Tag: Knowledge Worker

Personal Branding 101

9 Lessons and Tips in Personal Branding for modern knowledge workers, especially as work becomes more distributed and remote!

Personal Branding 101

Hello!

In this tome, I will talk about lessons I learned from a conversation with Ashish Kila (a friend from MDI) on personal branding. When I showed him a draft of this one, he said that this is more of Networking 101. I disagree and I think I will let you decide. 

A quick intro to Ashish Kila (AK)


AK manages Perfect Group and apart from all the fabulous work around value investing and the impact he has had on his community, he has worked really hard on his personal brand to improve his network. He has ensured that the right kind of people know him for the right kind of things. I mean talk to anyone from the world of value investing and there are odds that they would have heard about him if they aren’t friends with him already! 

So, as a practitioner and student of branding and marketing, I sat with him and tried to decode how he’s done this.

Before I launch into what he said, some disclaimers… 

  • This is based on my notes from the meeting that went like a whirlwind. AK had so much to share and I had so little speed with my scribbles and notes. So I may have missed a lot of what he said. I may have also attributed things to him that he may not have said. AK, I am sorry for this. 
  • I am presenting the conversation as a set of “lessons”. AK did not make this classification into lessons per se. 
  • These “lessons” are in a specific order – each lesson builds on the subsequent one! 

Wait.

What is a personal brand? 

If I am going to post this 2000-word tome on how to build one, I better define it. 
Your personal brand is nothing but the sum total of your reputation, the value of your word, the experiences that people have had with you, the after-taste they are left with after they meet you, the kind of work you do (quality, quantity, timeliness, etc) and more such things. 

And why is personal branding important?

Well, the information economy we live in, every opportunity that comes to you comes because of your personal brand. 

Gone are the days when people would look for the absolute best person to do a gig. Sounds counter-intuitive but clients these days would rather work with a reliable person. And not with someone they don’t know, even if that person is THE best ever. 

So, unless you are like furniture in your workplace, you will need to work on and cultivate your brand. 

And, without further ado, here are the lessons! 

1️⃣ Lesson 1.
If you are an entrepreneur just starting out, you are the face of your brand! And rather than investing in a brand for your company, work on building your personal brand and you’d notice that it would rub off onto your business! 

In AK’s case, post his MBA, he joined the business that his father started decades ago. When AK started working with his father, as the cliche goes, he was fresh out of the boat and he had to work hard to create his brand in the value investing world. And of course, with time, that has helped the brand Perfect Group. 

This is probably the biggest lesson for me. Even though I am a marketer for hire, I have remained behind a veil all my life. If I want my business to flourish, I need to be out there a lot more. After all, I am the biggest advocate of my business! I thus need to work hard on my personal brand and that means work on content and appearances (and heck, even put my photo out there).

2️⃣ Lesson 2.
Identify themes that you wish to be identified with.

Malala – Women’s rights
Bill Gates – Software, Global health
Piyush Pandey – mustache, advertising 
Ranveer Singh – irreverence
Sanjay Bakshi – value investing 

Get the drift? 

And EACH thing you do MUST be a part of that one theme. And the theme must be so simple that a 5-year old must be able to understand that. 

An easy way to think about themes is to think about the hashtags that you would want to be identified for. 

Lemme elaborate on AK. He clearly stands for three things, IMHO. Value investing, Community, and Leadership. Each thing he does – teaching, mentoring, masterclasses, tweets, blog posts, etc serves one of those themes. 

If you are someone like me that chases multiple things, pick and choose three hashtags that you could stand for!

And here is a question for you. What are your themes? 

For me, all my life, I have taken pride in being a Jack of all trades and thus have remained all over the place when it comes to my personal brand. I met a friend the other day and he said that no one knows for sure what I do! But now, after this session, it will change. I will stand for creative entrepreneurship, startups, and impact. Yes, these are fuzzy. I need to work hard on my brand. Will evolve with time. 

3️⃣ Lesson 3.
Add value. 
Each thing you do MUST add value. If you can not add value, forget about trying to build a personal brand / network.

