Personal Branding—Most Important Thing You Do. Full Video AdobeMAX 2023

I'm going to share this quote with you from my friend yo santosa who says people don't fall in love with corporations they fall in love with personalities and here's the weird thing as I look across the social media landscape and people are posting content all the time it's strange to me how humans try so hard to be corporations to sanitize everything that you do to wash it to run it by a legal team or something so that you don't offend anybody you don't say anything so it's really weird corporations are trying to be more human

and humans are trying to be more like corporations so today I'm want to talk to you about building a powerful personal brand and my main goal is to help you unmask your superpower and it's counterintuitive it's not what you think it is it's the opposite of what you think it is I've been using this term nerd or sometimes a geek and I didn't realize there was a difference and so I looked it up did you know there's a difference between nerd and a geek there's this comedian this joke is totally stolen from him so I'm

gonna his name is Don McMillan and he's funny because he's the only comedian who uses ven diagrams and this is his ven diagram he explains it right so in order for you to be a nerd you have to be really smart you have to have high intelligence quotient and you have to be obsessed about weird things and you also have to be socially awkward so not everybody gets to call themselves a nerd okay and so you start to wonder like well what are the other parts of the VIN diagram so if you're really smart and

you're obsessed that's a geek and if you're really smart and you're super socially awkward that's a dork and the last one's pretty funny if you're socially awkward and you're obsessed do you know what that's called it's totally called a stalker so you know I'm a nerd I'm a nerd because I like to think of myself as all these three things and some of you are probably feeling like real seen and heard right now I I see you okay so uh in 2014 I didn't know a lot about brand or personal branding and I Came Upon

This video and I have to admit I didn't have any idea who this guy was and this designer had asked me like do you know who Aaron drin is I'm like no and she's like you're just being so pretentious like no I really don't know so I had to go look up on the internet and I see this video and the first video I've ever seen of Aaron drin was him at tedex Portland he gets up on stage and he I'll give you a little bit of him drain's not here is he all right cool

cuz I make fun of him the whole time okay he goes up on stage and like my my name is Aaron James drain I'm 40 years old and I'm a big guy trying to make it in the little leagues I'm not qualified to be here um I'm I have no credentials look them up but no warts no nothing and I don't even wear pants so I was like this is the guy everybody's talking about what is going on what is going on here and what what made him so special so lovable so desired that people

will buy anything and get in lines like out the door what's going on with him was it because he's got some like god-given Talent or maybe uh he's just really fortunate a person at the right place at the right time with the right opportunity or maybe he won the genetic Lottery like with his good looks or something so I have a question for all of you what is it about Mr drin Mr ajd that draws so many people to him and you know who you are it's okay if you just identify yourself right now what

is it Charisma Charisma authenticity he's really hot he's really hot he is that you you like the you like him uh fluffy right okay all right all right so I think I know what the answer is and so what I did was I stopped shaving I started shopping at the skinny and shorts store and bought a whole new wardrobe so I was on my way to becoming an influencer I swear to you right um and I just I just want to say a couple things you know like I know how to use generative Phill and

I'm not even sure if Aaron even knows how to use Photoshop so you know Adobe call me we can work something out but the real aha moment came to me when I started to study this video I was like watching it over and over and over again that's my nature I'm obsessed like that and he did something that up until that point I didn't see a whole lot of other designers do so in the SE of say when everybody's trying to blend in we're trying to fit in with the world he just went the opposite

direction and it doesn't take that much for you to stand out to be different and so here's what I came up with and I think it might line up with why you're all attracted to too that he was refreshingly transparent if you just look at the first 60 seconds of his head talk he tells you his middle name people don't usually open up with that he tells you how old he is and that he's from Detroit Michigan and he's into this kind of music and this is his political affiliation he tells you all of it

he tells you about his attack dog Gary and he licks the ice cream he's like good enough for his mouth good enough for my mouth I'm like oo overshare I think so there was this high sense of self-awareness and he was talking about it he's like everybody was busy trying to go to India I was just trying to go to Indiana and it hit and I started to understand this guy was bringing the full weight of his personality and he was not hiding from it he was opening it up to show all of you and

there's something about that that I'm going to talk to you about so I started to know these patterns and um I developed a little bit of a framework okay and it combines my love for Cinema for pop culture and I say that because if I don't I think there's some IP copyright infringement here so it's really a critical analysis of Pop Culture media film and Comics Disney don't sue me okay so I'm really into this stuff and the framework looks something like this and I do want to say something here which is typically I'm doing

personal branding workshops that are 8 to 10 hours long I've done my best to squeeze it into a 60-minute talk so that's I'm just going to pull the highlights for you okay and I'm going to share things that would normally be interactive we would do this together I'd make fun of you you would try you would fail I would make fun of you it would work something like that but I'll just show you what some of the answers look like you don't need to worry about this because I'm just going to pull it apart but

there are basically four components to this thing knowing who you are your origin story where you're born your parents all that stuff that's cultural capital that we trade on all the time you know how when you see somebody like oh you're from the same town that I I went to or you had that teacher you went to that school or you use that same software we connect with each other that way and then there's this larger thing the people that surround us our community um the city in which we live in our allies or Sidekicks

there's a lot of comic book references it gets deeper than this okay and then there's your defining attributes the things that make you you your your catchphrases your your quirks your idiosyncratic nature those are the things that you want to learn and tap into and then there's this element that most people ignore which we'll just call the enemy the things that you stand against the things that are that the things that you're trying to get rid of in in in terms of the world and that's what it kind of looks like and I started to

see these overlaps between comic book mythology and building a personal brand so today I'm going to talk to you about building a powerful personal brand the Adobe Max 2023 version of this and my main goal is to help you unmask your superpower and it's counterintuitive it's not what you think it is it's the opposite of what you think it is and I'm going to do this in a couple of parts so part one is the ugly story now the ugly story has a story too because my wife and I were really good partners um I

