Things Happen When You Are Completely Honest. I got a death threat last week from a guy who is a senior at Brown University who didnt think I could track him down. More on that in a second. The first thing I want to deal with is the question asked me the other day, how do you make a personal brand. When I hear the words personal brand I think someone is going to lie to me and then try to take all of my money. Personal branding, I guess, is descended from the mockery called corporate branding. The Study Of Plant Disease Epidemics Pdf. The Coca Cola company, for instance, loves the drug, Ecstasy. My favorite TV commercial is  not the 1. Apple commercial although thats a close number two but a commercial for Coke Zero Coke Zero Roller Girl. It takes a song that was originally written by  Paul Oakenfold. The original topic of the song was about how great it was to take the drug Ecstasy and go to a rave. Anything could happen. There would be pretty girls, great music, and at the end of the night, total communion with nature. In the commercial, though, theres a girl roller blading. She looks like shes on the boardwalk in Santa Monica. The song is playing in the background. Things Are Going Great In My Absence Free Pdf' title='Things Are Going Great In My Absence Free Pdf' />I very much support Stephans position The more I learn about health, the more I tend to focus my attention on a few simple factors that I think account for most. WVslS' alt='Things Are Going Great In My Absence' title='Things Are Going Great In My Absence' />Nella Fantasia translated from Italian In my fantasy I see a just world, Where everyone lives in peace and honesty. I dream of souls that are always free. Growing up, I guess I was just a private school kid who took things at face value. I was a sporty dude, and always pretty social, so my teenage years were fairly. As a business leader, I found that one of the scariest things to do was to give your people the freedom to make mistakes. While mistakes allow individuals. Yahoo Lifestyle is your source for style, beauty, and wellness, including health, inspiring stories, and the latest fashion trends. Absence is her reigning theme boyfriends leaving, parents dying, things going missing. Ghosts and secrets, cemeteries and tombstones. More is made of. Shes not taking Ecstasy but drinking Coke Zero. She dancesroller blades around her studly friends, her beautiful girlfriends, and it ends with everyone taking Coke Zero, the fizz going up like a group ejaculation into the sky. Coke Zero the brand where you can find your own personal ecstasy. I Want That. Whenever I watch that commercial I feel like I want a life like that free from worry, stress, free from thinking about money or petty jealousies. Surrounded by friends and beautiful people. Moving without effort, the ocean in the background. As they say in the song once again, I find myself with my friends. Coke Zero tells me the dream is possible even though intellectually I know its a myth. Freedom isnt found that way. But were willing, as a culture, to accept the lies that Coke tells us. And they are willing to use songs about drugs to help us accept those lies. Perhaps Coke figured out that maybe this time they had gone too far. They pulled the commercial. Sometimes I can find it on You. Tube. Sometimes I cant. They try hard to make it disappear. What they never explain is that coke zero is essentially brown dyed water with about 1. CO2 and you make it fizz. Thats the secret formula thats locked in a safe in some bank in Atlanta. I can make Super. James. Cola with that formula. But then I cant license that music, get those sexy girls, and run that ad on the Super Bowl and a thousand other places. I cant do corporate branding by myself. But no matter lets move past the artificially safe confines of corporate America. Thats dead and if you havent planned your exit strategy yet you will have to soon enough. So What Is Personal Branding So now I keep hearing about personal branding   the idea that your career, your mind, your body, everything that makes up the superficial you can be packaged up into a brand just like Coke or Mcdonalds can. With the spectrum of pornography allowed by Facebook, twitter, linkedin, google, etc etc etc a personal brand can evolve and grow like any superbowl ad. Kim Kardashians didnt have an answer when Barbara Walters asked her, finally, but arent you really just known for a sex tape when Kim initially tried to re brand herself as a businesswoman in a very intimate interview. So we start to arrive at the truth of the matter Branding is lying. But personal branding is even worse because the joke is over. Now were talking about me and you. Were talking about who YOU are. And lets face it. Its not pretty. You need to re brand from birth. People confuse honesty with a type of happiness. He can be honest because he is happy. But its not true. Life is a series of failures punctuated by brief successes. Thats honesty. Failure is not necessarily bad. Its reality. But branding tries to reverse that. With a personal brand, you suddenly pretend to be super successful, a businesswoman in Kardashians case failure is non existent, and out of your mind comes the exact mathematical formulas that if someone drinks your Cola and snorts your Ecstasy then they too will  have the pretty girl, the success, the money, the accoutrements. A Friend of Mine Who Does Personal Branding. I know a stockbroker who sends a Christmas card every year to his clients. He wants to present an aura of success. Each time hes in some other blue lagoon on some random part of the world, with a blonde girl different each Christmas with huge fake breasts and they are snorkeling or hugging in the water blue blue aqua or staring off into a beautiful mediterranean ancient city. He makes money. Lots of it. And you cant even look at him, the girl is so beautiful and her eyes are staring at him and shes kissing him and its all over his facebook page. His status might even be engaged and she has an exotic name. The only problem is, and you cant tell anyone because this is the beautiful part he is telling me in his tell all because hes a good friend and knows I will never reveal his name is that hes gay. He picks up his boyfriends in dungeons. Hes been smothered in concrete until he was unable to move and holes would be poked through so he could breathe, and only then with a boy whipping him and arranging this unusual punishment, would his copulation come to completion. Honesty is about the scars. But its more than just bragging about failure, which could be a form of ego. Its about truly helping people. Theres 1 trillion websites competing against each other. The most honest website of all Google. Google cant help you with your problems. If you suspect you might have herpes after a particularly courageous night out on the town, going to Google will not help you although you may feel a vague feeling of remorse when you see the Im Feeling Lucky button. Google has no content on it at all. But Google is honest about that. You just walked into their store and said, Please, help me do you have anything to prevent a potential outbreak of herpes and Google will say, quite honestly, im sorry, I cant help you, but here are ten of my competitors who can potentially help you. And, by the way, here are three more of my competitors who MIGHT be able to help you but, in full disclosure, they are paying me to tell you this. And then Google shrugs its shoulders. Thats all they can do for you. But thats honesty. Thats not branding. So youll come back to them. Because they are a straight shooter and the target was on your head. And when you need to know about that growth behind your ear, or what the best software is for keystroke logging, they will say the same thing sorry, we cant help you but we can direct you to at least ten of our competitors who seem pretty decent at it. With honesty theyve set themselves free. Heres the thing about a brand. It puts you in jail. You know who had the original patent that Larry Page tweaked into the Page. Rank that made Google and separately, that Robin Li ALSO tweaked into the patent that became Baidu Ill tell you Dow Jones. The Wall Street Journal. See, 1. Unusual Things About GoogleThey knew how to make Google years before Larry Page even thought of the idea. But they didnt do it. Why Because their brand says they dont give out stuff for free.