Recent social distancing initiatives and work-from-home policies have left some of us with a lot of time on our own and less to do. One thing that is worth spending this excess introspective time on is your personal brand. We should all be bold and forward-thinking enough to not lose sight of our personal development goals, and continue to build our personal brands.
A very rich man once said: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room” (Jeff Bezos, Amazon). The term “branding” is traditionally used in reference to businesses, but with the proliferation of social media and the gig economy, personal branding has become vital to stand out from the crowd. A personal brand is how you present to the world the unique combination of skills and experiences that make you who you are.
In his best-selling book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell talks about three archetypes that are necessary to achieve a word-of-mouth social movement. According to Gladwell, the Law of the Few posits that “[t]he success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” Economists call this the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 Principle, which states that in any given situation, roughly 80 per cent of the work will be undertaken by 20 per cent of the participants. Certain kinds of people are critical in spreading information and can take a movement from being something that is at a local level to being something that is exploding. These are the changemakers. The 20 per cent will fall into either some or all of the below archetypes.
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