I don't ever do the the grocery shopping on occasion I actually go into the store usually I just sit in the car and wait for her uh because she doesn't like to be rushed that's the problem so I'm there like let's just get this and move on so I go there and this thing catches my eye off the shelf it's just screaming at me at Whole Foods and it says hello I'm ugly I'm like are you talking to me wait who's ugly you're ugly or I'm ugly and so I picked this thing up purely based

on design and packaging so for those of you who don't believe design and packaging works this is an example and I'll tell you why because now I'm telling their story to you which you might tell someone else and they paid me Zar for that okay also available call me hash sponsor post okay so I'm going to share a couple things about this package their story and I want you to pay attention to it as if we're doing a workshop together okay and there's this concept called the three FS um it was introduced to me by

this guy named Brenan Kane who was able to grow a million followers in 30 days or something like that it's ridiculous what he's able to do 30 days thanks thanks Alex okay so he talks about when you tell a story humans most humans connect to facts feelings and fun so if you only talk about facts you lose a lot of people if you only talk about feelings or fun then you you're potentially going to miss a third of your audience so whenever you tell a story you try to include all three things so I'm going

to ask you to pay attention I'm going to read to you what is on this package and try to identify what is a fact what is fun and what is feeling and then we'll go over it okay as if we're working together so here's what it says it says beautiful on the inside 100% upcycled peaches so that's a term upcycle I I know that term I've not seen it used in food like this before ugly fruit is thrown out because of the way it looks but you should never judge a fruit by its cover and

by buying this package you are preventing two and a qu pounds of ugly fruit from becoming waste and then more peaches are thrown away in California than the state of Georgia produces and ually right the state known for peaches according to Justin Bieber right and then lastly at the back it say pit happens while we do our best to remove all the pit traces from our product sometimes Mother Nature just won't let go so how did the ugly company turn an unremarkable Bland ho hum product into a charismatic brand one that we will talk about

and it's not because of the product itself CU it is pretty ugly there's small small pieces of dried fruit okay it's not because of that it's not because it tastes any better so number one they were able to turn a weakness into a strength that something is that is discarded becomes something that we value more than the discarded thing and they trade on our guilt for landfill and food waste and food scarcity into gold quite literally okay so were you paying attention to the three fs and they told the compelling story okay so I broke

it down for you so the waste that's a fact that they throw that we throw out more fruit in California than Georgia produces that's a fact and here's where it gets real interesting judging on appearance that's a feeling and so for those of you who have ever been judged or have judged someone and regretted it you're going to start to connect to that story there's an emotional bond that's happening there and then when they say pit happens we know what they mean they don't really mean pit happens so that's just them having fun so we

wink at each other we're in on the joke and we're part of that story now and lastly it's just full of Personality they humanized a pretty bland category I've never paid attention to drive fruit in my life I don't know about you but now all of a sudden I'm paying attention to it because it made it human and it made it relatable and I'm going to give I'm going to share this quote with you from my friend yo santosa who says people don't fall in love with corporations they fall in love with personalities and here's

the weird thing as I look across the social media landscape and people are posting content all the time it's strange to me how humans try so hard to be corporations to sanitize everything that you do to was it to run it by a legal team or something so that you don't offend anybody you don't say anything so it's really weird corporations are trying to be more human and humans are trying to be more like corporations now that doesn't mean that if you have a lot of personality that's a guarantee for Success there is this graphic

that I want to share with you doing a little research from the cut I don't know what the cut is but they have this ven diagram because there's plenty of personalities that we hate apparently so this is the diagram of people we hate okay so it's a it's a diagram between tries too hard doesn't try hard enough and crimes against other celebrities okay so you'll see it's kind of weird so in the tries to hard category you have Kim Kardashian Chris Jenner gwenneth palra Madonna and hathway I think it's pretty accurate I don't know why

but they're all women and there's something interesting about this you'll see where this goes okay and then there's some people who don't try hard at all universally agreed right Lindsay Lohan like come on okay and then crimes against other celebrities they're all men John Mayor Jay Leno Jesse James oh there's an argument happening over here you okay with this graphic you you want me to amend it okay we can do that later all right anyways and then the overlap is quite interesting between the tries too hard and crimes against other celebrities Taylor Swift Angelina Jolie

and Ashton Kutcher and doesn't try hard enough and tries too hard at the same time he's able to pull it off kind of true this is a damn good graphic isn't it that's why I stole it now I want to ask you who do you think oh I'm sorry I messed that part up who who doesn't try enough and commits crimes against other people Kristen Stewart It's amazing so who do you think tries too hard doesn't try hard enough and commits crimes against other celebrities Kanye Kanye I think he tries too hard mostly okay but

