Off topic: Yay, I got picked up in a author spotlight for Towards Data Science. I got to talk a bit about my background and my favorite pet topics of how everyone should embrace domain knowledge.
Today is a bit of a short, but meandering post.
I’m going to springboard off a great blog post by @kierisi last week, talking about building your “personal brand”, and not in the skeezy “market yo’self!” way. Instead, she recommends a much more organic and natural way of building a personal brand — looking at who you are already, today, choosing what points you’d like to emphasize, and then authentically and consistently presenting yourself through that lens.
As far as the advice itself is concerned, I don’t have any complaints about them. I think that many people who gain experience and become more comfortable in their own skin slowly gravitate towards projecting a fairly consistent set of facets of their person onto the world… largely because you get tired of juggling and decide to allocate the slowly depleting supply of F’s to give to more important matters than battling it out on the Internet and in professional circles.
Similarly, while people have varying levels of skill and practice at presenting a specific version of ourselves to the wider world, we all do things like self-censor off-color jokes, stupid hot takes, etc. So we all have the base skills needed to actively build a personal brand. (Okay okay, that assumes everyone has basic self-awareness skills, which obviously is not true).
So why am I here writing about this stuff if I essentially agree with everything? Because figuring out who you are, even in a controlled online context, is difficult work that everyone should spend more time on, myself included.
Two flavors of defining oneself
While there are plenty of ways to philosophize over how to define something, I’m not going there. Instead, let’s break things up into a simple dichotomy of Positive and Negative.
To put it simply defining something positively in this context would be saying what something IS. “I care (a lot) about data quality”, “I obsess over photography and hobbies in general”, etc. They’re the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about defining something. If you’re primary goal is to quickly express your “nichiest-niche”, having a narrowly defined positive definition is a quick way to get there.
The problem is that humans are multi-faceted, so we can’t possibly fit into a single perfectly defined definition. This becomes part of the difficulty in coming up with a good personal brand definition. You likely have realized this when trying to come up with that single profile description, or that silly “objective” line on many resume templates.
The other broad way to define something is to say what it is NOT. “I’m not a machine learning expert”, “I don’t wade into protracted online arguments”, etc.. It’s very much like what you sometimes hear from 3d modelers and sculptors, you create a statue by “cutting away all the stuff that isn’t a statue”. It’s hard to describe it any other way, you keep removing material until it looks right.
The nice part about negative definitions is that they often leave lots of wriggle room. Any kid will know that being told “you can’t have a cookie” leaves infinitely more possibilities for fun snacking than being told “you can only have carrots”.
Why would you want to think of yourself in such a way? It’s a sign that you’ve developed a certain amount of experience in your life — you’ve learned a bit about both the world and yourself.
The world looks full of endless possibilities when you start out. Why, yes! All the popular programming languages look useful and I’m going to try them! Yes, I’m going to do this AI stuff using Tensorflow. Yes, I’m building a chat bot. Yes I’m going to run the most rigorous A/B test to have ever been tested!
Eventually, beyond the motivating halo of novelty, you do many of those things and figure out that you like some of them (hopefully), but not all of them. You wind up doing more of certain things, and less of others. Eventually, you figure out that certain classes of things just aren’t interesting to you.
This pattern traces the course of how many people slowly develop their personal brand/identities online. Most people start off as some form of “Interested in EVERYTHING!” and it slowly transforms into a more well-defined set of things. Through the weathering of time, a statue slow appears out of the block of featureless rock.
Putting definitions to use for growth
Thinking back to some old business classes I took ages ago, one thing that was emphasized quite a bit was the importance of mission and vision. To my surprise, after working for a number of years, I realized that while the concepts have been a bit overdone over the years, the core concept is still important because it brings focus to an organization — it gives people the ability to say “No, we don’t do that”. In a landscape of endless possibilities and potential business opportunities, many of which can go poorly, it’s important to know what to focus on.
So we can take that idea and point it at ourselves. However we choose to define ourselves, it also acts as an aspirational guide. If you’re anything like I was years ago, it would feel impossible to aspire to a specific thing. I just can’t see myself as “becoming an expert in neural nets" because it’s too narrow (even though that field itself is huge).
And while negative definitions are generally bad for putting on resumes and personal brands, they’re really useful for cutting down the field of possibilities without being too restrictive. Deciding to not dedicate any energy to learning C++, doesn’t mean you can’t choose to learn Java, and it’s completely different from deciding you’re going to be a C# expert. It’s super useful when you’re starting out and not quite sure where you want to go.
However you choose to define things, the most important part is to collect and build up experiences that allow you to figure out what you are. You can draw the map how you want, whether it’s looking ahead or looking backwards.
But do you “need” all this for an online presence?
Not really. =O
It’s very nice to have a semi-consistent persona/life on the internet. There are definitely ways to take advantage of the large groups of followers that come up from having strong presence and brand online. But there’s a difference between having a strong presence and brand, and merely being a participant.
Many people seem to think that they need to get their profiles and things in order before participating in Data Twitter, and that’s very much not true. The welcoming folks are more than happy to engage with pretty much anyone. So I highly encourage everyone who is worried about getting their brand right before starting to just relax, write something that works for now, and dive in.
Because the experience that comes from participating will probably do more to inform “who you are” more than anything else.
About this newsletter
I’m Randy Au, currently a Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. The Counting Stuff newsletter is a weekly data/tech blog about the less-than-sexy aspects about data science, UX research and tech. With occasional excursions into other fun topics.
All photos/drawings used are taken/created by Randy unless otherwise noted.
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