AK is known so wide and far because he is out there helping others, connecting them, gifting them books (relevant I must add), being of use. And tangible use at that. There are enough and more armchair activists. A conversation with AK adds real value. To a point that I’d be happy to pay him. 

If you want a network / brand, you MUST add value. Around the themes that you want to be known for! 

4️⃣ Lesson 4.
Create content. 
One easy way to add value is to create content. This could be a blog post, a podcast, an interview, a well thought out tweet, or a simple link that allows your followers to derive value from.

Content is like compounding. It takes consistent effort over the long-term to see the tsunami of results. 
And like compounding, sooner you start larger the results.
Like compounding, start with a bang! Start big. Let the law of numbers work for you! You can’t expect to do tiny things if you want an enormous impact. 

Oh, and each piece of content must have a well-planned distribution strategy. It is no longer enough to just churn out valuable pieces. You need to take them to places where your audience is! 

A simple and powerful tip that AK gave me? Find a publication that has a wider reach than you. And write for them. I am on it. 

5️⃣ Lesson 5.
What you do on SM is important! 
On Social Media, most people (apart from your friends and family) follow you because they get to learn from you. And what you post adds value. 

So, each piece that you put on SM, it has to add value. And it has to be a part of the theme that you wish to be known for. 

Oh, please stay authentic. And while you are being authentic, please ensure that your content is relevant for your audience.

6️⃣ Lesson 6.
When in Rome…
What he means is that you need to tweak your content and appearance and message and conversations for the Social Media channel you are on. A tweet is different from a FB post and is different from a LinkedIn conversation. And so on and so forth. Most of us are guilty of trying to fit the same thing at all places. I commit an even greater sin – I am inactive on most channels apart from Twitter. 

So, identify the channels you want to be on.
Create things that would do well on those channels.
In a format that will get the most relevant eyeballs (most relevant; not just most).  

7️⃣ Lesson 7.
Engage engage engage! 
Identify key people in your domain.
Look at various channels that you think your target audience is on.
And engage with them.
And ensure that EACH engagement adds value.

Also, the channel could also mean things beyond the Internet. For his community work, AK has to take out hours to be present at community meetups, industry forums, and whatnot. Yes, there is life beyond the Internet. 

So, engage. At the place where your audience is! 

I do this but I am yet to see the results. I am largely on twitter and I’ve made lists of marketers that I like and respect and I try to engage with them. May be I don’t add enough value? May be I need to tweak my filters? 

8️⃣ Lesson 8.
Jo dikhta hai wo bikta hai. 
Anyone from India would know of this adage. Translated in English, means whatever is visible, will sell. 

So, get out there and seek out opportunities around your personal brand. And ensure that the word is out there.

Yes, it is time-consuming.
Yes, it’s a lot of effort.
Yes, there are hardly any tangible outcomes. 
Who said it was going to be easy? 

A Network / Personal Brand takes a lot of work to cultivate. AK has invested a lot of time and effort into it. What we see right now is an outcome of hard and consistent work that he has put in over the last so many years! 

9️⃣ Lesson 9.
Use technology to your advantage. 
AK mentioned that he uses Whatsapp broadcast lists to share relevant things with relevant people. He also mentioned that he takes copious notes on each person, each meeting. He knows where to slot who. He knows what will move who. He knows who to reach out to when he needs help with a certain thing.

It is such a simple and yet powerful idea. While I am pretty adept with tech, I think I need to learn this. 

***

To be honest, when I was meeting AK, I did not expect to learn so much about networking & personal branding from a “financial brain” but guess that’s how life is – hits you from unexpected places when you are off-guard. 

Also, AK has kindly agreed to help the readers of this letter! Please do reach out to him. He is on every platform you imagine 🙂 

Also, apart from these 9 things, some other notes that I took that I can’t seem to slot into a lesson are… 

  • Think long-term. The long term is 10 years. Not 10 days. 
  • Iterate. Tweak. Experiment. There is no formula for what works. What works for AK may not work for you. And vice versa. Some people are plain lucky. But you will have to put in serious time and effort to be able to do this. 
  • Students are your best bet when you want to get feedback on things fast. They are smarter than you (like all newer generations than you) and they have zero context. Thus they are fearless and can question the very tenets that you stand for. The lesson I am taking away is that I will approach all colleges around me and try to be their marketing SPOC and challenge my understanding of the discipline.  
  • Testimonials. Videos. AK is a big advocate of this. Even though report after report pointing that video is what people consume more than anything else, I have my reservations. I will let you decide.
  • A great rule of thumb is that assume EVERYthing you put out on SM will end up on your CV for your prospective clients / employees / partners / colleagues to see and dissect. 

