The internet has turned into a giant mental asylum where everyone is screaming for attention while they have absolutely nothing to say. If you spend five minutes on LinkedIn you will see a thousand people who have convinced themselves that they are thought leaders because they have a ring light and a camera and the ability to type words into a box. It is a mass delusion fueled by a desire to be famous without having to actually be good at anything. Most of what passes for personal branding today is just naked narcissism disguised as professional advice. People are obsessed with the idea of a brand because they are terrified of the idea of being a normal human being who does a normal job. They want to be a presence. They want to be an authority. But they forget that authority is something you earn by being right and by being effective over a long period of time. You don't get to just declare yourself an expert because you decided to post a video of yourself drinking a green juice while talking about your morning habits.
This entire movement is based on the lie that strangers care about you. They do not. They care about their own problems. If your brand is built around your journey, your struggle, and your deep thoughts on leadership, you are talking to a wall. You are giving the person on the other side of the screen no useful reason to stay. People pay for what you can do for them. They do not pay for your personality unless it is tied to a skill that makes them money or removes pain. The personal-brand obsession has pulled too many professionals away from the work itself. They are getting better at Canva graphics and clicky hooks instead of getting better at the craft. It is a race to the bottom where the loudest person wins even if they are full of shit.
AI has made this situation a thousand times worse because now the barrier to entry is completely gone. Anyone with a keyboard can generate a months worth of content in ten minutes. This has led to a flood of generic garbage that is clogging every feed and every inbox. When everyone can be a thought leader the entire concept of a thought leader becomes meaningless. We are reaching a point of total saturation where people are starting to tune out anyone who looks like they are trying to build a brand. The more you try to polish your image the more fake you look. The irony is that the people who are actually successful are usually too busy doing the work to talk about the work. They don't have time to post three times a day about their favorite productivity hacks because they are actually being productive. They aren't trying to be an influencer because they are already an influence in their actual industry.
If you want to actually stand out in this mess you need to stop trying to be a brand and start trying to be useful. You need to provide more value than you take in attention. Too many people have this equation backward. They want the attention first and then they hope to figure out the value later. That is not how it works in the real world. Real brands are built on a foundation of competence and reliability. If you are known as the person who gets things done and who solves the impossible problems then you have a brand whether you have a logo or not. You don't need a clever tagline if your work speaks for itself. The world is starving for people who are actually competent and who aren't trying to sell you something every five seconds. If you can be that person you will win without ever having to use the word brand in a sentence.
You also need to realize that the platforms you are building your brand on do not belong to you. You are a digital sharecropper working for a billionaire who can change the rules at any moment. If you spend three years building an audience on a social media site and they decide to change the algorithm or ban your account you are back at zero. A personal brand built on a social network is a house built on sand. It is a fragile ego project that can be wiped out in an afternoon. If you aren't using that attention to build something that you actually own like a product or a service or a direct relationship with your customers then you are just wasting your life. Stop focusing on the vanity metrics and start focusing on the actual bottom line. Success is measured in dollars and impact not in likes and shares. If you are getting a million views but your bank account is empty then you aren't a brand strategist you are a clown.
The expert grift is the final stage of this nonsense. These are people who have no real world experience but who have decided to teach other people how to be experts. It is a circular economy of bullshit where everyone is selling a course on how to sell a course. They use AI to generate their marketing materials and their curriculum and they hope that nobody notices that they don't actually know anything. They talk about the power of storytelling and the importance of finding your why but they can't tell you how to read a balance sheet or how to manage a project. They are selling a dream to people who are too lazy to do the work. If you find yourself following one of these people you should take a long hard look at what you are doing with your time. You are being scammed by someone who is just as desperate for validation as you are. The only way to build a real reputation is to go out and do something difficult and succeed at it. Everything else is just noise.
AI and Internet / Awareness
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