Personal Brand and The Birth of Self‑Mythology

🎙️ Intro

When I was a kid, there were no computers. No internet. No social media. No phones. The only virtual world I ever entered was the one I built in my head from the books I was reading.

We played outside. And the focus was always on the game — the shared moment, the shared imagination. Back then, you could immediately tell when someone tried to pull the attention away from the game and onto themselves.

Kids like that didn’t really fare well. If you appeared to be self‑absorbed, people kind of… abandoned you. But that was then.

Today, they flock to you.

Somewhere between the playground and Instagram, drawing attention to yourself stopped being a social faux pas and became a strategy. A skill. A currency. A career.

Social media gave us something we never asked for: a personal brand.

For those who don't know what that is: Harvard Business School Online defines personal brand as the intentional, strategic practice of defining and expressing your value, with the aim to differentiate yourself from others in the online world and attract opportunities.

Some personal brands get this concept. They play the game and they play it by the rules. They choose a product — which, yes, can also be them — they establish their goals and values, and they present it in the virtual playground in a way that maximises their chances of success. These guys usually draw a firm line between the game and the real life and while they might make the occasional 'A Day in the Life' video, they don't really let you further than that in their lives.

But then there are the others. The ones who — just like the kids on the playground — point the spotlight on themselves.

And instead of building a personal brand, they start building a self‑mythology.

Let me explain.

Imagine you’re an actor on the set of a movie. The story has already been written — it exists, perhaps in a book, in a script, in the director’s head. You’re one part of a huge machine: other actors, supporting cast, lighting, sound, makeup, assistants, producers. You’re playing a character inside a world that is way bigger than you.

Now take all of that away. Strip the set down to nothing. Remove the director, the crew, the script, the story.

Imagine it’s only you and your camera, pointed at well… you.

No film. No plot. No world. Just you. Not you as a person in a story. But you as the story itself.

Instead of living life, you are now performing it. Instead of growing through tears and pain, you are staging pain and performing growth. It's you, performing yourself.

For what? External validation. Likes. To grow an audience.

And yes. Funnily enough, it does work. Especially on Instagram, where personal brands are almost required to self‑mythologise to “blow up” the algorithm.

I follow some of them. Watch them. Study them. Analyse them.

So perhaps you can trust me when I say: despite the big number of followers, this type of presenting a personal brand brings huge drawbacks with it.

But that… is a story for another episode.