So, yeah.
That’s about it.
What are some of your “tips” for building networks / personal brands?  

And like I asked you in the beginning, I think this is a piece on personal brands. AK thinks this is more apt for networking. What do you think? 

–
Saurabh Garg
Met AK and wrote this in Sep 2019

PS: One more thing. 
Plant seeds. 
AK did not really give out this advice but it occurred to me while I was talking to him. 
Planting seeds is to seed opportunities that have the potential to grow. 

Lemme give an example to further illustrate this. 
Even when you know that a certain conversation will not lead to your personal brand, please engage. Plant that seed. Let the world know. And then let that grow. Create opportunities. Wait till you get lucky. Law of numbers. Create chances so that serendipity strikes you. Say hello to that poor fellow who’s got the middle seat and is jealous of your window / aisle seat. 

This post, for example, has nothing to do with the themes that I wish to be known for. And yet I am putting in time (took me about 2 hours – yes I am slow) to write this. I am planting this seed. This will hopefully make me known a tad more. This will probably get a larger audience than my SM presence can ever get.

Originally posted to the subscribers of my weekly newsletter, Shoulders of Giants. Subscribe to it here. 

Note Taking 101 for 2020 and beyond

A 3000-word guide on how to take notes that work for you!

Context. A couple of days, a friend asked me how I take notes and while I was giving him gyaan on that, I realized, I could write a piece on it! So, here we are.

PS: In SoG 40, sent in Dec 2018, I wrote about how I take notes for the first time. And 18 months on, most of the process has remained the same! Except that Evernote has been replaced by Roam. And that one tool has allowed me to streamline my process far better. Let’s dig in!

So, how to take notes that actually work!
I am dividing this piece into various parts. These are the philosophy, tools required, the actual process of taking notes, and more.

Read on.

A. My philosophy of taking notes

This is going to be the longest part!
Lemme start with a simple question.
So, why do you take notes?
Easy peasy.
Note-taking aids in learning better. See this free course and do it if you haven’t.

Thing is, the act of storing information helps create neural networks in the head that moves things from your temporary memory to long-term memory. Plus, I have observed that if I write things in my handwriting, the brain tends to make stronger associations and I can remember things for longer.

And of course, you want to save information and data and notes and tidbits and all that, that you think can come in handy as you go along! You know, sometime in the future?

Lemme give an example.

Imagine you and I worked on a start-up idea 2 years ago and we made elaborate notes on it, including sketches and all that. Now, after 2 years, suddenly, somehow, for an important work presentation, you need to refer to some charts from that idea. Of course, you remember making some notes! But for your life, you can’t find the piece of paper (or the notepad) that you took those notes on! You see, back then you spent hours on those notes, and now that you cant find em, they are worthless!

So, the notes you take must be taken in a way that allows you to retrieve those notes FAST.
THIS IS THE CORE OF HOW I TAKE NOTES and you must too!
Repeat. I MUST BE ABLE TO RETRIEVE NOTES.

And the process of retrieval MUST allow for serendipitous connections to happen. This serendipity is what makes us humans better than other living things. You know, how you often get some of your best ideas when you are thinking of something different altogether! It happens because deep down at the synapse level, your brain has made some connection between those things!

Lemme give another example, to give gyaan to my friend when I was looking for my notes on #noteTaking, I realized that I had actually written an entire SoG on #noteTaking and this could be a good time to do a redux. And thus, this SoG! I also “remembered” the Coursera course on learning that I have linked above. It also made me stumble upon the painful memories of how my ex-girlfriend managed her closet (will talk about it in a bit).

So, repeat. A great note-taking system MUST allow for serendipity!