you're you're pretty good here um Chris Brown right okay so what is the moral of this lesson besides me just trying to steal a joke is I guess the rule in life is to try but not too hard and just don't hurt other people pretty good rule to live by so we want to make some effort but we definitely don't want to hurt other people on our way up okay part two of this is the 21st century brand and that's what we're here trying to help you do so that you can become more influential so

you can create those kind of opportunities so you can magnetize yourself and draw those things to you it's a wonderful thing when it starts to happen for you and so we're all using the same language I'm going to refer to Marty newers definition of brand a brand is the person's gut feeling about a product service or organization so it's not what you say it is it's what they say it is right so we we know this products are made in factories where brands are built and made in the hearts and the minds of people hearts

and Minds just remember that and then I came upon this article at in the Harvard Business Review uh and there was this thing it like build your personal brand what an amazing okay not that great of an article but they said that your brand is built basically around every interaction that you have that people are forming an opinion about you and if that is true like there are a couple hundred people in this room and everybody here will have a separate opinion about me and each other so does that mean there are possibly infinite versions

of ourselves possibly well I had to do that because I needed to show the slide that maybe we're living see how it works you guys in the Multiverse and you notice the last couple of years maybe the last 10 years the conversation on the Multiverse is increasing across different media it's really interesting I'm I'm fascinated by these kinds of Concepts well at least in the Marvel Cinematic Universe the Multiverse is a bad thing like there's one true you and then there's alternates right and so season two Loki's out that it's awesome the best series you

know the other one's not so good that there's a whole time variance Authority that's trying to prevent these variants from existing so much so that he who remains is trying his sole job is to maintain the sacred timeline the one version and actually eliminate the other versions of you so we're kind of at war with these different versions of ourselves that's at least my premise now I want to ask you this question What If instead of us fighting against these different versions that we are all meant to be a more unified whole that we can

learn to live in peace with these different versions and so that we can go from this disjointed self that's misaligned to something much better something more cohesive and whole I'm going to talk about that so this is the new brand Roi this is a big concept because a lot of times when people see me they hear about branding personal branding they think I'm going to teach them social media hacks how to hack the algorithm what you to post it ain't about that that was a trick to get you here I want to do something that's

more meaningful more Soulful to you so it takes a little bit of work for me to establish the foundation for this but I tell you it's completely worth it okay so I believe in this idea that there's karmic equity and if you think of a bank it's like you make a deposit every time you do something that's good and you expect nothing in return and the more that you can do this over time without taking anything out it builds in a compounded way it builds exponential but every time you ask for something it resets back

to zero your account gets drained back to zero does that make sense so when you post a piece of content and it's to Market your course or to hire you or to give you an opportunity or to review your portfolio or your resume you are emptying your bank out again and to me karma is just the energy you use to reset that balance that's what we're trying to do so I Came Upon This the old rules of brand awareness and it's pretty solid here make something for everyone tell our story attract customers and to build

brand awareness a lot of you are doing this very Playbook right now the the new rules look something like this understand the customer story make something that they want not what you want give them a story to tell and create brand Affinity so I take you back to the ugly company the ugly fruit company what they did was they understood my story what I want to do which is to reduce waste and to um not fill up uh the the dump with things that we we don't necessarily need to throw away so it's like into

conservation all those things and it's now I'm going around telling their story and that's what you really want and so we're trying to find this balance between the things you have to do for money versus the the long-term game which is to build massive brand value and these are at odds with each other so that's what the Harvard Business review article talks about that Performance Marketing is good for short-term Revenue but it comes at the cost of long-term brand building value so it's Revenue versus value and I'm going to show it to you and how

it looks okay so instead of playing the short-term game we're going to go play the infinite game the game which we get to play forever for as long as possible and that's the whole point of the game in itself now I Came Upon news piece for Reese Witherspoon and I think she's a pretty awesome person a pretty awesome actress but not like the best and I didn't realize this but she has grown a massive social following 29 million followers on Instagram and here's what she's been able to do with the the 29 million followers on

Instagram she's turned this into a book club with two and a half million people reading books anybody here part of her book club okay a couple people all right all right you don't have to be shy about it I see you I they can't see you I see you it's okay all right yeah okay it's all right to be a you know so here's what she's been able to do she takes her her General brand awareness and the connection she's being able to build with fans of films that she's been on she creates a book

club and she recommends books now here's the really interesting thing in order for you as an author to have your book circulated within the book club you have to Grant her the media rights rude woman so she can make movies TV shows or whatever she wants but then you're thinking isn't that exploiting the author how many authors would like to get their book in front of two and a half million hungry Minds that would be fantastic for the author so it's a win-win and optioning your movie rights doesn't mean they don't get money either they

get money when the movie's made as well so she has this ultimate data collection machine which is I think these books are good you read them then they tell her these books are great and BAS on that she knows what TV shows and movies to produce so she sold her company her production company hello sunshine for $900 million good on you girl girl next door does all right so it got me to think like okay so you're not in movies uh you're not a nepo baby whatever so what can you do to become a more

attractive character okay so I've been thinking about this and I usually would do this in Workshop so I would ask people think about somebody throughout time in history that has held a a place of high esteem and Regard in your mind right so you might think of some people like Mother Teresa Gandhi or the Dal Lama and then I asked now now really think about them why are they so attractive to you what is it about them and I would do this with a large group of people and we almost always end up with the

