If you intend to stand out in this world, you need to do it sooner than later. You look at the root word of original. It's origin.
The point or place where something begins. That's you. That's your story.
That's the beginning of your story. A story that you may have forgotten. It's all about the feelings now.
And we can see everywhere we look. Character, the thing that we held in very high regard is seemingly disappeared. Sometimes if you're feeling like not yourself, it's because you are leaving parts of you behind.
You're you're missing pieces, right? So, a lot of us walk around fractured because we're not in love with all of us. And this is how you take an idea and you take a point of view and you stand out.
You just be different. I'm going to start off with a story. Um, it it began in the good old days of clubhouse.
My friend Patula Art Center professor, we had a clubhouse call together and it got a little spicy in the room and we get off the phone. We always do our postmortem. We're like, "Hey, how did the call go?" and she tells me, "Yeah, Chris, um, I I think people misunderstand you." I'm like, "What do you mean they misunderstand me?" They're like, "You know, you're a little edgy." And I think if you were to tone that down a little bit, I think more people would like you.
And I told her, "Prula, they didn't misunderstand me at all. I am edgy. I am a little bit canankerous." And I think they're there in that room because I am.
And and I'm I'm putting up this slide here because Patula is a brilliant professor at Art Center. She's a designer. and she wrote one of my favorite quotes, practice safe design, use a concept.
So, she's a brilliant woman herself and she's telling me this thing and then I tell her, I would rather be hated for who I am than to be loved for who I am not. And I realized something. Patula comes from an academic world where how you move up and down in life really depends on being a very intentional communicator, a very thoughtful communicator.
And that kind of training is the very thing that you can't do online. Because then what you wind up doing is you whip out or you cut out all of the personality, all the nuance, the things that make you you. So I just want to give you a couple like the big ideas.
Uh big idea number two is we've moved from the age of character, I'm sorry, to the age of personality. It used to be we were judged by the things that we did and now it's all about the personality. It was about what kind of person are you?
And and now it's how do you make me feel? It's all about the feelings now. And we can see everywhere we look.
character. The thing that we held in very high regard is seemingly disappeared. The next idea here is that it's it's not the attention economy that you know so much about.
It's the attention is the economy. This is where all the money is being made. And social, as I heard in in this really great meeting of minds, social has become the new resume.
We know that when when you build your resume, there's a little fluffing that goes on. So, what do people do now as a shortcut, right? So, I talked to my friend Neil, who's an event organizer, and I recommend speakers to them all the time, and they're great, brilliant people.
The first thing he does, he goes on their social account. He's like, "Chris, I can't book the speaker." I'm like, "You're missing out on the genius of this person." He goes, "But they're not going to help me sell any tickets. No one knows who they are, and I can't work that hard to promote them.
That's not my job. It's their job to get known." Okay? So, we know this already.
When we're looking at videos or any search results, we're looking at the top 10. We're always looking at the top of the list. And so you need to do everything in your power to become known and to understand how to this game is played so that your brilliance, your genius, and your gift that you're going to give to the world is seen by other people are looking for you right now.
A little line I wrote, there are riches in the reaches. People would say there's riches in the niches. I'm telling you right now, because you have a following, because you have an audience in a community, brand sponsors will come and give you money because they want your audience.
They want your reach. That's what they're really paying for. You'll get better publishing deals because you have a perceived audience and reach.
They don't have to market you as hard. You're more of a surefire thing and that's what they're buying. That's what they're going to give you a deal for.
And I was just thinking about this. I'm sure you know who Haley Bieber is, but I had to figure out who she is. Now, her last name is quite famous because she's married obviously to Justin Bieber, but does anybody here know who Haley Bieber is?
Like who is she? What has she done? Does Oh, okay.
Hands went down. What has she done? Who is she?
She has a skinare line. Correct. And she's married to Justin Bieber.
We already went over that. She has fashion. Okay.
Anything else? I mean, who who here doesn't have that besides not being married to Justin Bieber? Nails.
Was that she has nails? Okay. So, did you know who she's the daughter of?
Who? One of the Baldwin brothers. Steven Baldwin.
I didn't even know that. Okay. She's a she's a socialite and she's a model.
