What "Personal Brand" Lost
A short draft on recovering integrity and self-knowledge from a term that became performance.
Draft essay
This piece is rendered from the launch seed abstract and is clearly marked for Annette's review before publication.
When Thomas and I wrote about personal branding, the phrase had not yet hardened into a costume. It was not a demand to become louder, more visible, or more easily packaged. It was a question of coherence: do the outside signals of a person match the inside truth?
That question has become harder to hear. Much of what now passes for personal brand is performance under commercial pressure. People are asked to behave as content channels before they have been helped to understand what they actually stand for. Visibility arrives before integrity, and the order is wrong.
The useful work is quieter. It begins with self-knowledge, then moves to expression. A personal brand worth having does not invent a person. It gives form to what is already there, so that others can trust it.