same three characteristics they are they're self-confident they're self-aware and they're vulnerable think back to ugly fruit company they're confident they're self-aware and they're vulnerable so we can borrow these Concepts and we can start to apply them when we look at our own personal brand so now I'm going to break down the more specific components of it okay the first really counterintuitive idea is that we must be willing to be vulnerable to build meaningful connection that's a Berne Brown quote I have a slide for somewhere so you're Perfectly Imperfect the way you are it got me

into looking into Carl Young and he describes like ourselves in a very different way than Freud does that there's this Persona and all of us are in our Persona right now it's how we want the world to perceive us it's what we do to get along with everyone else and then the ego regulates the Persona our front-facing self versus our real self our shadow self this stuff that is private that we rarely show to anybody maybe to our only our trusted best friend or a partner in life or maybe a sibling or a parent and

when there's conflict between these two the public and the shadow South at least in the comic book world that looks something like this I love the Incredible Hulk because he is the manifestation of a split personality disorder you have the cold stoic Dr Bruce Banner who is like an incredible intellect and then you have the Hulk who raging emotion the angrier he gets the more powerful he gets so therefore he has unlimited power as long as he remains angry it's kind of an interesting character not just Hulk smash so here's the problem if we all

show up at as our Persona how we want the world to perceive Us and how we get along or how we show up to get along what happens when you spend so much time doing that and my fear and my belief and observation is that we forget who we really are you pretend to be somebody long enough and you forget who you are I this is also my theory that why people like actors and actresses who pretend to be lovers in a movie actually fall in love afterwards cuz they go through the same emotions that

you would have have I don't think your heart and mind can figure out the difference so this is the battle that we have to work through so personal branding is not so much an Act of Creation it's an act of self-discovery your self story your self-concept who are you and what makes you you so back to the world of comic books there are characters who have no difference between their public Persona and their secret Alter Ego or identity Reed Richards Mr Fantastic is the same person he doesn't have to hide anything in his world he's

a hero he's wealthy he's respected so I think that's a clue cuz sometimes I think these stories are designed to send a message to us in a more palatable form that's easier to consume and so what I'd like to do is do a little Shadow work with you this is the part where you're going to have to take out a piece paper I think or just write it with your iPhone or whatever you have okay or pixel or whatever you use um you know how I feel about that okay so and I just want to

say this uh as I invite you to try to participate and be vulnerable and EXP a different darker side of yourself that I'm not a mental health professional not even close to one and sometimes when we do these exercises we open cans of warms that I do not know how to deal with I'm not trained to deal with so I I just say you you you need to do this under that understanding that we can only go so far here okay so here's the first prompt for you it's the very easy prompt what we do

is we peel back the the the layers of the onion we start easy and we get more and more like progressively more difficult okay how do most people people see you how would they describe you your personality how would they describe what it is that you do so you just want to write like one or two Word answers to this okay now obviously you're not going to be able to work through the workshop here in 90 minutes or 32 minutes left now okay so just that's the easy part we can always describe what it is

we do I'm a designer I'm a photographer I'm an illustrator I'm I'm a social media manager whatever it is that you do you can write that and most people see me as something okay so I'm going to share with you happened when we were on our European tour when I actually did the workshop some of the answers some of the people are in this room I won't say who they are we'll see okay so my friend Annalie she's a brand strategist she's kind she's caring she's nurturing she's deeply empathetic uh she's a public speaker and

instructor she's got this really warm supportive inclusive tone and she's she's this blonde woman so she's like this ray of sunshine and that might be literally the kinds of answers you might write to that first prompt as you can see it's just like what the public sees now the second prompt to this is but what they don't know is that I really struggle with this thing right so some of you might see me as this gregarious outgoing person who creates a lot of content it's everywhere all the time what you don't know is I just

gasping for air over there with stomach pains just minutes before coming up on stage so now we start to kind of show the world the other side the side that we very rarely show other people and there's this rule from entrepreneurs organization EO and EO is an incredible organization anybody here EO members we got to work on that they're all millionaires okay so maybe you'll be there soon or you're already there but you didn't join yet they're all they had this thing called a 5% rule so what they say is about 90% of what you

share you share with the world right it's the top five and the bottom five that you hide from everyone so if you have an incredible opportunity if you close a $3 million gig you don't go on Instagram and share that cuz you're afraid people judge you there's that expression that people want you to see you do well but just not better than them so it creates feelings of jealousy right that's why when you when you get a new whip you might not want to post it because you know your friends from your old neighborhood might

judge you in a certain way or they might come and Rob you either way and then there's that dark stuff like uh abuse uh divorce that you're going through a really tough time whatever it is that's the stuff you don't share but in EO they say leave the 90% to the rest of the world show us the 5% your high highs and your low lows and so I think that's a that's a hint for us as to what we need to do and what we need to get in touch with so an's going to go

a little bit deeper so she struggles with self-confidence so there's the opposite side the side that she she shows people what they see and then there's the side that's really her so she struggles with self-confidence that she feels guilt about wanting to be in the spotlight because she's Swedish and she there's this thing it's the idea of the law of yante where you're not supposed to stand out everybody's equal everybody's the same a bunch of Europeans here whether you're Swedish or not know what I'm talking about they feel the same way there's many expressions for