I didn't know that either. Okay. And the shocking part of it is she sold her company recently called road for a billion dollars.
Is that incredible? That's to tell you the power of reach. And so Andy Warhol has said this famously like in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.
And I just want to let you know the future is now. And all of you can manufacture your own fame. That's an incredible idea.
It really is because a lot of us hate social. My assumption is many of you here not because you hate social but usually that's a sentiment we feel like it's painful to do the algorithm doesn't love us it's not sharing that kind of same sentiment it's not a mutual love but it's incredible now that we can live in a time that you don't need the gatekeepers to anoint you as worthy of having a talk show or to have your own TV show or to be able to share your opinion you don't need an editor for magazine or newspaper to do that you can do this and it's an incredible thing that we're the time that we live in okay so I have this contrarian approach to how to build your personal brand. And if you start to get shocked a little bit, you'll see that, yeah, he's pretty consistent.
I'm consistent with what I'm telling you to do. That's why I said sit anywhere, do whatever you want until somebody tells you you can't do it anymore. Don't be rude about it.
But you need to start to go outside the box. Color outside the box. Okay?
So, here's the first contrarian idea. Don't chase new. Do not chase new.
Okay? And I'm going to give you some examples. And the the two examples I'm going to give you is from from Hollywood.
Actually, the all three examples are from Hollywood. And Hollywood is the dream factory. They make movies.
They tell the most powerful stories. And it's a multi-billion dollar industry only to be supplanted by video games, which is also a great storytelling platform. So the first one, the first case I'm going to make with you is this.
Okay. Do you guys know what movie this is? Can you?
The what? The the fountain. You're very excited over here.
I love that. It's the fountain. Okay.
And do you know who directed The Fountain? Darren Areronowski. A brilliant director.
Love his work. Here's the thing about The Fountain. Okay, this is what Rotten Tomatoes said.
The fountain is a cinematic poem, a haunting exploration of love, life, and eternity. Every frame feels like a work of art. And it got a 52% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
That's how much we love new things. I love Darren Areronowski. I watched the film.
I cannot remember the film. I do not know what it's about. It grows $16 million on a budget of $35 million.
So, my math isn't that great, but it's about 50%. 55% Rotten Tomatoes 50% maybe there's some correlation there considered a box office flop and here is Darren Areronowski's filmography here he's directed Pie Raccoon for a dream one of my favorite films you guys like Black Swan gripping film amazing and recently the whale won an Academy Award for Brendan Fraser right beautiful but he's always trying to do new let's do case number two you guys know what film this is Cloud Atlas Some people watch films, so you still get out. Thank you.
I'm I'm sure the studios love you. Me, too. I go out.
Okay. Don't don't spoil it for everybody else. So, you did you watch this?
Okay. Let's Let's advance to the next slide. Cloud Atlas.
A beautiful mess. Okay. That was a little cut and paste.
Sprawling, ambitious blend of thoughtprovoking narrative and eye-catching visuals. Too unwieldy for some, impossible to ignore. 66% Rotten Tomatoes.
A brilliant film across space and time. Nonlinear. Do you know directed cloud Atlas?
Does anybody know? See, a lot of people don't know the Wowskis. Yeah.
And let's let's keep advance. Next slide, please. So, it gross 130 million worldwide, which is a decent number except for when you look at it a little closer.
Only 27 million domestically. I would consider that a flop. It's rely on the international market for its box office receipts.
Still a big box office disappointment. Here's the Wowskis. directed bound the matrix franchise speed racer V for Vendetta love V for Vendetta Jupiter ascending and sensate okay how much does the audience the world want new that's the big question for you to think about okay let's go so case number three maybe I'll change your mind now go ahead is a person named Thomas Cruz Mathther IV also known as Tom Cruz let's look at Tom Cruz and you know some people would know him as Maverick great billion dollar film made a lot of money.
Maverick. This is like the sequel to Top Gun. Yes.
Okay. And there's a comedian, his name is Rich Hall. He has this idea that all Tom Cruz movies are exactly the same.
He's like single-handedly saved Hollywood. He basically makes the same thing over and over again. And we're all laughing, but he's laughing all the way to the bank.
While Darren Areronowski and the Wowskis are like dropping duds now, and nobody wants to watch those. So why is it so hard to do the same thing over and over again? because it flights our creative soul and our desire to do new things.
