I'm Not Special and Neither Are You
Here's why that's a great thing...
I never wanted a personal brand. All those eyeballs on you? Haters lurking behind anonymous accounts? Internet strangers judging any misstep and extrapolating it across your entire personality? No thanks.
This all started to change when it became my job. When I joined Growth Machine in the summer of 2020, I became responsible for running the company blog and newsletter, and hosting the podcast. In short: I was the face of the brand.
I was up for the challenge. A former journalist and longtime content marketer, I wasn't a stranger to publishing online. And as a behind-the-scenes player for so many years, I finally felt I was ready to take a seat behind the microphone, in front of the camera. I wrote and published, I recorded and interviewed, I filmed and edited. I wrote thread after thread after thread. And trust me: two years and tens of thousands of followers later, no one is more surprised than I am. It is a wonderful feeling for your hard-won lessons and vulnerable ideas to resonate with internet friends across the globe.
But as I acknowledge this audience growth, I am also keenly aware of the truth: nobody cares.
Not even you, dear reader. As soon as you finish this newsletter, you'll switch apps and immediately forget what you just read. You'll go back to doom scrolling, you'll knock out a few to-do's, and (hopefully) you'll roughhouse with your kids or meet up with old friends for dinner.
I say this because it's too easy to get caught up in our own little digital worlds. You publish a viral tweet and you want to high-five everyone in your house for crossing 5,000 likes (but in the real world, your partner blinks and tells you to unload the dishwasher). And when the opposite occurs and your thread sputters out with a single retweet from some private account you can't even see, you want to hide under your desk (but your partner reminds you that you still haven't taken care of those dishes).
You stay in this metaverse long enough, and you start to see the social norms. Your brain matches patterns and decodes interactions. Maybe it even starts creating rules:
That post was reshared 100 times, so it must be useful.
That person has 30,000 followers, so surely they are credible.
They unfollowed? Well, I guess that door is closed forever. She went out of her way to subscribe to my YouTube channel? Wow, a true fan. We're mutuals who happened to "like" each other's content today? Clearly, we are friends now.
Without even realizing it, we've constructed an entire narrative. There's the hot popular girl who everyone likes. That's the class clown with the hilarious memes. And you? You're the hero who's been kicked down a couple times and you're about to save the day.
But none of it is real. It's a story you didn't even know you made up.
You're just a regular person hunched over a keyboard. You like hiking but don't do it often enough, you love ice cream but want to watch your weight, and you forgot to unload the dishwasher again.
You're not special.
This realization is a great thing. In fact, it's really quite freeing. Because you'll stop playing by imaginary rules and following weird internet social norms. Your digital world isn’t the stage you thought it was and there’s no spotlight on you.
When you realize that nobody cares, you might find it easier to be more forgiving of yourself and the community around you. Some of that self-consciousness will melt away, allowing your true self to emerge. And you just might see that having a personal brand isn't so scary after all.
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🍩 Petits Fours
Four bite-sized blurbs linking to interesting content.
🔸 Writing under a pseudonym is more honest than writing under your real name: "We don’t need to be proper all the time. At some point or another, we’ve all been assholes. Writing under a pseudonym just allows me to admit it."
🔹 When this man came out to his father 20 years ago, here's what happened: "My relationship with my dad shows me what can happen if you do the exhausting (and I mean exhausting) emotional work of loving someone. That if you really try to understand and validate a person's humanity—even if (especially if) you dislike some parts—magic is possible."
🔸 Fail porn and cope culture: "Some people will do nearly anything to avoid reflecting on what kind of job they want. Even if they verbally agree that goal setting is a critical step of their job search, most people would rather take a random job offer from a recruiter than identify their dream job. After seeing this pattern play out repeatedly, I’ve developed a theory on why. Most of us are afraid to want things."
🔹 A list of clinics and abortion funds to donate to: Consider the National Network of Abortion Funds, Keep Our Clinics, the National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, the National Abortion Federation, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Midwest Access Coalition, or any of the funds listed in Alexa Heinrich's Substack post.
Bonus petits... fives? On marketing, audience building, and... the formula shortage: I recently joined PencilAI's Add Creative podcast and it might be my favorite interview on audience building so far. I kicked off with a rant about the infant formula shortage (sorry, not sorry), but Chase Mohseni and I covered lots more. Here's a short clip.
🍉 LA Fruit Salad
Fruit carts are a pretty Los Angeles-specific thing. All over street corners (anywhere, but mainly downtown, the westside, mid-Wilshire, etc) you'll see these brightly colored umbrellas shading a small cart adorned with fruit. Pull over. It's worth the stop. But if you wanna make it yourself...
Freshly chopped summer fruits (I like mangoes, watermelon and jicama)
Juice of 1-2 limes
Toss with tejon seasoning
Add chamoy hot sauce if you want