We are hungry. We are determined. In many cases we are ravenous.
We want it now. Who doesn’t?
After all, ff you want it at all, why would you want it ‘at some unspecified point in the future’.
That doesn’t make any sense. No. ‘Now’ is the only unit of time that makes sense to us.
We are quite simply people who want to change the shape of the world. That is not aggrandising it. We are creatives, and we want to force our ideas out into the world. We want to write them bigger than the sky. We want them to dominate skylines in Manhattan, Shanghai, Moscow and London.
We want ‘a blaze of glory‘ to be a mean and paltry way to describe success of the magnitude of success.
In case it’s not clear yet, we are also just a little bit impatient.
Patience Is A Virtue
Yeah, yeah—patience is a virtue, but it’s kind of a boring one.
It’s not up there with Jesus healing the sick, is it?
‘Yeah, he healed the sick alright. And he did that thing with the loaves and fishes. And—oh yeah, bonus!!!—he was like really, really patient too.’
Against the more spectacular virtues one might have, patience is somewhat . . . vanilla.
But, it’s also essential: particularly when you’re building a personal brand online.
Understand this: one piece of content is not going to make you a megastar. You are not suddenly going to attract 100k followers on Instagram from one post. You’re not going to snare 1m YouTube subscribers from a single video. And you’re not going to hit 99k on Twitter with a solitary Tweet.
Unless you’re a celebrity or something. And even then, it’s probably going to take time before you really hit your stride.
A personal brand, in essence, is an amalgam of all the pieces of content you put out on all the different platforms you inhabit (including your own website and email list, plus socials). That amalgam is collated over months, and usually years.
Because here’s the thing—your personal brand is a digital analogue of you. And you are far to complex to be summed up in one piece of content. You need a lot of pieces of content. And since you are getting older everyday (sorry) and achieving new things and having new thoughts and experiences, the process of creating those pieces of content never really ends.
Which is why you have to cultivate patience. And why you have to embrace the grind.
No one said this was going to be easy. But do it consistently and do it right and it will be the most rewarding thing you have ever done in your life.
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