this in Europe in America we love ourselves we praise excellence and exceptionalism the rest of the world they don't know what we're doing here they think we're all crazy okay so she has a lot of insecurity that she's like approval seeking and that she's like too emotional those are her things so what we want to do is we want to start to generate a bunch of words that start to make us feel really uncomfortable that are us inside that we're afraid to share with the world this is really scary stuff but this is your Shadow

word okay um so when we do this in Workshop forat you can imagine because everybody's seeing everybody like no one wants to say anything but when it opens up the gates just go crazy and then it's a flood of emotion it's a beautiful thing for me to witness I feel like when I run these workshops if people are not crying I failed I've totally failed okay so Tom he was at one of the workshops he says I struggle with being a people pleaser okay let's work with that James struggles with substance abuse he's a recovering

addict Phyllis struggles with age discrimination she's gone through multiple careers in her life and so people look at her like shouldn't you be doing this by now okay so I'm going to take it back to analie here so her Shadow word is attention seeker and then I asked her like what lesson did you learn from your Shadow word I think all the challenges that have been put in front of you were designed to teach you a lesson the problem with most of us is we don't recognize that as a gift we see it as an

obstacle we don't learn what we need to learn and guess what happens we're doomed to repeat it over and over again so she had a really difficult time she goes Chris being an attention seeker is really bad considering where I come from the society and the culture in which I was raised but what did you learn from it anal and how did you overcome this and how did it make you stronger and this is the path towards healing from this thing that causes you pain to figure out where you need to go so if you're

a recovering addict what did you learn if you're a people pleaser what did you learn now you've settled into what your Shadow word is we're going to change it by adding a Transformer word a Transformer word changes the meaning of original word so your Shadow word could be one or two words probably not more than that and then you add a Transformer word and so here's literally what Tom did at the workshop and I was just so pleased that somebody actually had some success so it was great it was a good feeling for me so

Tom said I'm a proud people pleaser is that okay Chris I'm say if that fits with you and it feels good to you you know run with that but it's interesting because Tom builds communities and if you don't know who Tom is Tom is the founder of design Cuts he is the community guy and he wrote a book on this called the community guy or something like that so that becomes a thing of strength for him now let's go back to analie analie uh and we're trying to work through this and it took a lot

to get this out maybe she's a reformed attention seeker that feels a little soft to me U maybe she's a conflicted attention seeker or a conscious attention seeker it's not going anywhere so we we have to kind of rethink this and then we say like maybe she's an attention Economist but then that takes away the original Shadow word right now it's like you're doing something different you're like Gary vaynerchuk or something you day trade attention all of a sudden right so we have to be careful when we add the Transformer word that we don't wash

it of the real meaning and the power it has for us okay instead of being an attention Economist maybe you're an attention Trader same meaning but then I started thinking like what's another word for traitor like a day Traer your an attention broke her and then we have fun with the way that we write it so that it's a reminder for herself that if you're not careful attention will break you and that's a lesson that she needs to learn in all different ways and I think she's on to something here okay so if you can

do this take three words you can turn them into two words or you can combine two words and make them into one hybrid word you get bonus points if you can use alliteration or rhyme but what I C you against is making it cute when we do this people are like oh I can use three Rs but it means nothing or It Sounds Clever but it has no real emotional value to you I didn't ask James for permission now there's lots of James in the room I just say it's a James I I can do

it okay so he started coming with ideas like design addict art addict tic that got some eyebrows James see what I'm saying yeah but he likes that he likes that it's sounds funny like he's an arct maybe he has an an art dition or maybe he's a designoholic okay so when we do this exercise people are like yeah but I'm still struggling okay okay well there's more ways to do this we can lean into the people who hate us and we can just embrace them with the warmest hug and we can take back our power

so another problem that you can look at is what would your naysayers your worst critics and your cynics and trolls say about you excluding family what would they say about you so I'll show how this exercise looks right so if you like like Phyllis she they might say she's old she's past her prime she's she's a has been washed up a gezer Dusty ancient dinosaur grandma Jerry atric remember she's a late career switcher who's also a brand strategist and she did this not with me I'm just using her as an example here I can't take

credit for it so she uses grandmother as grandmother I'm like you're so clever Phyllis you should run this Workshop but she's not here so I'm running it okay so here's what somebody uh who talks about business and marketing a lot a woman and so these are some of what the critics might say about her that she's business obsessed she's greedy she doesn't have a priority straight she's money hungry she's a gold digger a capitalistic Covetous Material Girl and she takes Gold Digger and she turns into gold digger and this is Jenna Kutcher she has like

the number two podcast for marketing I believe I'm not jealous not at all okay so my friend Rick Morris he's a freelance designer art director creative director so he he calls himself a noble assassin and then my other friend Ash Thorp who's like had tremendous success uh and an amazing body of work some of you guys know who Ash Thorp is he calls himself an art prostitute he's not beating around the bush he's just keeping it real and we we know people who are ghost writers I'm like you're a ghost writer shouldn't you just be

a growth writer so there's this thing that if you if you say it by withholding your tongue with a lith you can sometimes hear it differently so if you're I'm a go fighter then you can write it out differently you can have fun with that and then I saw this on a on um on a food truck uh the guys who bake they're the yeasty boys that's pretty good right okay it's who they are it's what they too and there's this other person on social media he's a real Fitness buff he runs like militant workout

