There Is No Brand You. There’s Just You.

Fifteen years ago, a sharp doctoral candidate emailed me before a summer internship at the World Bank. The role came with a large office, plenty of external interaction, and the ordinary anxiety that comes with walking into a prestigious institution. He asked for advice. I found my reply recently while going through my digital sock drawer. I told him three things:

1. Be yourself. Hard work and a friendly personality landed the internship.
2. People like to work with people they like. I had seen that hold up on four continents and across decades.
3. Decide ahead of time what success looks like. Then pursue those things in a way that still feels natural.

I have been mentoring in some form for most of my career. Sometimes it was formal, through programs like the University of Washington’s SEBA mentor match or the University of Michigan’s Barger Leadership Institute. Sometimes it was informal: a conversation, an email, or a phone call that ran longer than planned. One pattern has stayed consistent. People, especially early in their careers, want to know how to show up in a place that already has its own rhythms, hierarchies, and expectations. They want to know how not to disappear.

That anxiety has not gone away. Hybrid work, large organizations, and the constant low-level visibility of professional platforms have only changed the surface of the problem. The advice industry around personal branding has changed too: LinkedIn optimization guides, content calendars, AI-generated bios, personal-website templates. Most of it treats branding as a layer you add on top of your daily work.

I would still give the same three answers. They line up with principles entrepreneurs have used for years to build things that last: start with a clear mission, and stay close to your core strengths. Without those, the rest of the advice drifts.

Brand You is just you

None of this is new. Tom Peters named the idea “The Brand Called You” in a now-famous 1997 Fast Company article that treated every professional as the owner of a personal brand deserving the same care as a company’s. The point worth taking from it: there is no useful difference between Brand You and being yourself.

The idea is far older than Peters. In Hamlet, Shakespeare gives the line “This above all: to thine own self be true” to Polonius, a pompous courtier who then spends the play eavesdropping, scheming, and finally hiding behind a curtain. It is the best illustration I know of the problem. The advice is sound; the man giving it lives the opposite, and the gap catches up with him.

That observation survives contact with Slack channels, Zoom calls, LinkedIn comments, and reference checks. A brand that diverges from actual behavior is fragile, and people eventually notice the gap. Authenticity is not a soft virtue in that environment. It is the strategy that keeps the rest of the work from collapsing under its own contradictions.

Eight rules from Richard Tait

I mentor, but I have often sought advice myself. The late, great Richard Tait, who co-founded Cranium, and I shared many conversations about entrepreneurship and life. We met often enough that I considered him a friend, and his influence lives on.

Durable companies tend to run on a short list of principles, and Richard’s map cleanly onto personal branding once you stop treating branding as a separate campaign. Here are eight rules I took from him, applied to Brand You.

1. Have a clear personal mission

Decide what you want this internship, this role, or this stretch of years to accomplish for you. Cranium’s mission was to give everyone a chance to shine. His next company, Golazo, was built on the idea that everyone is born to score. Both statements made recruiting easier because people could see themselves in the work. A personal mission does the same job. It gives colleagues, mentors, and later advocates a reason to invest. It also gives you a filter when opportunities arrive that sound impressive but pull you away from the work you actually want to do.

2. Know what you are good at, and double down

Tait’s plain instruction was not to stop until you are the best in the world at the thing that matters. Cranium coined CHIFF (clever, high-quality, innovative, friendly, fun) and used it as both mission and quality standard. The personal equivalent is identifying the strengths and working style that already set you apart, then committing to excellence in those instead of settling for average at everything the organization values. Give yourself a short, memorable standard others can recognize. The temptation in large places is to contort yourself to meet every expectation. That path produces a brand no one can describe.

3. Change the rules where it serves the mission

Large organizations have established paths. The useful move is not to ignore them but to look for low-risk ways to deliver value differently. Cranium missed Toy Fair, so it took the game to Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, the places its customers already were. The constraint revealed the channel. The same pattern shows up in early-career work: a better way to document a project, a faster feedback loop, an unconventional collaboration that solves a real problem. A brand becomes visible when the work itself is distinctive, not when the person is louder.

4. Make the right relationships a priority

People who join a company have to fit the culture and engage with the mission. Cranium hired for smarts and rented experience in some areas, then learned the reverse held for operations and finance. The personal version is surrounding yourself with people who share the direction you want to reinforce. Allies, mentors, and collaborators become part of how your brand is experienced. Mentoring is one of the clearest ways to do this: teaching forces you to articulate what you know, mentees keep your own thinking current, and the relationships last. Many turn into later collaborations or quiet advocacy. Organizations notice people who invest in others; visibility is a byproduct.

5. Turn the people who experience your work into advocates

At Cranium, customers became “Craniacs.” Birthdays, proposals, and weddings were built around the game, and the company occasionally did ridiculous things for them. The same mechanism works inside organizations and across professional networks, though usually less visibly. Small, reliable, occasionally remarkable acts of quality or service create talk that self-promotion never matches. When colleagues describe you accurately and positively without being asked, the brand is already working.

6. Stay creative, and avoid the hairball

Tait’s favorite book was Gordon MacKenzie’s Orbiting the Giant Hairball (Viking, 1998), a guide to remaining creative inside large companies. Tait and MacKenzie formed a friendship. MacKenzie taught him to trust creativity and to stay out of the pure reaction business. Bureaucracy, status-quo processes, and reactive busywork erode distinctive work. The practical move is to protect time and space for the projects that actually reflect your strengths and mission.

7. Do good as you do well

Cranium donated more than a million dollars to after-school programs. In our last conversation, Richard and I talked at length about volunteering at Mary’s Place and other social organizations, and about whether empathy can be taught in schools. Giving back strengthens both the people you help and the person doing the giving, and it compounds credibility. Mentoring sits squarely inside this principle. It needs no formal program, only the decision to invest time in someone else’s development while you are still doing your own work.

8. Lead with passion, curiosity, and speed, and expect knockdowns

Speed is useful. So is the willingness to recover. Tait defined success not by how many times you are knocked down but by how many times you get back up. Energy rooted in a clear mission is infectious. Self-confidence that comes from knowing what you are trying to accomplish and what you are good at tends to last. The loneliness that sometimes accompanies ambitious work is real; recovery is part of the practice.

Where the gap opens

These principles are tools for expressing who you are, not for replacing it. The common pitfalls today are familiar. One is optimizing for algorithms or trends instead of for the people who actually experience your work. Another is using tools, including AI, to generate a voice that does not match how you show up in meetings or on projects. A third is chasing every opportunity instead of protecting focus on the mission and the strengths. Each creates a gap between the public signal and the private behavior, and people will eventually notice.

Blogging has been one practical way I have kept the gap small. Writing regularly forces the same clarity mentoring does: you have to decide what you actually think, then say it in language other people can use. It is mental pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups in one exercise. It surfaces what you no longer believe and what still holds. And it builds a brand in the only way that lasts, by making the thinking visible and consistent over time.

The posts are not the brand. They are evidence of the brand.

Which brings me back to that email. Be yourself. People like working with people they like, and authenticity makes that preference easier to earn and easier to keep. Decide what success looks like for you, then pursue it in a way that still feels like you. Richard’s eight rules are ways to do that work without drifting into someone else’s definition of a good career. If the brand you are building requires you to act differently from how you actually work and think, it will not last.

The knockdowns will still arrive. Getting back up, while remaining recognizably yourself, is the part that compounds.

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Avanti. Measure what matters.