Brand Your Name To Build Wealth

You are not a job description printed in a box.

And if you want to build wealth, you have to take advantage of all the aspects of your personality - your passion, your skillset, your personal well-being, your sense of humor - and transform those into a brand that is irreplaceable.

Because if you are making money working as a job description, you can be replaced.

 

You Are Not Your Job.

It’s only natural for your identity to meld with your full-time job. The majority of your productive hours are spent at work. Your professional goals are likely work-related. The money you live off of is derived from your work. Your work is what you talk to your wife, husband, or partner about when you get home. It is your life.

This is especially true if you are climbing the ‘corporate ladder.’ You grind each and every day to get one step closer to that manager position. Or that VP job. Or the C-Suite. And there is no shame in any of that. It can be thrilling. Especially if you are making progress.

But remember that you were hired into a box with a job description. And if they can hire you to do that job, they can hire someone else. You are replaceable.

 

For Independence, Brand Your Name On The Internet.

When you work for someone else, the goodwill around your name - your most important intangible asset - is associated with the company you work for.

The solution is to build your own personal brand on the internet in conjunction with the company so that you can use it as an asset to build wealth.

A brand is a unique combination of skills, traits, qualities, or even products that can be summarized under one heading. If you don’t own another business that you are known for, your brand is your name.

This is similar to Naval Ravikant’s recommendation to “Productize Yourself.” To productize yourself is to turn who you are and the specific skills you have into a product you can scale at zero cost. It’s using your:

  • personal accountability,

  • uniqueness,

  • personality, and

  • specific knowledge

to build a branded asset that works for you after you’re finished working on it. Something that you can stamp out repeatedly using leverage (money, code, media, or labor). Naval writes:

“If you’re looking towards the long-term, you should ask yourself, ‘Is this authentic to me? Is it myself that I’m projecting?’ And then, ‘Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it? Am I scaling with labor or capital or code or media?’ Making money should be a function of your identity and what you like to do.”

 

Making Money Is An Extension Of You.

What I love about the passage above is that making money becomes a natural function of your identity. Find something you love to do - that you are also good at - and productize yourself to make money doing that thing. Then scale it with leverage.

When your brand, your product, and your leverage are all moving in the same direction, you can’t help but make money.

Charlie Munger calls this the Lollapalooza Tendency - an outsized outcome as a result of all factors and components pushing in the same direction.

You are more than a job description.

Brand your name, and start leveraging it to build wealth.

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Naval Ravikant on how to “Productize Yourself” - https://nav.al/productize-yourself