There's this book written by Seth Goden. It's a brilliant book. And if we look at this on this graph on this axis, the vertical axis, it's the results and the x-axis the horizontal one is effort and time.
So as we go to the right, it's more effort and time. And we kind of measure this thing, right? And it looks something like this, right?
That's called the dip. That's me redrawing it. Okay?
So every time we start something new, it feels really fun. It's exciting. We're learning Photoshop.
We're doing AI. It's really cool. We're animating in After Effects.
We're shooting a video. We recorded our first video. It's so exciting.
And then the the joy of doing that work starts to wear off and it starts to become really hard. Uh the algorithm changes. Our audience is fickle.
They found somebody else that's new, that's hotter, fresher, and better, more technologically driven than you. And it sucks. And you feel burnt out as you stay in this kind of dip.
And so what do we do? We're like, I have a new idea. Let's start again.
Because when we start again, it becomes new and fun again. And we repeat this process over and over and over again. and we're stuck in the dip.
So what Seths is saying, you know what, the dip is a good thing. The dip is a natural barrier to competition. When things get hard, you got to buckle down and keep doing it till you have that breakthrough because the magic, if you don't quit and you keep going, you persevere.
It's right up here. It's the very rare era that few people reach. Basically, if you're an influencer yourself or you're following somebody, you've achieved that level.
You've achieved that status. And the thing that sucks is this. You know, like celebrities who have all the money and opportunities in the world, they're already naturally good-looking to begin with.
They have great proportions. People give them free stuff all the time. Like there's no justice in the world.
They get the free traffic. They get the money. They get to travel and do everything that they want to do because they were able to push past the dip.
So don't chase new. Okay. Uh I I was going to ask you a question.
I'm not going to do that for sake of time. What we have to do is give up our attachment or our how we're drawn to shiny object syndrome. It's like squirrel, right?
That's what's happening there. So when we chase new, new is an external infinite pursuit of what's next. And there's always something that's next and it never ends.
And if that's what you want, go do that. Uh Pepsi bet on that strategy did not work out well for them. For a long time, it was the cola wars in the 80s.
It was the choice of the new generation. Well, the new generation aren't loyal. They're very fickle and you're always chasing them, spending a lot of ad dollars.
What was Ko's campaign during that time? The real thing, baby. The original.
The real thing. And that's what I want you to focus in on is is being original. And original is not what you think it is.
Original is an internal quest to discover yourself. You look at the root word of original. It's origin.
The point or place where something begins. That's you. That's your story.
That's the beginning of your story. A story that you may have forgotten. So branding isn't so much an act of creation, which people like, let's create a brand.
It's not that at all. Even for big brands and for personal brands especially, it's the act of remembering. And you think, what a strange concept.
Why do we have to remember who we are? Well, there's a lot of things that happen in society that strip you away from your individuality. We'll talk about that a little bit later.
Uh contrarian idea number two is don't chase better. Everybody is always telling you do better, do better. This is not the best that it can be.
And there's a limited return on investment when you chase better. I'm going to make an argument with you in a second. Okay?
So, they have a better product. I saw this on Instagram where I guess I get most of my education these days and you have a better product. Who wins?
Let's have a discussion about that. So, I'm going to show you a bunch of companies and then you guys just yell out brand or product. Okay.
Better brand, better product. Just yell at brand or product. So, here's the first one.
McDonald's. Somebody's like, "Mm, I'm loving it." No. Yeah.
You know, the What is that? The Big Mac doesn't even decay. It's It's really gross.
It And it doesn't decay in your body either, apparently. Okay. IKEA better brand of product.
For real. Have you sat on a table or something and have it just break on you? The problem with IKEA furniture, it's great for college students.
It's great. It's like fast furniture. It's disposable.
I don't think it's good for our environment. I used to love it as a college student because it gave me the idea I was living a European lifestyle on $89. The problem with IKEA products is you never give it to your children.
That's it. You're not going to find an antique store. It's just not going to happen.
Okay. Better brand. Nike.
Yeah. See, so runners know. Runners know.
Okay. And then Starbucks. See, now you guys are laughing, right?