A1 – Your notes as your wardrobe!
Think of taking notes as your wardrobe. While wardrobes and the management are personal to people, I think there are the following approaches that most people can be slotted into…

A1.1 My ex-girlfriends’ method.
She would dump all her clothes in a pile in the almirah. In no order. To make matters worse, she had three different almirahs at three different places in the house where she would store clothes. Which to her worked because, in her head, she had all her clothes in one of the three predictable, known places.

But when we had to go to a party, she would have a hard time finding her party dress (yeah, she had one favorite dress). And to find that dress, she will empty all the three almirahs. And more often than not, she wouldn’t be able to find her dress and make do with something that is easily accessible.

Most people take notes like this. They save things in an un-orderly manner. At multiple places. With multiple methodologies. With no means to retrieve. And when they need to revisit those, they do not know how to find the notes they want!

Plus, because they are looking for a specific dress (aka note), they ignore other great dresses (or notes) that could prove to be better at that time! You know, serendipity?

So, notes must allow for the retrieval and help bring to surface seemingly unrelated connections!

A1.2 A shopkeeper’s method.
Imagine walking to a store that sells clothes. You tell him that you want a shirt in Salmon Pink color. He’d ask you your size and in less than 1 second he’d pull out a piece of the exact color and size that you asked for. If you then told him that you wanted a Baby Pink or a Rose Pink or a Blush Pink or some other minor variant of Pink, he’d find it as fast as you can rattle of the color name. Aren’t you amazed at their speed / system etc? They organize things so neatly that you can use their shelves for ASMR meditation! Imagine ASMR and notetaking in one piece! Serendipity!

So, how do they do it?
Well, every time they get new stock, they either stack the inventory neatly (which takes a lot of time) but makes the retrieval fast and easy. After all, you need to serve the customer fast!

Some people take notes like that and it is super! Except, all the time you invest in taking notes is essentially sunk, and more often than not, you do not need all notes that you take!

Lesson? Note-taking must be reasonably quick!

A1.3 The Sheldon method.
You know Sheldon Cooper? He is so predictable and so orderly that there is no room for adding newer things. I mean his closet would probably be arranged by days or color or even by superheroes. It works great for him but may not work for you and me. Look at him arranging Howard’s closet!

Plus, it would leave no room for serendipity!

A1.4. My best friend’s method.
So, he is somewhat like Sheldon and somewhat like a shopkeeper. So, he has these 4 different closets, each with multiple shelves. In one he puts all his shirts, in other, he puts all the tees, and then in yet another, he puts his pants. So across these 25 shelves in those 4 almirahs, he’s spread his clothes methodically.

This is great but when he has to dress up, he needs to go to each closet and each shelf and then decide. This does two things. He misses some great combinations that he can wear if he could see all his wardrobe at the same place at the same time. Plus he takes time!

This walled-garden worked well for boring people that wear predictable patterns and combinations. But if you want to get crazy and do new things, this may not work.

Think of how you organize your files in folders and sub-folders and then further nested folders. You bury the files so deep that it’s literally impossible to look at multiple files at the same time. The method worked great to hide porn when we were kids. But now that life has little more meaning, this nested folder approach just won’t cut. No?

So, you need to be able to see your notes in toto and they can’t be buried under structures and all that.

Here’s a quick / dirty way of visualizing these…

So, like closets are personal, note-taking is personal. And you need to find the approach that you like. Just that you need to stick to the five principles. Your notes…

  • must allow you to remember (aka retain) better
  • must be reasonably fast to take
  • must be easy and fast to retrieve
  • must allow for serendipitous connections
  • must make zoom-in and zoom-out possible with reasonable speed

B. Tools that I use to take notes

So, now that we have established the philosophy and principles, here are tools that I use to take notes…

B1. I use a physical, old-school notepad to record everything that I come across. Nothing is missed. Even the pauses that people take while talking gets into my notepad!

B2. I use Roam (been on it for about 3 months) where I transcribe everything that I initially put on the notepad. Before I had access to Roam, I used a combination of things like Evernote, Asana, The Brain, Google Sheet, and even my EA for that matter!

