The Three Cs of Personal Brand
Capture. Clarity. Courage.
The very first requirement for a personal brand is ‘personal’.
It has to be ridiculously you. Unreasonably you.
I’m on a mission to protect the ‘personal’ in personal brand.
Focus on the ‘personal’, the brand will follow.
But there’s an overwhelming amount of advice out there. Where do you even start?
To simplify it, I’ve distilled my two decades of brand building into this framework. Introducing: the three Cs of personal brand.
- Capture
- Clarity
- Courage
All three are pointed at one thing: finding the belief you build on. Not a logo, not a color palette, not a content calendar. A belief.
And note the order.
This process builds on each other.
You can’t start with clarity.
Who this is for
Founders and professionals who have spent years building the work but kept overthinking their personal brand.
You know you need to build your personal brand. You’ve done real work. Your clients, coworkers and (most) ex-bosses can endorse you. You’ve solved complex problems at work.
But personal brand sounds like a second job you don’t want. It also sounds like bragging. So you defer it. You detest it. You reject it.
This framework won’t give you a silver bullet or a template for your personal brand. But it will give you step by step clarity on the process.
This isn’t for you if you’re looking for a hack or a content calendar prompt. It is for middle aged men who want to end their anonymity.
How to use this piece
Read it through once first.
Then come back with a pen and a notebook. There are a lot of questions here and you’re meant to answer them on paper, not in your head.
Treat them as thought starters. Don’t stop at them.
Block the time. Weeks, not an afternoon. No hacks here, I told ya.
1. Capture
This is where it starts.
In step 1, capture information. Collect evidence. Create a log.
This is like being an investigative journalist of your own life.
The exact way a documentary film maker captures footage.
Please note this isn’t a fiction feature. This is a documentary.
In a fiction feature every shot, every wardrobe, every detail has been planned to the T.
In a documentary you capture the footage and wait for the story to unfold.
The story will emerge in the next step. You have to trust the process.
You find it, you don’t invent it
We are following how Stephen King produces his work. In On Writing he says stories are found things, not built things. The writer’s job is to uncover one intact, not to construct it. He distrusts heavy plotting for exactly this reason.
That’s way more applicable to personal brand, because we don’t have to invent anything here. It’s already there. It’s in you.
Before the finds, one rule.
Write. Don’t type. Don’t dictate.
Yes, I’m talking about facing the blank page. Consistently.
Every time I write on paper, I come up with some gold dust which was hidden somewhere in my subconscious. That gold dust is what we’re after.
A pen and paper as it turns out is the best way to find that.
Block time to write. Head to a library or a coffee shop. I’m writing this from a library in Toronto.
Trust the process.
Where do you start writing about your life? Here are three routes.
Route 1. The trajectory of your interests, including the unreasonable ones
Growing up I had so many creative pursuits. Sketching. Playing guitar. Writing poetry. Street photography. Reading. Making videos. Advertising.
To me it is fascinating that there was always one creative passion at any given time of my life.
During school I was heavily into sketching. Then in college I wanted to be a musician. Even tried to create a band with friends. But soon realized it wasn’t for me.
Writing and photography stayed on.
But when I joined advertising it felt like home to all my creative pursuits.
I quit working in advertising agencies in the first couple of years of my career. But little did I know I’d never be able to quit advertising.
Looking back, my passion for camera and advertising has consumed me for all these years.
What’s your interest that’s consumed you for years?
It does not matter if it’s related to your work or not. In fact, the further away from your work life, the more interesting it gets.
Do you like finding the best travel deals? Or finding the best cafes in your city? Or do you know everything there’s to know about [ ] insert your passion here.
There are some interests that don’t make sense. The unreasonable ones. Pay attention to those.
That’s the cleanest test there is. Nobody is paying you. Nobody is asking you to keep going. You keep going.
My unreasonable interest would be hunting and collecting advertising books. So many of them are out of print. I probably own more advertising books than there are lakes in Ontario. I spend an unhealthy amount of time and money tracking them down.
It doesn’t make sense to anyone else, but me.
Route 2. Your work life
Now coming to your work.
What’s the one thing at work you can do with your eyes closed? Over the years you’ve gotten so good at it. You take ‘lunch and learns’ on this topic. Everyone at work knows this is your wheelhouse.
For example, over the years founder friends keep coming to me for brand names. They want something memorable, creative and with a story. I’ve gotten good at it and I have my own process to name. Here’s a link if you’re interested.
Brand strategy is something I’ve been solving for so many years. Even when I’m not in a marketing role. They know it, because I can’t stop talking about stories from the mad men era.