Maybe you're from the Midwest. You're like, better product. I don't know.
It gives you a full European experience. Yeah. Okay.
And the one that puts a nail in the coffin. Who said better product? It's water.
Friends, you're like, I'll pay $8 for that better water. Why is it better water? Shut the front door.
Get out of here. She's like, the bubbles are so effervescent. They they they tingle my lips and tongue.
Get out of town. You've been sold a brand. You have.
I promise you. Seth Goden writes this book. It's called All Marketers Are Liars.
They lie to you and we're complicit in the lie. We taste the wine before we drink it. Yeah.
When you go to the restaurant, you're like, I'm gonna have a good meal before you even take your first bite because we're seduced by our own self story. Okay. So products focus on features whereas brands focus on meaning.
And we'll talk about that. Okay. So this is if you're new to the world of branding, you really need to understand this because if you're talking about what you do or what you sell as features, you're losing the brand game.
So liquid death, the liquid death in your vertical is going to destroy you. And I mean because they have a better brand. So there's this idea I have, it's called biology, right?
If if I buy this, what does it say about me, my values, beliefs, and preferences? We're making choices every single day. And when we buy something, something is happening there.
Okay. Uh, this is a quote from an Anna Lape. I think I might misspelled her name here.
Every time you spend money, you're casting a vote for the kind of world you want. Do you believe that? Yes.
Especially now that we live in such accessible times and we're not worrying about starvation anymore. We're choosing. We're making a lot of choices.
So, we're moving more towards identity and away from survival. Who am I? What does it make me if I buy this product?
Right? Like, is anybody here a Dell person? There aren't really Dell people.
It's just a cheap computer. That's really what it is. I buy Dells for my dad because he don't care.
For everybody else, it's Apple all the way. This is a new idea here. I'm I'm in Austin.
I'm having dinner with some of these people. You might recognize some of them, but I have There we go. Okay.
That's Dan Martell. That's Ryan Dice. He's like OG marketing.
Mr. Daniel Priestley. He's been in our podcast, written several books.
Brilliant people. Brilliant people. We're having a conversation and Dan was telling me about like his foray into branding and building his personal brand and he's not convinced.
He's like a lot of people. He wants to just make money and he's exited out of several companies. Rich, he has a private jet, flies everywhere.
He has a whole crew with him. But before he did all that, he needed convincing. So he reached out to the reluctant one.
Do you know who the reluctant one is? This guy, Mr. Hermosi himself.
and he was famous for saying, "I'd rather be rich than famous." He's changed his story. So, I consider him the anti-personal brand, personal brand club president. He really is.
So, he he reaches out to Alex and they're talking like, "I I I I don't want to build this brand thing. I don't want to be famous. I just want to be rich." He goes, "Well, okay, if you really want to be really rich, you're going to have to build your personal brand." You build a strong personal brand, clients find you.
You don't ever have to look for them. So, that's when Dan Martell says, "Brand is a force multiplier. It takes everything you do and it scales it up exponentially.
So if you're still on the fence like should I be making content? Should I build my brand? Who am I?
What am I trying to do? Should I have an opinion on things? Maybe by the end of this presentation you will have some new thoughts in your mind.
Okay. So the brand with the strongest tribe wins because it's a battle of tribes. I'm voting for the world I want to live in.
I'm casting my vote. So every time you do something, someone casts a vote with their views, with their time and their attention. Should I watch your content?
Should I watch the other content? Should I read your carousel? Should I read your post?
They're making that decision every single day. Your job is to let them know what you stand for so they can decide, I'm on your team or I'm on the other team. I'm on team Apple or I'm on team Dell.
They're just going to pick. This is Reese Witherspoon, famous actress. Well, I didn't know this until I read about her that she sold her company for a billion, almost a billion dollars.
Like Reese Witherspoon? I mean, really, what happened here? So, she grows her fame and where people are making money now is not where you think they are.
So, she grows her audience to 29 million. It's probably bigger than that now. And then she creates a book club with two and a half million people in her book club.
And this is really interesting. When you can command an audience that big, what she does is she says to authors, "If you want our book club to read the book, you have to option the rights for the movie, the TV show, and the video game to me." That's pretty awesome. And if you're an author, you're like, "Yes, please." You have two and a half million voracious readers.
