Imagine you’re a farmer in the year 1850. An old schoolmate recently told you all about how his cousin would never have to work another day of his life. In California, he had found 4 biscuit-sized lumps of gold. Being a particularly forward-thinking farmer in the settlement, you have no interest in sitting on a pile of gold all day and drinking pasty black English tea for the rest of your life. You are, however, seriously considering a trip west. You want to find someone who will sell you gold for a reasonable price so you can try your hand at an invention that you’ve been drafting in your journal for some time now. Your device is quite unconventional. It’s similar to a pocket watch, except you wear it around your wrist. You have access to the city where all the equipment and skilled craftsmen that could fashion the parts together; all you need is the materials. How expensive is gold anyway?

If your plan worked, it would be a sensation, so you take out your quill plan and draft a plan.

Fast forward one and a half centuries, walk down to the local Walmart, and you can find a wristwatch with internal parts made from real gold for $14. That amount of money can be earned for less than two hours of minimum-wage, press-a-lever-every-five-minutes, chicken-nugget-frying work. So what happened? Did watches stop being useful? Did gold lose its value? Was your plan to create watches 19th-century garbage?
The answer will take us on a journey through time.
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In 2013, a friend sent me to a little-known site that offered a small selection of web-based programming classes to beginners. The website was called CodeCademy. After building my first webpage in HTML, I immediately offered to build my aunt a website for her woodworking business. At the very least, the site was…actually, no. It was worse than nothing. Even still, my small web page marked my first milestone: I was officially a programmer. Knowing how to write code felt like a million bucks; little did I know that software would prove to be the gold of the 21st century. And much like the gold of the 1850s, the modern gold called software has much less to do with the utility of the thing itself and much more to do with its perceived value.
The Information Age marks the first time in history when the best product rarely wins in the market — quality isn’t everything. The winning product is the one people believe in. The product with the best brand. Of course, the quality of the product forms one of the supporting columns of a good brand. But the reality is, a 10/10 product that people don’t know about will lose to a 6/10 product that gets attention. This applies to every kind of product, from a Fortune 500 company to the sports team you follow. A brand’s value little to do with the physical object or set of features, and has everything to do with the buyer’s relationship with the product.
To bring gold back into the conversation, the best products are known for their exceptional qualities. Gold conducts electricity. It is easily formed into useful shapes. It can resist natural decay from air and water and acid. Heck, it’s even cool to look at. On top of that, most people in society believe it has value, which adds to the branding. Think about it, if everyone else on earth decided that gold would be worthless and you were the only person that knew how awesome it is, so what? Would you be able to turn it into something valuable? Maybe not, but because we all agree it has value, it can be traded in the marketplace for other things that have value, like money. The final pillar that gold’s brand is built on is the way people feel when they think about gold. What comes to mind? Comfort? Luxury? All of these aspects, the quality, reputation, and emotional association create a brand. And it is gold’s brand, not the metal itself, that defines its value.
But enough about gold, let’s talk about the gold rush happening now, in 2019. I started writing computer programs in High School. Since then, I have realized just how valuable well-written computer software can be to a company. Not only are the internet and mobile applications new channels to reach customers, but they also happen to be the least expensive and most easily scalable channels ever. Click one button and bam! your app or website is available in a marketplace that billions of people have access to. That’s a good deal. But making a product available is only the first step in the journey.
If you’re still not convinced that it’s not just companies that have brands, here is a great example. Soft-skills have a terrible brand. Networking is a skill, and just like any other skill, some have more natural talent than others, but anyone can learn it. Oddly enough, companies have decided that they don’t want to hire people with a dedicated role of “Chief Networker,” but don’t be fooled, every successful company has a team of people who have mastered the different soft-skills. (Dr. DeRionne Pollard at Montgomery College writes about how a better name for interpersonal skills are better referred to as “power skills,” so that’s what I will call them from here on out.)
Now that I’ve convinced you that these skills bring value to a company and are underestimated due to bad branding, you’re probably wondering, “How do I learn these Power Skills?” I’m so glad you asked. The three biggest components of power skills are empathy, insight-driven questions, and social interactions. I’ll break them down in turn.