programs he goes by the name of Primos swolder okay and and then I have a friend who does speech uh he coaches people on how to be a better speaker he has a program called Mind Body Spirit and he really believes in martial arts and Jiu-Jitsu I'm like Marshall what just call it martial art why you working so hard okay so I said earlier that staying vulnerable is a risk that we have to take if we want to make a meaningful connection and here's the problem and the reason why I would encourage you to reduce

down what it is that you describe yourself not what you do but how you describe yourself there's a big difference here it's about you your personality is to make it as simple as possible to understand because complexity is the enemy of comprehension retention and execution and what you want to do is be able to create something that other people can tell the story for you without you being in the room that's how you know your story is really good so it requires a lot of editing for you to arrive at your two-word brand the two

brand is not your entire story it's not even part of the story it's just to get people to become interested in saying tell me more what does it mean to be a brandother what does it mean to be a primal Soldier so when when you arrive at your two-word brand you can then now use this as a way to tell stories and I'll give you an example of how I do this okay so story I'll give you some of the structure too now when we look at story I think like who are some of the

best storytellers who have multi-billion dollar intellectual property of course Marvel and DC and Stanley is the master at creating characters uh he's created some of the most iconic characters and there was a a lecture that he gave I think at UCLA on how he created Spider-Man he goes what we have to do is we have to just figure out the hardest thing to do is figure out your superpower and then once you figure out the superpower you can give it a name and then we have to invent some personal problems so he was sitting in

his room and he saw a fly crawling up on the wall he's like that's a superpower what if you can crawl up on the wall so that he figured out the superpower was the hardest part he what we call him uh Mosquito Man fly man that's not cool Spiderman and as he tells the story he runs to his editor he says I got this hero it's called Spider-Man he say that's the dumbest idea Stan don't you know people are afraid of spiders he goes what else you got well you don't even understand like he's a

teenager he goes St no heroes are teenagers only Sidekicks can be teenagers well you know how this story works out so he's the wall crawler he's Spider-Man and he's a teenager and this is a clue for you on how you can tell your story your superpower begins with your two- word brand and it defi it starts to tell people a little bit about who you are and what makes you unique and different so now we're able to to dive into the to the origin story now he knows his powers he knows what he's going to

call him he knows a little bit about his problems and so a lot of people uh don't know the full story of Spider-Man he was an orphan raised by his uncle Uncle Ben and Aunt May he's an ordinary kid who gets picked on by a lot of people being bullied um and he's kind of a really super smart geek nerd and he's bitten by a radioactive spider and when he does so he immediately uses this newfound power to get revenge to seek Fame and to money to to gain money and there was this pivotal moment

in his life in his storyline in which a criminal was running out of a TV studio and the cops say stop him and Spider-Man's like or Peter Parker says it's not my job not my job and you know what happens to the rest of that story right so a lot of people think Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man when he was bitten by radioactive spider that's not when he became Spider-Man that's when he gained the power but when he decided not to act and to do the right thing that's when he became Spider-Man because what happened was

that criminal who got away from him was the exact person who murdered his Uncle Ben and that's a tragedy of Spider-Man and he's one of the most tragic characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe like every time I think about him I just want to cry because he feels so guilty for using his power for himself that he's always putting his needs second every single time and if you haven't seen it uh across the spiderverse and into the spiderverse i ball like a baby I highly recommend you watch that so this also kind of gives you

a clue as to why certain characters are so sticky like why we remember them and we'll talk about them and our children and our children's children will talk about them and how they architect and design these things and the necessity of tragedy and Trauma in building up your story and Robert mcke who wrote the book story who's a story consultant he says there's if there's no conflict there's no story stories have to have conflict and in the in the fictional world we can see this and that almost all these Heroes they're orphans or they're abused

and whatever is going on black panthers father was killed in a terrorist attack according to MCU uh Clark kenel his whole planet was exploded like all of his people died his parents died is like that's a pretty tragic beginning Tony star parents killed Tony Stark is an alcoholic Daredevil's mom was the nun that he didn't find out till much later in his life vision's father homicidal AI robot blackbolt killed his parents accidentally by speaking you know Batman's story so there's this part where I start to wonder like why is it that some characters go through

a traumatic experience in their life and emerge a hero and while some become a villain do you guys know why the adversity and Trauma like how they process this so my my feeling is the hero overcomes and becomes stronger because of the trauma whereas the villain stays victimized and wants to get revenge and wants to hurt other people as a response so when you're crafting your story and you're trying to tell your story adversity is your ally tap into that let people in you become much more relatable and real for this so how do you

use this in storytelling now I first came up on stage and I introduced myself as a loud introvert and it's not a great example of a two-word brand but it's mine I'm using it okay and the way I use this in storytelling is when I want to make a post I want to make sure that the post ends on Chris is a loud introvert he's socially awkward he struggles with all this public speaking stuff okay so I was going through a batch of my old files or my old phot photos and I came ACR across

this one where I want an Emmy for a title that I designed and I was like what am I to write about this I'm not going to write like yeah congratulations to me I'm so proud of me my team whatever blah blah blah so I wrote about the story about how painful it was for me to think about the 30 seconds that I have to say when I accept my award and then my knees are shaking and I'm in the audience and a whole bunch of weird things happen in that moment and this is the