B3. Web-based clippers like Wordbrain Memex etc that automatically save all that I browse / see etc. This allows for a quick search on the pages that I may have visited but not found good enough to be saved.

B4. I have enabled all history on all websites that I use – things like Google, Twitter, location data, auto-completes, etc etc. Thing is, I am one of those that believes that privacy on the Internet is a myth. I may try whatever I wish to, someone out there would have access to my data and would target me with ads! So, stop trying!

Before we jump to the process, please allow me to submit that as long as you know what’s your note-taking philosophy and the reason why you take notes, tools are not important. Tools, like other things, will evolve with time and you can not become a slave to a tool!

C. The process I follow to take notes

The holy grail! The meat. The crux. The reason why you are here!

The process has largely remained the same since the original piece. The tools may have changed! So, the process is…

C1. Use tags extensively.
For EVERYTHING.
Every piece of data that you save (called a block in Roam) has to have a tag. Think of a tag like a connection to the world. A note without a tag will get lost. There is no way to navigate to it. And more tags a note has, better it is!

For example, if I am listening to a conversation between screenwriters, I would use tags like screenwriting, filmmaking, sgInterests, creativity, name 1, name 2, and so on and so forth. Often I have more tags than the actual piece of information.

Now imagine I am brushing my teeth with Colgate, that is endorsed by Sonam Kapoor that worked in a film scripted by a person that I saw the talk in the instance above unless I use tags and links, I would never be able to connect my daily chore to writing for films! Ok, shitty example. But I guess you get the drift!

Thing is, you have to make sure that the tags are consistent across all your tools! This is the linchpin on which great notetaking rests. Tags allow you to link notes to each other. Tags allow you to zoom-in and yet zoom out. Tags allow you to find meaningful and often, meaningless connections.

More on this in C3.

C2. Use your hands!
I take pen-paper notes as much as possible. If I am not sleeping, I have a notepad within an arms reach. Even if I am walking or something. And then I digitize these notes. Back then I wrote that if I am on a date, even then, I have a notepad on me. That has changed :D.

When I first wrote about taking notes, I wrote about how I write (bullets, index, etc). But after almost 18 months of sustained use, I have realized that I have stopped following any particular template. So, I’ll skip it.

For times when I can’t carry a notepad, I use blank visiting cards. I’ve also sort of spewed them all over my house. See this thread. If I am walking, I cant take a note per se. But I have these cards. If I am watching TV and the notepad is not around, these visiting cards are right next to me.

C3. When on a computer?
If I am on the computer, I use Google Chrome (even though its slow af) and use things like Pocket Web Clipper, Memex, Pinterest button, Feedly, Google’s Keep, and so on, and so forth. A quick glance at my extensions tells me that I have more than 50 active extensions on Chrome, most of those manage tabs or history! Most people would scoff at this but I really like to capture all that I can.

In my emails, I have tools like Hubspot active to archive those.

Plus when I am reading on the computer (or seeing videos or something), I keep Roam open in a tab and I keep dumping links, thoughts, etc in it.

And, on a day to day basis, in no order, I use the following tags in Roam to archive notes / information…

  • whatIRead – I keep a list of things I read. I add my notes on those, add links and tags. For example, for this Bloomberg story about Ambani’s, I have tagged it as Mukesh Ambani, #sg5stars (a tag I use for best of the things I come across). The things I read, I often write #sgTLDR – a short summary of what I read.
  • People – like a CRM, I take notes of calls made, things that I did, etc. Of course, I can’t capture everything but I try to get the most of it. For example, today I had 6 conversations that were worth saving for later. This does not include conversations with friends, family, etc. And neither do these include inane chats.
  • toDo – things that I need to do during the day. The ones I do, I mark them as #sgDone
  • sgThoughts – ideas, thoughts, and other things that I don’t have tags for. I often club this with #parkedIdeas, #toWrite, #currentThings etc.

There is more. But tagging is like wardrobing. You need to find a system that works for you.

C4. The phone is not an office tool!
Call me old-school but I do NOT consider the phone an office or a productivity tool. I do not check my mail on the phone. I do not read on the phone. I do not use the phone to learn by watching videos etc. The only thing I use it for is podcasts. I want to stop even the podcasts but I don’t know an answer right now.

