Are You Not Entertained?
In one of the most memorable scenes from the first Gladiator movie the title character, Maximus Decimus Meridius (played brilliantly by Russell Crowe), has just vanquished a half dozen foes in the arena in the most brutal fashion imaginable. The swiftness of the match and the violence that ensued has stunned the crowd. Rather than inspiring the adulation and applause his trainer Proximo had predicted there is simply silence. Maximus hurls one of the swords he just used to behead his final opponent into the royal box and asks of the crowd, “ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?”
Preceding this match, Proximo had given Maximus a pep talk. He shared the story of being a gladiator himself years before, of being an indentured warrior servant to the Roman emperor. Proximo had learned that a gladiator needed to not only win, but win in a style that made him uniquely feared. Adulated. When a gladiator reached the level of a star, there was the chance that the emperor would grant that gladiator freedom. Proximo was one of the earliest advocates of the personal brand.
I’m all for personal marketing, so don’t get me wrong. I mean I write a blog for Pete’s sake so people will think I’m a thought leader in sales (suckers!). Where I am driving is that there is a dark side to embarking on a personal branding campaign. It is the loss of authenticity.
Philosopher Martin Buber wrote a slim little book titled “I and Thou” (“Ich und Du” in the original German) in 1923. He was 45 at the time and he had over his lifetime seen the impact that technology was having on how we related to others and more importantly ourselves. The invention of the telephone, moving pictures, the propagation of personal photography and the growth in mass media all gave Buber pause to consider whether we consider ourselves and others as an “I” or an “It”. Buber presciently saw that in this new world of technological advances it would be ever easier to objectify each other and our own identities.
What is lost in this objectification is our authentic, God shaped selves that we package up, productize and monetize. We treat ourselves as being worth what we can sell or produce. We begin to inflate our role in successful projects as a part of the brand building plan. We learn to quickly perceive what persona will work best with the client and become that person. We confuse the medium with the message as we spend unimaginable amounts of time on LinkedIn, Facebook and even Tik Tok trumpeting our wins, “celebrating” our best clients and demonstrating our loyalty to their brands.
One morning we wake up and it’s all over. Our “bestie” client has left for another company in another industry, we get passed over for the next promotion or we fail to reach President’s Club and the big cruise to through the Greek Islands. And when we look in the mirror a stranger is staring us back in the face. The real gut punch, however, is when we realize that just as we’ve objectified ourselves, we treated others and objects to be utilized in the pursuit of the goal.
I’m all for personal marketing. I’m also all for personal honesty. I’ve had more than a few mornings over the latter half of my career when I’ve had the courage to look in the mirror, really look in the mirror, and I have not recognized the man looking back. I don’t like him very much either.
Here’s the kicker: I suck at personal branding. Spend too little time posting, write too few of these longwinded blogs and detest selfies in general. Yet I still find myself a stranger in my own being from the efforts I do make to present myself just so, change my being just this way to win the sale, woo the client and earn the accolades of the boss.
What amazes me is that what makes clients for life is authenticity. People want to buy from people they know. I mean really know. The 360 degree view, bald spot and all. Those are the people who are easy to love because they love themselves. And those are the people that are easy to trust.
So maybe a little less time on the personal branding a lot more on the time on the hard inner work required to discover our authentic selves and love that authentic self enough to be willing to share all of ourselves with our family, our friends and even our clients. A lot more work on the self, a lot less work on the selfies.
Are you not entertained?