post that is the most liked and engaged post I've I've ever put up on LinkedIn you can see has almost 8,000 likes or points of Engagement so if you figure out what your two-word brand is and you search for the stories it should dovea into that that reinforces your two-word brand does that make sense everybody okay good you guys had more energy earlier I get it end of day I know I'm throwing a lot of stuff at you it's cool okay um here's another way for you to find out who you are in your story

because it's not easy to know yourself it's one of the most difficult things to do uh is the mentor and some of you know this uh you know Batman's Mentor his teacher is also his enemy razag Gul you know who my mentor was Jose cabay and he and I are the exact opposite and there was a period in time where he became my Nemesis it's kind of weird how that works so some of you have a parent that plays both roles both your mentor and your Nemesis and if that is your story tap into that

it's very interesting for me to see like who's whose teacher Tony Robbins one of the most powerful wealthy successful personal development people you know his mentor was Jim ran he met Jim ran when he was like 18 or 19 years old and that changed his life and Jim Ron's Mentor was a guy named Jay Earl scha whose Mentor was also James beckenridge it's quite interesting how the mentor shapes You by just saying this was my mentor we make assumptions about who you are and your values and your beliefs just because we know who your Mentor

is is so tap into that it's really interesting to me that Gary ve often cites his mom now more than his dad as his mentor first half of his story was all about his dad the hustle thing immigrant working really hard now it's about empathy kindness I already mentioned Bruce White so here's the next promp for you who shape your thinking your values and your beliefs what did you learn from them and here's where you add the conflict back in how did you initially resist so for me and Jose Jose is like let's go make

videos on YouTube I'm like dude I do not want to do that I'm too old I say things that piss people off and I don't want to risk my business you do it and you know when he told me I'm not doing this unless you do it I need you not behind the camera but in front of the camera and him doing so changed the course of my life and I'm very grateful for him for that so think about who your Mentor is figure out the conflict and why you resisted and what lesson you learned

tell that story I mentioned before about the the the community and the culture the city says a lot about you the city in which you were born and the city in which you choose to live in it's part of your cultural capital so ask yourself like okay what do these things say about me where I live and where I was born and so most of you here live in Los Angeles right there's a lot of people here from La this works better when we're not in La so right so we we we know what all

the common stereotypes are about people from La this this plays much better outside that there's a lot of superficiality plastic surgery everybody's Super Hyper health conscious everybody's fit in drinking green juice right not everybody here obviously not judging that it's like everybody's flashy and Loud city of stars or celebrities everywhere where you can live the big dream and horrific traffic most of this is true so when we when we lean into this like what assumptions do people have about the city in which you live in you embrace it you don't fight it and I used

to live on the west side there was a church a very Progressive church and they have the most amazing messaging and marketing branding campaign I've ever seen this is what they say come in for a faith lift good right from a church come on this is winning like gold Awards writing remember that Lis thing it comes in handy sometimes so the villains the villains are as important as the heroes in the story and I would argue probably even more important in your story than what you say you do because true fans need true critics um

Freddy O from snas a Swedish agency he has a book and he has this concept make enemies the order is important make enemies and gain fans because when we find out what you stand against we we like okay the enemy of my enemy is my friend so what you have to do is you have to learn how to pick a fight you have to fight against something and so here's the interesting thing I think the reason why these characters I'm going to share with you are successful is because look at they're villains they're brilliant they're

usually the equal and opposite of the hero Superman's all powerful he's a little dumb he's the Boy Scout Lex Luther's brilliant genius uh and and is super wealthy but he's very weak physically Batman's super strong Joker's crazy Batman has a code of conduct Joker has a Cod of chaos and then Spider-Man's enemies go on and on and on including just being a misunderstood teenager it's tough to be Peter Parker so when you start to look at the villains in your story ask yourself what annoys me what makes me mad because your complaint can become your

calling there's a rule that somebody shared with me you're allowed to complain about things one time if you complain about it twice you're just a whiner so whatever I tell my kids do something about it stop complaining invent the solution to your problem so make a list of some villains in your story and give them a cute nickname when you label them you own them and nobody's better at this to Donald Trump he's the master this is a master class Harvard CH teacher class about this okay there's a guy who who blew up on the

Internet his name is Andrew Tate a very controversial character and he basically says anybody who doesn't believe what I believe you're the enemy you're just the Matrix and when press explain what the Matrix is he doesn't even explain it but there's a bunch of young men out there like the Matrix Man The Matrix is out to get me he's arrested indicted The Matrix The Matrix and on a less serious note there's this company that's done a brilliant job in marketing I think they're based out of San Diego called Dr Squatch and I saw these ads

they didn't pay me I watched all of them from beginning to end multiple times to study so Dr Squatch the one of their funny ad is a guy who's in the woods takes the dish he throws against a rock and breaks he goes you're you're a man you're not a dish doesn't even make sense and he goes do you know what's in your soap it's mostly detergents chemicals things you can't even pronounce so their enemy they just made them up it's big soap they borrowed the language of big farma big tobacco and they just made