Basically, if they buy the book, they're an instant bestseller. That's a dream of every author. If you make a dollar a book, you've made two and a half million dollars if they all buy one.
But she leverages that and she so she creates a production company called Hello Sunshine, right? And here's how she knows what TV shows to make. Did you buy the book?
Did you read the book? Did you love the book? So, she's done something super smart.
She's using the audience as intelligent data. Kind of like Netflix is mining all of us to see what shows you want to watch. That is a brilliant businesswoman.
I thought she was a pretty face. Amazing. a billion dollars leveraging audience building brand.
And if I if I tell you to to be different, maybe there's just different ways to say different. So, be weird. Just don't be typical.
Okay? Uh there's a there's this quote I love from Sally Hogs Head. She wrote this book called Fascinate.
And I want you to put this in your brain. If it's the one thing you walk away with from today, different is better than better. Many people are pursuing being better.
And I told you after a certain point, ROI diminishes drastically. Different is better than better. Just remember that.
Okay. And I want to show you um this is an idea borrowed from James Clear book Atomic Habits. What a 1% difference can make when we talk about being 1% different or 1% better.
Let's talk about that. Let's look into it. Okay.
So, well, what does 1% look like? Well, if we look at the number one and we add or subtract 1% to it, I'm sure some of you have seen this before. What does that look like?
And we do it over time. So, we do it to the 365th power, right? So we know 1 * 1 * 1 * 1 to 365 is still 1.
But what happens if you improve it by 01? What happens if we improve by 1% over 365? It becomes 37.8.
That's pretty crazy. So over 365 days, if you focus on figuring out what makes you different and you keep leaning in on that, just like Tom Cruz, you know, he's a pretty good cocktail waiter, you know, that kind of thing. Just do it over and over again.
You can start to see where these ideas map out. And to look at the opposite side, if you just take away that 1% 01, what happens when you do that to the 365th power? This this number shocks me more than the 37.8.
That's a number. And so I think what happens in in society is we're educated to leave our differences at the table, to conform, to be normal, to be average, and to strip all that stuff away. And that's why we have to learn how to remember who we are, what makes us different.
So in the world, good is expected. It used to be good was the differentiator. A good stick, a good computer, a good actor, that was what mattered.
Good is the price of entry. You don't get to play the game if you're not good. And good is not enough.
So we look at this graph where we say be good because that's what is required. It's not the differentiator. And then be different.
Uh if we look at this in the lower quadrant is the one that you want to avoid. You're not different and you're not good. So you're a knockoff and you're cheap.
And that may be a lot of things that you can buy in timu I believe. Yeah. You're you're you're not good and you're not different.
And if you're now good but you're not different, you become a commodity. You're a me too. A lot of your content that you put out there is me too.
There's nothing wrong with that. Especially when you're early in your content creation journey because you do what everyone else is doing that you look up to, right? But at some point you have to do something that's different.
Now we're starting to move into the other quadrant. Still not where you want to be. You are different but not good, right?
And some people do that. So that's like wearing a clown outfit. It's like, "Okay, you're different." But how does that help anybody right now?
It's not good. Where you want to be, obviously, is here to be different and good. This is the market leader.
Basically, every brand that you love that commands a premium price that has a weight list of like hungry customers, they're in that space. They're both different and good. Okay.
Um Warren Buffett's former um partner who passed away, Charlie Munger, he has this thing called inversion thinking. So instead of trying to do something, they look at what the opposite thing is to learn what they should do, right? It takes a different approach.
It takes an oblique approach to thinking. So let's talk about like if we want to be different, we want to stand out. So let's take the opposite approach and think about how do we blend in?
How do we disappear? Okay. And it turns out the FBI and the CIA, they have this program on how to hide in plain sight so that you can blend in and infiltrate communities, hate groups, whatever it is, terror cells, and you can just blend in.
So, I wanted to ask you just really briefly here, how do you hide in plain sight? How do you blend in with your appearance, your personality, the stories that you tell, what you say and do? So, what would you need to do to blend in in person?
Let's come up with the easiest ideas first and work towards hard. like what's the e like if we're in a FBI training program, we want to infiltrate and not to stand out, hide in plain sight. What would we need to do?
