Personal Branding Without Being a Douche

Very true: "You have to stand up for yourself and sometimes that means being a bit more aggressive than you normally are. This is the way of the world."

No that's the author of 100-Hour Body (definitely not my opinion of worthwhile literature), right? But I think I understand why you'd have that impression. This kind of "personal branding" definitely has a similar taste to that kind of ethos. Although I don't think it's fair to necessarily opine on this particular blog post, there's nothing abjectly wrong with it, by the same token it does seem a little off for HN. Still, if your goal is to build a brand so that you can sustain yourself, maybe it's not such a bad thing. Approach is definitely important though...

Edit: apologies, the author of this article and the referenced are one in the same, according to the author. My mistake!

Yeah that's me. =) Do you have any thoughts on those posts?

Thanks for the advice. I recognize that not everyone will jive with my style or choice of words, but similar to Zach Holman's use of swear words, I chose to pick the word that I feel works best.

I think most people are familiar with the term "douche" or "douchebag" and that it's usage is similar to "bastard" -- very far removed from the original meaning. I certainly don't mean to offend anyone but like I mention with the case study of Amit - it's pretty much impossible to please everyone.

Interesting -- this goes straight to some concerns I had about Zach's whole 'brand' and 'persona' response to the (overblown) controversy on swearing. I agree with most of what Jason says here.

But I still have an issue with the notion of my character and reputation being tied to the language of 'brand'. I think it cedes too much ground to the encroachment of marketing into some of the essential parts of human interaction, reducing what we present and edit of ourselves to mere marketing.

Contrast with _why. Here's a guy who clearly edited himself in a radical way, created a persona, built a following, but it would be hard for me to see _why as a 'brand', because the content of his persona was focused on creativity and his contributions to the community, not his marketability.

I totally get that we're all always editing ourselves to present a certain point of view of who we are, from the profile pics we use on Twitter/FB/LinkedIn, to the style we use in our tweets, speeches, presentations, etc. -- it's impossible to eliminate that from our interactions publicly and online.

But do we have to concede that much ground to the business side of things that we call it "branding"? I hope we have different ways of tying our public selves to a kind of integrity that goes beyond the ethics of commerce, to something deeper.

Commerce is such a powerful force in our everyday lives anyway, can we find a broader language to describe this process than something that tends to reduce us to products?