Empathy
Empathy can be tricky because many think of empathy as an emotion. A while ago, it occurred to me that if I would hit my head on the cabinet door and my mom was watching, she would ask me if I was okay and the blood would literally drain from her face because she’s mirroring my pain response. This is emotional empathy, and there is another type of empathy. The other type of empathy is a logical process you can use in social situation you can exercise by asking yourself this: “If I was the other person in this situation (this could be the teacher, the student, the manager, the IRS, the President, whoever you are NOT) what decision would I make, what thoughts would I think?” And more importantly, “Why would I make those decisions and think those thoughts?” Once you have asked these questions and come up with an answer, though, empathy is not done. You have to continuously test your predictions to those answers with reality, and then update the knowledge you used to make predictions. Empathy is not about putting on someone else’s shoes, it is about imagining what the inside of someone’s shoes look like based on how they walk, making decisions based on what you imagine, and then improving the thing you imagined if your decisions lead to bad outcomes.
Insight-driven Questions
If you were going to interview Neil DeGrasse Tyson, how confident are you that you could come up with a question about Astronomy that he has never been asked before? Seems like a simple question at first, maybe you could just come up with something super specific, right? Asking unique questions that add value is no easy task. The challenge of specific questions is that you must know specific things about astronomy to be able to ask a specific question in the first place, and when it comes to networking and power skills, you don’t get a ten-minute break to do research during the conversation. So what options are we left with? You could ask him about something that you are interested in…but then the other person will probably just be bored. Maybe you could just ask him a generic question like, “What projects are you working on right now?” And go from there.
It turns out, the way to ask insightful questions is to combine all of these strategies. First, you have to understand the other people you are talking to, and the best way to understand them is to do research in advance. Then, just ask them to talk about themselves. Egotists have given talking about yourself a bad brand, but it turns out that talking about yourself is something we humans are really good at and like to do, so go out of your way to give people permission to talk about themselves. The next step to ask insightful questions is to pay attention to the answers people give. In other words, genuinely listen. Stop thinking about what you will say next! The beauty of listening is that, if you have done your research in advance and actively listen during an interaction, you can ask the best questions by combining the things they tell you into new questions that will provide even more insight than you ever could have come up with on your own. If you want to ask Tyson a question he’s never been asked before, then ask him wide-open questions that he has undoubtedly been asked before, pay very close attention to his answer and what parts he cares about the most. Then take one of his statements, think of something you’re curious about, then smoosh them into a question. Viola! Insight. (Oh, and to catch that last insight, you have to listen again. This is more of a reminder to myself.)
Social Interaction
I could write an entire book about this power skill, but it’s already been done. If you haven’t read it already, pick up a book of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. If you want the one-sentence summary, here it is: Social interactions will be successful, not based on what you say or do, but based on how the other person feels when they are around you. (And yeah, if you want to know what to do to make other people feel good when they’re around you, you have to understand them first, which means asking good questions and then using empathy. Noticing a trend?)
A person can build a strong brand on quality and power-skills, but to reach the next level, there is one remaining pillar.
To understand the last aspect of a brand, rewind with me one more time, but this time we’ll go way back. Before Instagram, before public transportation, before books and the press, before the Renaissance, before Jesus and Muhammad, before Ancient Civilization — okay stop. (Good thing you stopped. If you’d kept going, your brain might have been sucked into the black hole.) Welcome, you are now in Prehistory. Your purpose in life is to hunt food, protect your tribe, have lots of kids, and generally just try not to die. Being in middle Europe, or as you like to call it “the place between the ocean and the mountains,” you spend the morning fishing and hunting for snails. The calories that are least likely to eat you. When you finish your hard day of work in the mildly-cold coast weather, you walk back home to your tribe to prepare the food. As the temperature drops, the forty-or-so people break up into smaller groups so that everyone can be close to a fire. Here’s the question: who’s fire will you sit at? Will you sit with the young hunter who shares how she narrowly escaped a viper? Will you sit with the old Sage who tells about his past life on the other side of the mountains? You have no google, no fact-checking, no Encyclopedia, the only thing you have to help you navigate the world is your experience, and the stories that are passed down to you. When someone tells you a story that makes your work easier or your family healthier or helps you not die, you will go back to their fire. What does this have to do with branding? Everything.
