A Prime Example of Why You Should Never Settle (Especially With Your Personal Brand)
Your personal brand is the most important asset you have. #WhySettle when you can use it to jumpstart and propel your career to the next level.
Becoming a personal branding expert has been quite a long journey. Back in 2010, I almost went homeless and was saved by my grandmother. I was showering in the dark because I couldn’t pay my electricity bill for six months when I received an eviction notice. I had nowhere to turn and had no idea what to do.
It took me about half a year to recover the energy and dedication I needed to move ahead, but when I did, I borrowed a few hundred dollars from a friend and moved back to Los Angeles. I worked at a dead end job for two years and realized I would never get a promotion, let alone a raise. That’s when I realized that I needed to change direction.
In 2013, I took it upon myself to start writing about my life experiences on Quora, a site where people ask questions and people answer with facts, their personal experiences or stories. Six months into contributing, my content was read 2 million times, and I went from no social media following to 3,000 people and was named a Top Writer. A year and a half into the game, I had 10 million reads on my content, published a book and started to see my life change.
Now, I have columns in a lot of publications, I’m called on for expertise advice and there’s even a Wikipedia page about me.
During the early half of this time, countless people had reached out to me asking me to mentor them, but I really didn’t see a way to do this, due to how time consuming it was. Then last year, it dawned upon me, that I could create a program where I could help mentor everyone at a much bigger level. So I started my business InfluenceTree, which teaches people how to build their personal brand, get featured in publications and grow their social media following.
Among the people I helped along the way, there are some who have duplicated my success and achieved their own status. Tom Sullivan is one of those people. He hit 750,000 views in a year and his content has been featured in prominent publications such as Fortune, Inc, Observer and The Independent.
I recently traveled to Seattle to meet with Tom.
We’ve been working together for the past year, and I’ve been guiding him on what kind of content to create so he can expand his personal brand. I stayed at the Hyatt House Downtown Seattle, and I loved the room.
It felt like a high end studio apartment in LA that costs around $4,000 a month.
It had a kitchen, a living room area and all the amenities one could think of, plus an amazing view of the space needle right outside.
The hotel had so many amenities, it felt like I was in the comfort of my own home. I was truly impressed.
I invited Tom over to join me at the bar so we could discuss business.
When we first started talking, he told me about how he lived in a Hyatt House hotel for three months during a work trip and absolutely loved it. We talked about how his personal brand took him from figuring out how to afford raising a daughter to earning a six figure income and discussed what he could do to take his personal brand to the next level, by getting featured in more media outlets.
I’m so glad I had the opportunity to not only spend time with Tom and help him take his personal brand to the next level. It was also great to stay at a place that had such a friendly staff that treated me just like I was in the comfort of my own home while conducting the business I have grown so passionate about.
I’m definitely looking forward to my next stay at another Hyatt House location in the near future.
If you’re the same type of person with a #whysettle mindset, let me know what your goals are so we can work on getting your personal brand to the next stage. Because there’s never a moment when I think of settling, and there should never be a moment you ever think of settling either.