So, every industry, every community has a uniform. So, you wear the uniform of the people and you fit right in. You wear your hair the certain way, certain length, a certain color, you have a certain kind of makeup style, you wear certain shoes, you listen to a certain kind of music.
That's how you blend in. And then, how would you do this online from the easiest thing that you could do to the hardest thing to do to just blend in? What's easier than act like everybody else?
Don't do anything. Who said that? Thank you, Peter.
Don't do anything. So, some of you are doing a great job of that. And then the second best idea is to copy everyone.
Oh, there's this uh water challenge. Let's do that. There's a pointing thing.
Let's do that. Let's dance in front of the camera. Let's do that.
Well, if you do what everyone else is doing, how are you going to be different? How will you stand out? See how how well trained we are?
It's just to blend in. It's kind of like we just do it in a Pavlovian instinct. So, you wear work uniform.
You participate in group think, do what everyone else is doing. You all understand this. And you take up very little space, right?
And online, you just use that copy and paste content strategy. You spray and pray. Basically, you put out the content.
You never engage with anybody. You say those most empty things. You straddle the fence.
You never have a point of view. Shiny happy all the time forever. And I say that and then now just take a minute and search in your mind.
How did I show up today? how I've been showing up online. So, inversion thinking is actually really powerful.
If you're trying to stand out, try to figure out what you need to do to blend in and then map yourself against that and see how you're doing. Give yourself a score. There's a person up here is wearing a paper mask.
That person obviously does not want to blend in. I love that. Some people have crazy hair.
Do you whatever you do. So, there's this idea from Paul Arden in his book, Whatever you think, think the opposite. Where he says, "Safe is risky and risky is safe." So you want to be risky, unless you want to be sheeple.
So the best way to hide in plain sight is do branding. And I'm I'm here to talk to you about branding, not blending. And I have another idea I want to share with you that I' I've been told this and I did a little Google search on this.
We're mostly water. It's like some more than 50% of our body is made up of water, right? So now I was thinking about the packaging of water and what that can say about us.
So this bottle of water has no label. It has no story. And when we see bottles like this in the store, they're usually in the discount section cuz frankly I'm a little scared.
I'm a little scarred, right? And then what happens is if you're cheap and easy because you have no story, um then that becomes the criteria in which people would determine whether or not they want to work with you, buy your products, consume your content. And then there's this company called Avon and it says natural spring water from the French Alps.
The shape of the bottle mimics the the the skyline of the Alps. We buy this and I didn't watch them bottle it. I have no idea.
It could be from the tap. I do not know. It's how powerful this stuff is.
And Fiji arteesian water from the islands of Fiji, not touched by man. Wow. I feel like I'm going on vacation.
And they look at the way they they do this. Like I don't want to flour my water, but there's something evocative here about the illustration. And then this one is ridiculous and I just love how bold they are.
It's ionized alkaline water and their claim is overachieving H2O. Like your water is not working hard enough. And they charge you for it and you happily buy it.
Uh there's a bottle of smart water here. I don't want to drink stupid water. So names, labels, and packaging say a lot, right?
So, when something like this appears, and there's a personal story here, I was speaking on stage in Glendale and they removed all the labels from the bottles of water. I didn't know this at the time because they didn't want to deal with any kind of copyright trademark issues. I'm going on stage.
I have this case of dry mouth. I'm like looking at that bottle. I was just I went without drinking the water.
Also, because something else had happened, they poured it into a glass. Now, I'm even more scared of it cuz I'm a germ freak. I'm like, who drank this water?
Is this for me? So, this is really interesting. If you think of yourself as the packaging for your water, what story are you telling and how are you communicating that?
And if you don't have any story attached to it, then you become questionable yourself. So there's this word called providence and sometimes people are like what did you say providence? No, provenence which is the source of so it goes back to the original or being original.
What is the source of you? Your story. Where'd you come from?
Who are you when you were a little kid when somebody didn't corrupt you and tell you to fit in with everybody else? Michael Margolas wrote this book called Story 10X. And he says a product or service of a story is a commodity.
And that's the last thing that you want to become or be. So think this, no story, no brand. And what we don't want to do is just tell any story.
