The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [100]
And if people think absolutely nothing when they hear your name, then you have no brand.
And that, friends, is a big problem. Because your brand is one of your biggest assets—far more important, in most cases, than your resume. Great brand, no resume—no problem. Great resume, no brand? Welcome to position #347 of the stack of five hundred equally great resumes.
Your brand—a “reputation that precedes you”—will allow you to command big bucks for your time and insight, as it has for Marian. It will open doors for you in your career unimaginable if you don’t have a brand (i.e., if people don’t think much of anything when they hear your name or look you up on Google). People go to college in large part to build up a resume, and then spend years and years adding to that resume. But they spend zero time building up their reputation. That’s a huge, huge mistake, and a huge misallocation of time, money, and attention.
On this theme, Seth Godin told me: “If you decided to go out, and instead of finishing school, decided to learn things on your own that you thought were important—then that’s your story. Everyone needs a story to get a job. On the back of your first book [pointing to my book The Power of Eye Contact], it says you went to Brown. That’s your story. Your story could be that you have the most popular blog on airline safety. And if you really have the most popular blog in the world on airline safety, and you’re looking for a job doing PR on airline safety, that’s a really good story. That’s better than the story that you went to Brown.”
When Seth said this last remark, about airline safety, my jaw hit the floor. I actually know the author of the most popular blog on airline safety. She is the senior aviation correspondent for the New York Times. She has written one book on aviation safety for HarperCollins and is at work on another book on the topic. She was director of investigations for Kreindler & Kreindler, a leading transportation law firm, from 2001 until 2008.
She is Marian Schembari’s mom, Christine Negroni (http://www.christinenegroni.com). And guess what? She doesn’t have a college degree. She attended a small college for three years, got a job at a television station the summer after her junior year, and loved her work so much she did not return. She cut her chops reporting on aviation for CNN, eventually became their chief aviation correspondent, and took off from there.
I asked Seth if he knew of Christine, and he didn’t. But in coming up with his example, he essentially conjured her real-life story out of thin air. She built up an amazing brand for herself as an expert in aviation safety, from the ground up, with few formal credentials. Looks like Marian took a play from Mom’s playbook!
Seth continued on his riff: “Let’s say you got into Harvard and didn’t go. That’s a better story than you got into Harvard and you did go. And a much cheaper story. And it takes four less years!” I imagine some kid sending a copy of her acceptance letter to Harvard, along with a copy of her letter declining it, and saying to a potential employer, ‘Here’s what I did with the four years instead. I have the brains to get into Harvard, and I have the initiative to get a Harvard-quality education on my own, and I think outside the box. Hire me.” Think more than a few forward-thinking employers might be intrigued?
“There are all these stories available to people,” Seth continued. “There just happens to be this one particularly easy/expensive one, which is ‘You heard of this college because it has a football team, therefore you should hire me.’
“We’re afraid, ashamed—when we don’t have that story—to tell the other one, the one which is more unique and shows more personality. I have a very controversial post I wrote, called, ‘Why bother having a resume?’ The reason you shouldn’t have a resume is that any job you can get because you have a resume probably isn’t a job you want.”
In the blog post Godin references, he writes:I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain