Burn the brand

I hate the term “brand yourself.”

From the clothes you wear to your social media participation, the idea is that you should make a personal brand out of your identity to maximize your appeal to employers and to people around you. It’s rebirth for the digital age. It sounds like marketing specialists trying to explain why they should be paid for results they can’t quantify.

I get it.

You want employers to judge you from something other than Halloween 2012. That’s not who you really are. But guess what? Having a profile picture that’s you in a suit and a quote from T.S. Eliot is just as much of a lie.

We should not have to frame our interactions in the terms of a contract, providing everyone we meet with an experience.

We’re allowed to do something because we enjoy it or think it’s right. We don’t have to do it because we want some corporate version of ourselves to see rising dividends on our life success stock. Social media is making it harder and harder to hide how stupid people can be. And yes, you shouldn’t post passive-aggressive relationship soliloquies or the photos of you doing body shots in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, but those moments don’t define you as a person.

Nothing defines you but the actions you take from this point on. Not the clothes you wear, not the things you retweet, but what you do.

The truth is, growing up is messy. We have emotions that rip us from euphoria to despair, and in a year we’re ashamed we ever felt that way about something so trivial. We do stupid things to impress the weirdest people. We shouldn’t expect anyone to judge us for that, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of what shaped us, but we should use those experiences to grow as much as possible.

I don’t like the idea of branding because the focus is wrong.

I think if you want to be seen as a better person, you have to earn it by doing better things. If you want to be taken seriously by employers, do something extraordinary.

Don’t craft something that isn’t representative of you as a full, flawed person.Learn from your mistakes, grow and let your actions speak for themselves.

Stop trying to make the best image of yourself, and make the best version of yourself.

­— Stephen Kroll