When Personal Branding Starts Editing the Human Out

Nearby our building is a small local market.

It isn’t optimized for polish or aesthetics. It isn’t designed to make you feel like you’ve entered a lifestyle experience. It’s just a real market where people from all walks of life come together to buy what they need.

It’s far from the typical Costco or warehouse grocery where everything comes in bulk, and equally far from the polished supermarket experience where somehow the lighting, packaging, location, branding, and perfectly arranged produce all seem to find their way into the price.

This market is optimized for something much more practical: accessibility.

You can buy a little of this, a little of that, enough to get through dinner or the next day without committing to an entire week’s worth of groceries.

I started going there because lately I’ve been craving places where I’m not being charged an aesthetic tax just for existing inside them.

But I think there’s another reason I keep going back.

People there aren’t performing themselves for an audience.

And after spending so much of the last several years living virtually, I had forgotten how refreshing that feels.

I live and breathe Zoom meetings. I work online. I market online. I meet clients online. I publish online. I observe and study how people show up online for marketing.

And somewhere along the way, everyone online learned how to become a brand.

We optimize our language, curate our values, package our struggles, turn lessons into content and position our opinions. We’re encouraged to be visible, consistent, memorable, differentiated.

Even authenticity has somehow become something we strategically manufacture.

And at some point, the person starts disappearing behind the brand.

There are now so many invisible rules around being a person in public.

Work hard and someone calls it hustle culture. Encourage people and it becomes toxic positivity. Slow down and somebody calls it quiet quitting. Say something imperfectly or use the wrong tone and an awkward sentence can suddenly become evidence of your entire worldview.

Make a mistake publicly and the downfall machine comes alive.

Reaction videos. Reddit threads. Screenshots. Rumors. People who have never met you constructing an entire theory about who you are from fragments of your public life.

Some criticism is deserved, of course. People hurt people. Businesses behave badly. Public ideas should be challenged.

But there is something strange about an internet culture that rewards us for building increasingly polished versions of ourselves and then rewards everybody else when the polish cracks.

AI did not create this, but it has accelerated it.

Now almost anyone can produce polished, strategically positioned content faster than ever before. There are endless hooks, endless frameworks, endless thought leadership, endless carefully worded opinions.

And sometimes it feels like the internet is becoming full of idealized versions of people speaking to other idealized versions of people.

I don’t think I’m tired of people. I think I’m tired of people as content.

Maybe that’s why walking around a talipapa feels so refreshing.

The transaction is wonderfully ordinary.

Someone has something. Someone else wants it. Money changes hands.

Nobody needs to establish thought leadership before selling you lunch. Nobody has to explain their personal philosophy before handing you a bag of bread.

The vendor can be having a shitty day. The customer can be impatient. Someone can laugh too loudly. Someone can complain. Someone can be generous one minute and irritated the next.

People get to be inconsistent because people are inconsistent.

They’re just human.

And I think I miss that.

Last week, I didn’t get to record my podcast, but I attended a live meetup for podcasters instead.

I thought it was going to be more of a virtual meet-and-greet, people who make shows talking about what they’re making, why they’re making it, maybe exchanging ideas.

But it was more of an “ask a producer” kind of session, where people brought questions and got answers about production, structure, and how to make a podcast better.

At some point, the conversation turned toward how polished a podcast should be.

Production. Presentation. Getting everything just right.

And I remember sitting there thinking:

Oh. That’s not what I want.

(and then I spent the entire weekend overthinking about it).

I don’t want another perfectly packaged performance of myself. I don’t want to remove every pause, every rough edge, every laugh, every moment where I change my mind halfway through a sentence until the final product resembles a human being who never actually existed.

I want good work. I care deeply about quality.

But quality and polish are not always the same thing.

Sometimes polish makes something better. Sometimes polish removes the very thing that made it worth listening to.

I have a lot of rough (fun) edges. I hope some of them are what make me interesting.

I love business, strategy, technology, media, how people make money, systems, ideas, growth, and figuring out why people behave the way they do.

I just don’t want to keep packaging all of that into one narrow, perfectly positioned version of myself because somebody somewhere decided that is how you build a personal brand.

And that’s the irony.

Personal branding, despite how neatly we package it, is supposed to be human.

When large companies work on their brands, one of the things they often try desperately to do is humanize them. Give the corporation a voice. A personality. A point of view. Something people can relate to.

Yet somewhere along the way, personal branding started moving in the opposite direction.

Actual people began polishing themselves until they sounded like companies.

And now AI can help us polish that process even further. I mean, I literally used ChatGPT to clean up the grammar and sentence construction in this newsletter.

That contradiction fascinates me.

I love building personal brand websites for clients. I love helping someone organize their expertise, find the throughline in their work, and present it in a way that helps other people understand why they should listen. Establish thought leadership through content marketing.

I believe deeply in that work.

But when it comes to myself, I’ve always felt slightly different about it.

Maybe I don’t need to become a perfectly packaged personal brand. God knows my thoughts refuse to be curated.

Maybe I can simply be a person with a body of work.

A person who builds things, changes her mind, notices things, and sometimes, overreacts.

A person who can talk about AI one week, funnels the next, money after that, and something completely different when it becomes impossible not to think about.

If we’ve worked together before, you probably already know that this is how I show up on Zoom too.

Professionalism matters to me. Good work matters to me. Being prepared matters to me.

But professionalism and performance are not the same thing.

All of my clients are physically very far away from me (halfway around the world*). Our relationship exists through screens, messages, files, and calls. Sometimes that distance matters. Most of the time it doesn’t.

And sometimes the only way I know how to remind someone that there is an actual human being on the other side of that screen is to let myself be one.

Imperfectly.

Maybe the internet did not make us less human. Maybe it just made us extraordinarily good at editing the human out.

I think I want some of it back.

The flaws. The contradictions. The awkwardness. The ordinary transactions. The conversations that were not engineered for engagement. The things people say before they’ve figured out how to turn them into a lesson.

The real humanity of it.

AI is creating a virtual world around us through algorithms and machine learning. And maybe one of the few things left that makes us unmistakably us is our unique voice.

The nuance. The rough edges. The contradictions. The stories behind the scenes.

The things that are harder to optimize because they were never meant to be optimized in the first place.

And maybe that is what I want me to be too.

Not another polished presentation of expertise.

Just a person who builds things, notices things, changes her mind, and has a body of work that reflects all of it.

Messy, interesting, contradictory, alive.