Route 3. What do friends come to you for?
As mentioned above, my friends come to me for brand naming and other brand stuff. But they also come to me for business ideas, camera recommendations, Mac app recommendations and book recommendations.
Full disclosure: they rarely ask me for book recommendations. I give them anyway. To anyone I meet.
So you must get some feedback from your friends or coworkers. What do they think is your strength? What is it they come to you for?
How do you actually do it?
Put your investigative journalist hat on. Block the time. Pen and paper. Answer these in order.
These are thought starters, not a questionnaire. Your job is to fill pages. Start with the question, then keep writing past it.
Route 1. Your interests
- Write down everything you seriously pursued. Mark what died, what got absorbed, and what survived.
- Write about your unreasonable interest. When did it start? What makes it your obsession?
- Look at your social feed or your podcast feed. Which topics do you keep listening to?
- If you visit a book store or library (yes they still exist), which section do you visit the most? And why?
Route 2. Your work life
- What’s the one thing at work you can do with your eyes closed? How did you get good at it?
- What do you get pulled into meetings for that isn’t your job?
- What have you been asked to explain to the team more than once? What do people usually get wrong about it?
Route 3. Your perceived strengths
- In your inbox, check the ‘quick favor’ emails and texts. Which area of life are those? I get a lot of them for camera recommendations or landing page design reviews.
- Ask your friends or coworkers: what do they see as your strength?
Don’t edit, just write.
At this stage you’re collecting footage like a documentary maker. The more you collect the better it will be for you when you edit.
In the last couple of years, my own story, I’ve written and rewritten so many times. And details from the past keep coming up. The footage keeps getting richer and richer. So you have to give yourself time. At least weeks if not months. But keep writing every day. Trust me, there will be days when you get in flow and write five full pages, with the gold dust we are chasing.
As you keep writing, somewhere in all those words your belief will start to emerge. Don’t worry about it right now. We’ll tackle it in the next step.
The next step is your editing table.
2. Clarity
In this stage, we uncover the story of your brand.
This is where we edit the footage you got. By now there’s a possibility you’ve already started seeing the story.
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What’s the belief that’s fueled your interests and work?
The method is simple. Re-read what you did in Capture. Write some more. Edit. Build your story.
The line is already there
This isn’t just an advertising technique.
Documentary makers work this way. So do song writers like Bob Dylan, who filled notebooks for years, then went back over them and re-worked the lines until the song showed up.
And so did the greatest advertising copywriters. Eugene Schwartz. Gary Halbert. David Ogilvy.
They advocated gathering as much information as you can about your product. In this case, you are the product. Once you have all that product literature ready you sit with it until things jump out at you and start telling a story.
David Ogilvy, an advertising legend and my personal hero. Here’s the story behind his most famous headline for Rolls Royce.
He spent three weeks reading about the car. Every road test he could find. Ogilvy was obsessive about his product research. Then he ran this line:
At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.
He called it the best headline he ever wrote. The most famous headline in advertising.
But he didn’t write it. The technical editor of The Motor did, in a road test. He just found it, in the product literature he’d been studying for weeks. The only words he added were the name of the car.
That’s why you spend time on what you captured.
Go over it. And over it. Because the line is already there.
What only you believe
Edwin Land invented the Polaroid. A camera man and a founder, so I will zoom in here. His belief was: don’t do anything that someone else can do.
The goal of clarity is to find out what sets you apart. And what sets you apart is not a service or a skill. It’s what you believe about the work.
It took me a while to find mine.
I didn’t start with personal brand. But once I kept reading, writing, re-reading and editing I ended up here.
In the last decade I’ve transformed my life completely. A lazy-drunk creative who became an active-sober force. Thanks to my meditation practice and all the amazing books and friends who helped me during this time.
I’ve written a lot about it. Some of it also on YouTube and this blog.
This is my biggest learning. Nothing about how people see me changed because of a new headshot.
It changed because I changed. The ‘personal’ in the personal brand changed.
And what changed me was a belief. That I could become sober and kinder.
That’s why I say belief builds brands. Not branding, not logo, type, colours. Because if you believe you can be a runner, you better run, not just get pictures in running gear.
What to do
Re-read. A lot. Everything you wrote in Capture.
Re-reading sparks ideas, so you write more. That’s not a detour, that’s the work.
All of it is pointed at one thing. Uncovering the belief.
How do you actually do it?
Same setup. Block the time. Pen and paper.
- What’s the one thread in your career and life? For example, I was always in client facing roles.
- What challenges have you overcome? What setback have you survived? What transformation have you been through? I just shared mine above.