We want to tell a repeatable story. A repeatable story is a story that's so powerful that someone else will do your marketing for you. I do that all the time.
I just told you the story of six or seven different companies, maybe more. I'm doing their marketing for you. So they have to be short, contained, and highly memorable and sticky.
And I'll tell you how to do that. Okay. I recently had this gentleman on my podcast.
His name is Tanso Ali. He's a four-time Australian memory champion. He he remembered he remembered um the names and phone numbers of two phone books and he was tested.
It took him 24 days to remember it. But you can say a phone number or a name, he'll tell you the phone number or the name of the person based on the digits. He says silly stories is how we remember things.
The sillier the story, a pneummonic device that you create, it sticks. So again, what are you doing? You're telling corporate sanitized stories all the time.
You're not helping yourself to be remembered. You're unremarkable. So branding is meaningful differentiation.
How are you different in a way that's intentional? That's good for you. Meaningful differentiation here.
So here's the story. You guys know Audi years ago. Audi was a nothing.
They retreated from the market and they've returned in full force. They're going up against Mercedes and more more likely BMW. So they they had this line.
They have to carve out a different market for themselves. So they say never follow. That's Audi.
And now Audi is a serious threat as a European car maker in America, right? They've returned and they have this line, their S-tuned series, and they fully embrace this. I think you can figure out the puzzle.
So, they're just reinforcing the S in the Audi S series. And this is how you take an idea and you take a point of view and you stand out. You just be different.
Um, where do they talk about the engine, the wheels, the wheelbase? They don't because that's features. So, what they're saying is, and one of their lines was, um, Audi drivers know how to park their own cars to go against Lexus auto parking system.
You see what I'm saying? It's a lot of attitude. Shots are fired.
Okay? So, different is being weird. Different is being strange, goofy, whatever word you want to use.
This is where you start to fill in. This is how you stand out. So they are this is not you.
Typical, expected and normal. You should be atypical, unexpected and abnormal. We have to lean into that.
Okay. So here's an idea. You know what it means to play against type?
Well, Brad Pitt is a leading man hero. He very rarely ever does anything other than the leading man hero character because the audience doesn't accept him for that. Okay.
So what we do is we say this and you should ask yourself this question. What does the prototyp prototypical person in your space do, say, or write about? And you write a list of everything they do.
And everything you do must be different or at least one of the things you do must be different. Otherwise, you're basically giving people no reason to follow you, to listen to you. You don't want to be the poor man's Brad Pitt.
You don't want to be the poor man Julia Roberts. You want to be your own person. And the way that you do that is you do things that are different.
That's how you unclone yourself. And so once you create this list of what they're doing, you create your own band list. Now, if you don't do this, you risk becoming a red shirt.
The red shirt is a generic disposable character on Star Trek and they have a very high probability of dying. So in life, if you ever wake up and you're in a red shirt with a Star Trek uniform, all you have to do is change your shirt. Your chance of you living is much higher.
Okay? So when everyone is zigging, you should be zagging. Just go a different direction.
Okay? Uh I will talk a little bit about the authenticity gap to be authentically 100% you. Um and sometimes if you're feeling like not yourself, it's because you are leaving parts of you behind.
You're you're missing pieces, right? So a lot of us walk around fractured because we're not in love with all of us. We're so used to putting out a version of ourselves, a facade.
Now some of you might have run into one of your favorite creators here. Maybe that's the whole point. and you're like, "Whoa, they're so different than how they appear on TV." And that's really weird, but that's more common than you think.
That's the bad weird cuz they show up very specifically, very curated in life, I'm sorry, on camera, and it's very different from how they are in real life. And Carl Young has this idea that he says the ego regulates between our shadow selves, the part that we feel so ashamed, embarrassed, nervous or anxious around showing to people, we develop a persona who we show up in the world to be accepted, to be loved, at least not to be ridiculed. So we go around pretending to be someone that we're not all the time.
We wear a mask. And all of us do this. So we've been taught to hide your quirks, to fit in, to be professional, to be normal.
And the word normal just means to be average. I don't think anybody here wants to be average, to live an average life, to go to an average school, to have average amounts of talent, to have an average following. But we seem to love the idea of being normal.
This is a list of your two. Like Steve Jobs is too obsessive. Oprah's too emotional.