it up and I became a customer like 2 and half years is going now it's the power of identifying an enemy giving them a name and saying now we're against this I'm against big anything big government big soap whatever You Got Me In Dove their enemies beauty standards brilliant campaign I'm a Mac I'm a PC right oh well okay all right we're going to go there I think you might be outnumbered friend but we'll see and then there's this oat company called Oatley oat milk it's like milk but made for humans the Dairy Farmers sued

them for this oh yeah they won it's all right and seven up the way they they launched the brand stun Cola Patagonia we're in business to save our home planet you know who the enemy is so what you want to do is you want to Galvanize your community by aligning them a common cause to fight against something I think the only way that humans will have world peace is when we get invaded by aliens now we'll put aside our petty differences and we'll go fight the enemy it's the only time we'll come together so just

ask yourself we're in business to end what not to make nice with but to end this idea and so when we look at the future when we describe ourselves I I know I piss off people when I say this I think of the future as private art school without the crippling debt shots are fired okay style we're coming to the end of the presentation here style is like the icons and lexicons your language and your symbols so you want to start to develop and be very intentional about how you present yourself because packaging does matter

and this is the package because you are the package and style defined by John Prince or prime is if you keep making the same mistake long enough it becomes your style so you look at da Punk seea wanted to keep herself out of the media the Limelight so she wears his wigging becomes super iconic it becomes part of her brand Warhol word is wig it just becomes him Steve Jobs mock turtleneck and mom jeans needs to consult somebody on that but whatever you know and and lizo right so you you embrace all these parts about

you the good the bad and ugly and so you ask yourself and I like to reframe it like this instead of like what makes you ugly and bad like what were you blessed with so I'm bald I have shiny oily skin and I'm nearsighted so I just think it's time to accessorize based on that okay so I start wearing hats and the hats becomes my I like part of my identity and opportunities have happened there we won't get into that I'm nearsighted why not make the most of your eyewear so I wear these big bulky

frames so that you can recognize me they're part of my identity so when I used to work in the motion design industry I studied animation and I don't know if you know this but when they design characters for animation they look at their silhouette first before they design any of the details you can tell each and every single character who PO is who's the Mantis who's the snake and so you start to think about this and then you start to think about color and I want to show you how powerful color can be in the

Identity or design of your identity okay here everybody looks exactly the same all I'm have to do is put Red Socks one person they stand out but we can keep going we can give them red glasses or a red hat a red watch and a t-shirt with a red X over it so we start to design our identities so that people can see us and recognize us and it becomes part of who we are and our part of our personal brand so what can you do with the color pink and white well kareim Rasheed has

built an entire personal brand around this pink and white if you don't know who he is look him up so what you should do is you start to design and develop your own mood board collect the things that you start to think okay this could be me not now but maybe in a couple years and work towards building these things this is a mood board I built a while while ago and then I eventually bought everything that's on here okay set the intention then do it did you know that your signature can become your signature

style so just out of curiosity how many of you guys would identify as graphic designers just raise your hand and keep your hand up a lot of you now how many of you you keep your hand up if you're a logo designer okay so about half of the designers okay thank you all right so for you non-graphic designer logo designers it's really interesting all you have to do is take a bunch of different instruments markers pens a twig a brush dip them in ink and just write your name over and over again like a hundred

times with different instruments on different types of media and eventually you'll come up with this or this or this you guys recognize that signature right yeah I love Andrew Schultz bid on this he says I can't vote for Biden he don't got merch Donald Trump got merch merch game is strong you can't even argue that again whatever your political affiliation is doesn't matter the thing that you can do and and uh is to look at your initials and design your own monogram and so I have a couple here just to share with you some of

you might recognize and then I will show you my example here this is my name and so I take the C the D and the O and I put it in here this is my system my icons my lexicon my phrases and the last bit I want to share with you is once you know who you are what you stand for your story you can take a little snowflake and you keep building on that until it becomes an avalanche and it's a beautiful thing um and whenever possible in the world of ideas to name something

is for you to own it if you can name an issue you can own it and here's evidence of this More's laws Murphy's Law you get the drill so what we want to do is we want to take our own name our own identity our logo our signature our Expressions our beliefs we start to create something from that so this is how I show you so you could you can screen capture this if you want I would like for you to practice this once you figure out your name and your personal brand you you'll you'll

come to something here try adding something before your name try adding something after your name and see what happens okay so now here we go so we call our super fans the donuts our community donation our office space the dojo the newsletter that we don't write a daily dose the the podcast maybe raw do my AI robot is called doot a blockchain that I'm not working on is called crypto and maybe tools that I'll develop is called Play-Doh and it can keep going right so you can have lots of fun with this so I'm going

to work on a book called for sales strategies called dofu the way right maybe our models don't not worry and if I started a software company probably called Adobe and what if you wanted to write a book maybe it's called pocket full of D it just works okay here's the summary here here's all the things in one slide here weak is strong perfect is boring real is relatable stop selling start serving complexity is an enemy adversity is an ally not to to to run away from figure out what you two word brand is and your

two-word brand is going to be a shadow word that creates some pain for you that's piece of truth and you that you've been hiding from the rest of the world add a Transformer and you can own it I I'd like to end it on this before I get out of here a quote from Picasso the meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away I wanted to make an amend amendment to that that you are the gift so here's my resources everybody these are the books I'll

pause here so you can take it okay I'll pause here and you can take it thanks very much everybody I'm at Booth b230 if you want to come by I'd love to see you thank [Applause] [Music] you