influence appreciate you (or not) based on how you affect their life. You may entertain, sustain, or maintain them. You can make them happy, fill them with joy, empower them, enable them, inflate them, provide for them, love them, or cherish them. You can also tear them down, belittle them, irritate them, embarrass them or ridicule them. You are valued based on how you affect others.
Back to your brand, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it won't accomplish much, right. If you're product isn't positive, valuable, regarded well by your consumers, a better website, or a new profile on Facebook won't fix it. Make sure your brand is a reflection of the true product. You will be easier to market because your consumers will appreciate you and help do it for you.
How will your product perform today? How will your consumer's rate you? Will you get positive reviews? Encourage the people around you today. Add value to their lives by providing something that is priceless to them and costs you very little. Add something like an encouraging word or a note. Give someone a call today that you haven't spoken with in ages. Just tell them you appreciate them and you were thinking of them. Thank someone for making a difference in your life. Share an idea or offer to help someone who can't help you back.
Increase your output and increase your value. Exercise your influence (be a leader) and influence someone to be better that they might have otherwise been. Put some air in someone's sails and watch them soar. You can make a difference in the world today! We'll all appreciate it.
I like your “definition” of output – essentially I think you are saying that your output is equal to the impact you have on those you influence. Your product then is reflected in the “eyes of the beholder” so to speak.
Has me thinking… Many people in organizations have learned to “play politics” to portray an image to those above them that will bring favorable consequences. Personal branding or relating to yourself as a product seems to require a more encompassing view of who you are than the traditional top down approach of performance assessment acknowledges. Will that strategy work in the future or will personal branding trump political saavy as the essential skills to being successful in the organizations of the future? How might the way we are evaluated change? Thanks for giving me some food for thought Mike!
Thanks for your comment. You’re perceptive to consider the practice of “playing politics” and the current idea of personal branding. I think people will always be able to be swayed by what they see. Therefore there can always be an element of image management involved in the way people evaluate us. Thanks for the added dimension. We’ll both have to think on this some more.
We used to be considered citizens, not consumers. Or even producers. But equal participants in a democratic society. Now we have to choose between consumers and producers for our identity? Perhaps we are being used by the very technology we thought we could shape?
Rebekah, that’s a very thought-provoking comment. I do believe we’re being used by the very economy and materialistic society we created. Great comment. Thanks.