Don’t build a brand. Live a life.

Advice about personal branding has become far too formulaic. Just scroll through social media and take a look — You’ll find advice copying advice copying advice.

I’m afraid we’ve lost sight of what it means to actually create personal brands for ourselves.

You’re probably familiar with the top tips — get a professional headshot, write the perfect bio, share strong opinions, be controversial, go viral, yada yada.

Yes, some of those tips are helpful. But I think most people are approaching the whole personal branding process backward. They study what others have done, copy their formats, and attempt to reverse engineer someone else’s success.

The result is what we see across social media these days — thousands of copy-and-paste profiles parroting the same recycled ideas.

Why Most People Get It Wrong

The problem isn't the advice itself. Of course it’s important to have a nice headshot, a strong bio, opinions, and to know what great content looks like. Those are the basics, and none of those things are bad.

The problem is that formulas don’t always work. Because you may not have the expertise, luck, or timing of the person you’re copying.

And when you focus on building a personal brand by copying someone else, you're starting with the output instead of the input. You're trying to manufacture an image rather than letting it emerge naturally from your interesting life and experiences, that are unique to you.

A friend of mine has 30,000 followers, and he's never read an article about personal branding. He  shares his extremely contrarian take on life and work, his adventures as an American living in Asia, and his experience writing two self-published books .

People follow this guy because his life is fascinating, not because he followed the perfect brand strategy.

A Different (and Refreshing) Approach

So instead of asking how to build your personal brand, I hope you’ll consider a different angle:

What makes my life interesting?

Or, what could make my life interesting?

This can shift everything when it comes to defining a personal brand that reflects the real you. And instead of spending hours perfecting your headshot and bio, and trying to come up with something controversial to post about, you might actually:

• Start that weird side project you've been thinking about
• Engage in conversations that challenge your thinking
• Learn that one skill that's always intrigued you
• Create something just because it interests you

The irony?

This approach, of living and sharing, will build a stronger following than any branding template.

What Actually Works

My most engaging posts haven’t been the ones where I followed a formula. They've been the ones where I shared real insights and thoughts from experiences in my personal life.

Like the time I paid a guy $130 to move a treadmill and thought about how simple (not easy) blue-collar entrepreneurship is.

And my simple observations about reaching out to people just to say hi, rather than when you need something.

And my contrarian take on building a life and business differently than how most people are building theirs (especially back in 2023).

Or this Tweet about slowing down that came directly from a conversation I was had with my friend Steve Schlafman in Upstate New York. I wrote that down on a napkin and posted it the next morning.

These pieces of content resonated because they came from lived experiences, observations, and conversations. Not because they came from a personal brand playbook.

The Bottom Line

I hope you’ll reconsider what it means to build your personal brand.

Instead of copying and pasting, you can actually build a life that's interesting enough to share and for people to pay attention to. Maybe you already live one and you just need to put it out there more often.

Because the best brands and the best content doesn't come from studying — it comes from living a life worth talking about…and then talking about it!

And the beautiful part?

Even if no one ever follows you, you'll still have built something valuable: a life that interests and excites you. And at the end of all your days, isn’t that all that really matters?

Let’s put the “personal” back in personal branding.

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That's all for this week.

See you next Saturday.