Good storytelling is the central pillar of every good brand. Now, your probably thinking, “Hey, I get that telling stories by the fire was important back then, but now we have reliable sources of information about how to choose products and navigate the world like Google and YouTube reviews and Keeping Up with the Kardashians, so if I have a high-quality product then people will find it and tell their friends, right?” Wrong. This is the key insight for entrepreneurs in the Information Age: technology makes spreading high-quality products ridiculously cheap for producers, and it makes accessing high-quality products cheap for the consumer. If you want to stand out to employers in the labor market or stand out to investors in the business market or catch the attention of fine prospects in the dating market, you can’t just be good, you also have to convince people that you are good. And the way to convince other people of your value is through storytelling because, as it turns out, while our circumstances have changed, the things we humans want in life haven’t changed much at all. We want to be connected to our community, we want to do activities that make us feel like we matter and bring the full range of rich emotions, including happiness and sadness, and we want to feel safe and avoid dying. When the customer feels like the hero of your brand’s story, only then will your product rise out of the price war of mediocre products. This is easy to say, but movies can be many-million-dollar operations, so how can a person apply stories to their brand?
Constructing a great story can seem daunting, but fortunately, the emotion-evoking pattern of great stories can be taken and customized for any product or situation that involves strong emotions at all. (As a side note, this pattern will not work if your product doesn’t remove someone’s pain points. It might be worth improving the product before writing the story.) The basic structure of a story has three parts: the setup, the rising conflict, and the resolution. You can use this pattern almost anywhere.
This pattern applies to your value as an employee.
Most people, “I will work hard on assignments in exchange for cold hard cash monthly.”
You, “X business deals with insert pain point or constraint to growth, X business knows that some solution must exist but doesn’t know what to do next, I come to help X business, not only solving their problem, also obliterating the stress-burden of a buggy software system and the fear business stagnation.”
This pattern applies to great businesses.
Most people, “We sell computers that work well.”
Apple, “Most computers are complicated and difficult to use, but you want to create things and change the world, that’s why we created beautiful computers that make it unbelievably simple for you to create whatever you imagine.”
(If you haven’t seen Simon Sinek’s talk [https://youtu.be/u4ZoJKF_VuA], go do that now. You will probably start to see business marketing differently!)
This pattern even applies to the most mundane situations. Questions you get asked every day like, “How are you?”
Most people, “I’m fine. You?”
Interesting people, “I woke up late today and had to rush to work, then I was stuck on a computer bug until lunch, now I’m on my lunch break and got to take a few deep breaths which was super refreshing, so I’m feeling better now. You?”
Notice how you don’t even have to be doing something heroic to use the hero’s journey.
My personal brand, just like yours, is made up of my actions and accomplishments, my reputation in the eyes of others, and the feeling that other people have when they are around me. The crazy part about your brand is that, unlike a company, you are in your own head. Sometimes your brand and the you that exists inside your head do not line up. That’s just life. The best part about a personal brand is that, while you can’t decide what other people will think about you, you always have the power to change it. Hopefully even improve it.
Being a human is weird sometimes. It comes with metal, physical, and emotional challenges. Even weirder is being a human that exists in a world with other humans. In the Information Age, the work you do often has nothing to do with preserving yourself. Our brains are wired to help us figure out how to help us make our own lives better, and in this $14-watch world, the only way to help yourself survive is by creating value for other people, who, just maybe, would pay you their money to buy into your brand. So instead of looking for gold in the outside world, you’re going to have to make it. You’re going to have to follow the new golden rule and bake your own brand. This recipe will get you on the right track.
1. Ingredients: skills, habits, actions.
2. Preparation: Invite others to help cook, mix ingredients with Power Skills, turn empathy oven to 350.
3. Serve with stories and enjoy!
This is my recipe, but as always, please take it and make it your own.
Happy branding.
