The ABC of personal branding

Days ago, on a private conversation, a LinkedIn friend of mine told me “you are the best game design influencer that I know”. I am thankful for that comment, also if I don’t consider myself an influencer. I prefer to use the term communicator.

I hold another interesting discussion on “personal branding” which together with that happening made me think… I don’t really believe in “personal branding”, and being an influencer, and stuff like that.

Branding is something manufactured, the risk with thinking in myself as a brand is to start perceive myself as a commodity, somehow.

I believe in ABC: acknowledgement, body of work, and character. I think I work a lot on that, more than branding.

And I worked it CBA:

1. Character building: this is something personal, everyone tackles this in a different ways and I cannot teach anyone how to do that. I can share one of my character built feature: I deliver, no matter what. I don’t say “I cannot do that in such a small time”. Of course, according to the time I can deliver something more or less detailed. But that’s on you that gave me that time, everything is pretty transparent. I wasn’t like that before had to build that. And that is just one thing among multiples.

2. Body of work: you will become better at the things you practice more often, simple as that. Many years ago, I decided to stop focusing on look for a job in games and started just practicing game design, every single day. Also small things, like listening to a podcast and taking notes, sketching my ways of working. Consistently I developed my body of work. Today I see something from my past and it’s so bad that I notice my progress and I am happy. Plus, thanks to these scrappy spreadsheets, today I have my personal way that brings me income.

3. Acknowledgement: this comes only as a consequence of C and B, you need to find your people. Campfires are better than social networks. A campfire is a group of few people, it can be a reddit group or a slack channel. Interact with like minded people, find people to admire and listen listen listen. And send DMs to listen more. On the other end, you need to work on something. And on that point especially nowadays I cannot teach anything, it’s so hard. But I can say that if you have a job and tomorrow lose it, consider the juggler metaphor, from Seth Godin.

Juggler metaphor: manies believe that the secret of a juggler is the catch. Truth is, the secret is the throw!

Consider each job you had and lost not like you failed a catch. You were learning how to throw better, like a juggler! By flipping your point of view on this (very hard, I still hold consequences of that process), you will get more authority over time.