Phone to me is communication, entertainment, navigation, and payments device.

If there is something that I see on the phone that needs saving, I send it to myself on a WhatsApp group that has just me on it. And then I log in to a computer and then copy-paste it in the right place. If its a tweet, I “like” it and it gets saved in my Pocket. If its a LinkedIn update, I “share” it on the WhatsApp group that I have with myself. Ditto for videos. I tried taking notes on Notepad in the phone but I kept forgetting about those – like I said, unless I write things with hand or put tags onto them, I don’t consider those as “notes”.

C5. Digitize all hand-written notes and compile them in one place!
I compile all information from all sources and dump it on Roam. Like I said, I do not dump anything without the tags that I spoke about earlier. Repeat. Tagging is the cornerstone of great notes. Plus the double-linking in Roam allows me to find connections between things that I did not know existed!

So, I digitize things that are not automatically in Roam.

The sifting and sorting of things from digital sources is easy (copy-paste and some manual processing using Google Sheets). People like Tiago recommend that we use automation looks like Zapier and IFTTT etc to get things into one common repository. I like the idea but I can’t afford the monthly, recurring payments for those tools as yet. You may want to try. And you MUST read this piece by Tiago on note-taking and listen to this conversation between him and Perrell. Both are long but both are good!

The tougher part is digitizing notes that I have scribbled with my terrible handwriting!

When I got started on this PKM journey, I’d do it every day but now I do it once a week. This does two things. When I revisit things after, say, 3 days, I am reminded of things that I would otherwise forget. And second, once I set time away for this information management, I get to do deep work with on it. You know, without distractions.

Oh, I still use help from my EA on transcribing some of the notes. Though I am trying to do less and less of it. I have realized that the act of transcribing helps with retention and serendipity.

C6. Assign tasks to action items.
 Everything needs to be actioned goes into Asana. Again, I maintain those tags that I have used on my Roam.

That’s it.

D. How do my notes help?

So, I had to write this piece on note-taking. I ran a quick search in my Roam (and nowhere else). I found that I’ve written about note-taking a bit and the search throws references to Tiago Forte (have included already), Andy Matuschak (skipping it for the time being), Zettelkasten (the principle on which Roam is based), and the fact that I wish to be a super-connector and a quote from Bill Gates about notes. And other things things that I don’t want to publish here. Without the notes, I wouldn’t have known that all these are connected. So, there is serendipity for sure.

Here is how my notes look like. The faint blue lines are things that are connected to #noteTaking in my Roam!

Second, this act of writing this piece (about 3500 words) took me less than 2 hours. I wrote the entire piece with the help of just the Roam. I did not have to open another webpage (except for referring to the old SoG, making the cover image for the post and finding a youtube link for Sheldon’s sorting thing). So, there is the ease of retrieval for sure. And it’s fast!

Third, since I have started to use Roam, I now have a large repository of notes. This is growing larger by the day! This means that every time I have to refer to something (for a meeting, a project, or something), I just glance at my notes and I am ready. Yay!

Finally, I must say, a note-taking system is as good as the number of notes in it and the tacit connections that you can draw from that. This is the second linchpin of the note-taking system (apart from tags). You need to thus spend time on it. There is a learning curve but once you are over it, you will NOT go back. In fact, there is this entire school of thought emerging in the PKM circles where they compare taking (and maintaining) notes to digital gardening (you know how gardening requires a lot of work initially and then it gives you this beautiful garden that requires tad less maintenance? That! See tweets from my list of digital gardening geeks!

E. Finally, a word of caution

Do NOT let these notes become the end goal in itself. Notes and note-taking is your slave that you must use to become better. Not the other way around.

A great note-taking system can be one of the differences between you reaching the peak, vs you almost reaching there! If you do not have one, may be its time to start implementing one!

And here’s an offer. If you want to put in place a note-taking system for youself, I would love to help. Lemme know and let’s do this 🙂

That’s about it for the time being. Over and out.

Wrote this originally for SOG (original at SoGv4-10). Should you want to receive the weekly SoG’s in your mailbox, sign up here.