- What did you believe at the start of your career that you don’t believe now?
- What’s the belief that guides your work? Mine is belief builds brands, not branding.
- What’s the one sentence advice you could distill from your decades? Here’s mine: every marketing and brand challenge has already been solved by much smarter people, fifty years ago. They weren’t being distracted every seven seconds.
Now write it in one sentence
Think of it as the headline of your personal brand. The core idea. Mine is belief builds brands, not branding (colour palettes, typography, templates).
Terry O’Reilly, another adman, put it best. The task of marketing, he says, is a never-ending exercise in reduction. This section, Clarity, is all about that.
You might not get it the first time, or even the tenth time. That’s fine. You’ll arrive at it.
It doesn’t have to be perfect when you start. You can always change it. It has to be ‘personal’. It has to be you.
So now you have your belief. You know what you want to say. Why is it still so hard to publish it?
That’s where courage comes in.
3. Courage
Capture is shooting the footage. Then came Clarity, where you edit. But what good is an edited film?
A finished documentary sitting on a hard drive is just a completed project. Now you must show it to the world. You take it to the festivals. You knock on doors. You put it in front of people who might hate it.
If I had a dollar for every discarded social post, I’d have paid the national debt.
Five weeks on a LinkedIn post. Crafting, re-crafting, feedback from friends, then Claude (that’s worse). Eventually not posting anything.
That’s not a clarity problem. I knew what I wanted to say.
The moment you want to hit publish, someone inside starts saying:
“You are not a brand.”
“You’re not smart, you can’t be a thought leader.”
“Why publish? Remember your last five posts bombed.”
You know that voice. It shows up at the exact moment you’re about to hit post.
I wanted to make YouTube videos for years. But I was scared of showing my face. Of speaking to camera.
I finally started in 2023. Not on my main channel though. I started a new one, not in my name. Called it BeginnerAF, beginner at forty.
That was the side door. I took it because I couldn’t take the front one.
Over fifty videos later, I’m on my main channel. And LinkedIn. The videos are better because I made over fifty of them, not because I waited until I was ready.
That inner critic will always be there. I’m not writing this from over a hill, I’m maybe a step ahead. Because after years of advising others on their personal brands, I’m finally building my own.
I’ve always had the fear of what others will think. Worse, I solve brands for a living. If my post isn’t a notch above, what does that say about me? Because of all that pressure, completely created by me, I never really put myself out there.
But as I started sharing stories of my transformation online, the courage started to build up. Yes, I was a lazy-drunk creative, but that’s my past.
I’ve finally found courage to put ‘personal’ in my personal brand.
The biggest investment you can make is in you. In the AI age everything can be reproduced and replicated but not you. The personal in personal brand is untouchable.
Over the years, what has helped me with courage is reading. Especially founder and advertising books.
Carl Ally had the courage to name the competition. His Volvo ads made Detroit furious. See video below:
Phil Knight had the courage to keep selling running shoes when nobody took running seriously.
George Lois had the courage to defend his work. He once threatened to jump out of a window to get a poster approved.
None of them were doing it for their brand. They were just doing what they believed in.
How do you actually do it?
Start where you’re most afraid to post.
What’s the one platform you keep meaning to publish on but haven’t in a while? That’s the one. Start there.
Write a simple post. Text only. A hundred, hundred and fifty words.
Something on your mind you actually want to say. A book you read. An insight from a podcast. A problem you solved at work. A new client you landed.
Don’t search for a ‘hook’ or a ‘template’.
How would you tell a friend? Write it that way.
Publish it the same day you write it. No getting feedback from friends. Max three rounds of edits. Yes, the same day.
But it’s too basic
Sometimes we don’t say it because it feels too basic.
That’s not how to look at it. Ask instead: is it aligned with your interests, your belief, and you? Then say it.
It doesn’t have to be contrarian. It doesn’t have to be different. It’s just you putting it out there.
We all want to be unique. We want to say something nobody has said before.
There are no unique messages. There are only unique messengers.
I tell this to every client and every friend. Stop holding out for something dramatic.
What will people think?
Mostly nothing.
Everyone is swamped with their own content, their own to-dos, their own wish lists. A text post has barely any shelf life these days.
So relax. These are just words you’re sharing. Words you believe in.
Trust the process
You shoot the footage. You cut it. You release it.
I trust this process. It works every time. Took me decades of work to finally articulate it.
Hope this helps you building your truly ‘personal’ personal brand.
Thanks for reading, now go make a name for yourself.
If you’re struggling to build your personal brand, let’s get in touch.
