In 2019, I sat in The Wormhole Coffee in Chicago—the one with the DeLorean in the back—and spent four hours choosing a hex code for my new blog. I settled on a muted navy because I thought it looked ‘authoritative.’ I bought a $120 WordPress theme. I even commissioned a logo from a guy on Fiverr that looked like a stylized compass. I felt like a founder. I felt like I was finally building something.
I never wrote a single post. Not one. I had the ‘brand,’ but I didn’t have a soul. I was playing house.
Most people I talk to who want to ‘build a personal brand’ are doing the exact same thing. They spend six months obsessing over their LinkedIn banner and their ‘content pillars,’ and then they vanish by month seven. They fail because they’re trying to build a museum before they’ve even made any art. It’s a performance of productivity that masks a total lack of substance. If you’re currently picking out fonts instead of writing your first three thousand words, you’re already dead in the water. You just don’t know it yet.
The part where everyone gets tired and quits
There is a specific window—usually between month four and month six—where the dopamine of ‘starting’ completely evaporates. I call it the Validation Vacuum. I actually tracked this once. Last year, I followed 42 different people who announced they were starting ‘personal brand journeys’ on X and LinkedIn in January. By the second week of July, only 3 of them were still posting regularly. That is a 92.8% failure rate. I tracked their engagement, too. Most of them stopped when their ‘likes’ hit a plateau of about five per post.
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. They didn’t quit because they ran out of ideas. They quit because they realized that being a ‘brand’ is actually just a job, and usually a pretty thankless one at first. They wanted the authority of a 10-year veteran without the decade of being ignored. It’s incredibly lonely to talk to a brick wall for six months straight, and most people’s egos aren’t built to handle that kind of silence. They’d rather go back to being ‘unseen’ by choice than being ‘ignored’ by the market.
I might be wrong about this, but I think the obsession with ‘consistency’ is actually making people fail faster. We’re told to post every day. But if you have nothing to say, posting every day just highlights your emptiness. It’s like a drummer who never misses a beat but has no sense of melody. Eventually, the audience gets a headache and leaves. I’d rather see someone post one incredible, messy, deeply felt essay a month than five ‘How to optimize your morning’ threads a week. Those threads are the fast food of the internet—they fill you up for ten minutes and then leave you feeling greasy and sad.
The Canva-fication of the human soul
I’m going to say something that will probably annoy half the people reading this: I absolutely loathe Canva templates. I know, I know—it’s a great tool, it helps non-designers, blah blah blah. But it has created a sea of identical ‘personal brands’ that look like they were all birthed by the same dental receptionist’s office. If I see one more ‘Modern Minimalist’ carousel with the same beige background and the same serif font, I am going to lose my mind.
True personal brands are built on friction, not polish.
When you use the same templates as everyone else, you’re telling the world that you have nothing unique to offer. You’re fitting yourself into a pre-cut mold. Real people are messy. They have weird interests. (I spent three hours yesterday looking at vintage mechanical keyboards from the 80s—specifically the IBM Model M because that ‘buckling spring’ sound is superior to anything made today, but I digress.) Anyway, my point is that your ‘brand’ should feel like you, not like a corporate slide deck. If your brand is too polished, it’s not a brand; it’s a mask. And masks are heavy. You can only wear them for so long before your face starts to ache.
The ‘Risky’ truth about LinkedIn influencers
I’m just going to say it: Most of the people teaching you how to build a personal brand are charlatans. They are people who haven’t had a real job in a decade and their only ‘business’ is teaching other people how to have a ‘business’ like theirs. It’s a circular economy of nonsense. They tell you to use ‘hooks’ and ‘engagement hacks’ because they don’t actually have any real-world expertise to share. They are professional loudmouths.
I refuse to follow anyone who calls themselves a ‘Ghostwriter for CEOs’ or a ‘Personal Brand Strategist’ if they haven’t actually built a company that sells a physical product or a tangible service. I’ve noticed that the most interesting people on the internet—the ones who actually last for years—hardly ever talk about ‘branding.’ They talk about their work. They talk about their failures. They talk about the 14-inch steel pipes they’re trying to source or the specific way they failed to manage a team of six developers. That’s the stuff that sticks. The ‘Top Voices’ on LinkedIn are mostly just the people who are best at shouting into the void, not the people who actually know things.
How to actually last past the six-month mark
If you want to survive the ‘Validation Vacuum,’ you have to stop caring about the metrics for a while. I know that sounds like some Zen bullshit, but it’s the only way. I used to check my analytics every three hours. It made me miserable and it made my writing worse because I started writing for the algorithm instead of for myself. Now, I check them once a month. Maybe.
Building a brand is like seasoning a cast-iron skillet. You don’t just do it once and call it a day. You have to use it. You have to get it greasy. You have to let it get a little bit of character over years of cooking. Most people want the non-stick coating of a Teflon pan—perfect from day one—but Teflon flakes off eventually. Cast iron lasts forever.
- Stop naming things. Don’t name your newsletter. Don’t name your ‘system.’ Just write. Names are a trap that make you feel like you’ve accomplished something when you haven’t.
- Pick one unfair opinion and lean into it. What is something in your industry that everyone accepts as ‘best practice’ but you think is total garbage? Talk about that.
- Be a person, not a persona. If you’re having a bad day, you don’t have to post ‘5 lessons my bad day taught me about resilience.’ You can just say your day sucked. Or better yet, say nothing.
- Focus on the ‘Generalist’ advantage. Don’t pigeonhole yourself into one niche too early. I write about work, but I also write about keyboards and my failed attempts at gardening. People follow people, not topics.
I don’t know if this is the ‘right’ way to do it. There are probably people making way more money than me by using all the hacks I just insulted. But I’m still here, and they usually aren’t. I’ve seen so many ‘superstars’ burn out because they couldn’t keep up the act. It’s much easier to just be yourself, even if ‘yourself’ is a bit disorganized and hates beige templates.
Are you building something you’ll actually want to be doing in three years, or are you just trying to win a game that doesn’t have a prize? I’m still trying to figure that out for myself most days.
Write something honest today. That’s it.