Personal Branding Is Cringe
The embarrassment emerges from an ancient tension between authenticity and ambition. We admire those whose work speaks for itself - the scientist published without fanfare, the artist discovered in obscurity, the executive whose reputation materializes effortlessly. Self-promotion reveals effort, and effort suggests inadequacy. It exposes the machinery beneath the performance.
The Italians had a word for this: sprezzatura - the art of studied carelessness, of making the difficult appear inevitable. To visibly cultivate one's reputation violates this aesthetic.
The Aristocratic Inheritance
What we've inherited is an 18th-century aristocratic sensibility utterly unsuited to contemporary reality. The aristocrat required no personal brand; status arrived via bloodline and property. One could afford to disdain commerce, self-promotion, visible striving.
You are not an aristocrat.
You are building something - a practice, a reputation, a body of work that exists only insofar as it is known.
The Status Paradox
The discomfort attending "brand building" is not pathological. It marks the gap between inherited values (where self-promotion signaled vulgarity) and present necessity (where it signals professional existence). The paradox: authenticity now requires visibility, and visibility requires intention.
Rob Henderson identifies the deeper mechanism: “Being seen as status-seeking has the effect of lowering one’s status. Being unconcerned about status, and yet obtaining it nevertheless, is a source of increased status.” The willingness to self-promote carries social stigma precisely because status cannot be directly transferred or purchased - one must appear to have earned it through merit alone, not through association-seeking.
Seneca observed: "We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more in imagination than in reality." The anticipated social death rarely materializes.
Wilde understood: "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
The discomfort persists. Accept this with grace. Proceed with intention. The chaos Nietzsche described - the necessary chaos "to give birth to a dancing star" - includes precisely this discomfort.
The trying is not the weakness. The trying is the work itself.
tailored strategy.
