I had no idea who Gary Vaynerchuk was before starting Crush It! I'd never heard of Wine Library or Wine Library TV. To be honest, it was probably a good thing I hadn't as I might have been a little turned off reading the book after watching one of his videos. Passionate but slightly annoying.
I digress...
The reason I felt inspired to write this post was because Vaynerchuck, and the writer who transcribed his dictated words, flat out convinced me to. I had an immediate urge to start thrashing out what he calls a “personal brand” (I was lucky my Macbook wasn't in the vicinity as I was in the bath and I've read somewhere that water and Macbooks don't play nicely, especially when attached to a human). A personal brand, digitally speaking, is your online persona; the content that's returned when someone Google's your name. Your blog. Your Tweets. Your social media footprint. I didn't have (a good enough) one, and 47 pages into Crush It!, I had to have one. Right. Now.
“Hold it, you might want to reassure me, my résumé is awesome. Tell me this: Is it a pdf of a tidy list where you've worked and for how long, with a couple of strategic bullet points highlighting what you did in each job? Yeah? You're toast. Keep your pdf so that the HR department has something for their files, but otherwise traditional résumés are going to be irrelevant, and soon. Even if they're not yet, that résumé you're so proud of looks exactly like the ones being waved around by the other three hundred analysts in your city currently hunting for jobs.”
Cop. That.
And the man is right. If I owned my own business and was looking to hire a smart, driven person to help the company grow, I'd be more likely to hire the smart, driven person whom I already feel I know through reading years worth of insightful blog posts, over the smart, driven person who handed me two A4 sheets of paper. I've heard it said before, that the blog is the new résumé, but I never read too much into the theory. I couldn't see it clearly enough wearing the other shoes, the employer's shoes. The shoes that count.
I've started a blog numerous times before - personal ones, professional ones, then another personal one - but I could never keep them going for long. They never lasted for more than 5 or 6 posts. I think trying to separate my thoughts, my life, into sections was 95% of the problem. You shouldn't have to divide yourself up and write differently for each different aspect of your persona, especially when it is a personal brand you're trying to build. But the more I read, and the more I grow - personally and professionally - the more I understand the need to sell myself, to prove what I'm really about and what I'm capable of. And you can't keep doing that by trying to shrink the font to 11, then 10.5, because you can't get it all in the standard 2 pages.
So here we go, the beginning a new, improved
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