Elon's too weird. That's a different weird, by the way. Gary Vee is too intense.
Right? Your perceived flaws aren't flaws at all. The flaws are your advantage.
Okay? And in order to do this, we have to lean into those flaws or what Bnee Brown has championed, vulnerability is is trust is a byproduct of vulnerability. And that relationships travel at the speed of your vulnerability.
Your willingness to reveal who you really are. Your favorite creators are the people who are willing to show you a peak into their life and not only tell you about the high highs, but they'll also tell you about the low lows. It's how we know we can trust them.
Yin and Yang, this idea that there's no such thing as something that's purely good or something that's purely bad. There's always good and bad and there's always bad and good. Let's look at this concept.
Okay. What is the downside to something good? So, what if you're like really tall?
Most people are like tall is good. People don't like short kings, right? What's the downside to being tall?
Can't fit in your car. Hitting your head. There's a It sucks to travel with tall friends.
I have a tall friend. It sucks to travel for him. It's great for me.
Like, economy feels like first class sometimes. I always got room. All right.
And what if you're too rich? What do you have too much money? Huh?
Then you become weird. Maybe. You don't know who to trust.
You have tax problems. You're always trying to hide money from the government. And you never know if somebody really likes you for you.
That's a problem. See, there's always a problem. What if you're too smart?
Well, smart people overthink everything. And they're annoying to be around most of the time. They really are.
It's easy to see like what might be bad and the good, but what's the good and the bad? That's a lot harder skill to develop here. Now, what if you're too short?
Yeah. Easy. You're fun size.
I love that. We consume less resources, everybody. Y'all are killing the environment.
Yeah. Okay. What if you're poor or broke?
What's the good in that? You don't have fun. You get really inventive, right?
Yes, for sure. Nothing to lose. Only up, baby.
Yeah. Yeah. Let's go.
Let's go. See what I'm saying? It's not all bad.
And you know who your friends are cuz nobody hanging out with poor broke people for no reason. You really know. You never have to question that.
What you should do is create a too much list for yourself. What do people accuse me of being too much of? I'm too loud.
I'm too this. I'm too that. Just just go to town.
Then ask yourself, this is what we do. We reframe it and we flip it. We say, "Well, who needs this?
Why is this an advantage? How might this be a gift? This is the beginning process of leaning into your shadow self and healing from inside to remember those are good things, not bad things.
And you double down on them. Okay. Uh this is a campaign for Montana tourism.
And they ask people, "What do you think of Montana?" They're like, "There's nothing here to do. Just mountains, trees, and streams. There's nothing here." So, you know what the brilliant ad people did?
That's their campaign. Nothing here. See how you do this guys?
Okay. Southwest Airlines. Sometimes you love them, sometimes you hate them, but they cheap.
That's why, right? So, their line is fairs. That's it.
It makes sense. Okay. Mini Cooper.
Mini Cooper. This is how we go different. Okay.
Mini Cooper is really a small vehicle. So, instead of trying to compete with us uh like the SUVs and these larger gasg guzzling powerful vehicles, they just lean in being really small. Okay?
So, they take their weakness and they make it a strength. This is gorilla marketing. This is how you do branding.
And they turn this into their messaging, right? So we say if you're really small, it packs a punch. And and this is the ad.
Packs a punch. If we're really small, we can say float like a butterfly, sting like a uh sometimes we're playing with fire. And maybe because you've met your match, less motor.
See how we do that? Hopefully what I've done is I've teased you a little bit with some of these ideas in terms of why you should be leaning into what makes you different. I I want you to know this one thing about yourself is that the things that have been taught out of you, your individuality, your creativity is the thing that makes you you.
I want you to be the youest you you can be because the more you you are, the more you are. And if you lean into that, you're going to start to develop an authentic brand. And and mostly it you're going to be able to look in the mirror and love that person who shows up every single day.
Right? So my my opinion on this is life is really short. Like we're closer to death than we are to living.
We really are. I know that's a macob thing to say, but I'm a realist. I'm grounded in this fact.
I'm rooted by this. So, please do not spend another day doing work that you don't like for companies that you don't love, for causes you don't believe in. And I'm out of time.
Thanks very much, everybody. [Music]
