Are we turning our brains into ad agencies for our "personal brand"?
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The Gap, The Gain, and The Internal Ad Agency In Your Brain
The short podcast series the Gain and the Gap is worth a listen, especially because the underlying premise is both simple and satisfying: we are unhappy with achievements when we judge them based on feelings - usually in relation to the feelings we expected in our fantasy version of meeting a goal - rather than judging them based on measurement, specifically measurement from where we started out.
This might sound a little bit like "just be happy with the small things you accomplish" and there's truly nothing wrong with that. But to take it a step further, this approach also lets us be iterative and acknowledge that the goals we set often end up being myopic.
In the final episode of the series, The Difference Between Happy and Unhappy Achievers, the hosts, Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Harvey, make another point that got me thinking.
We are surrounded by and suffused with advertising. As the number of ads we see has risen (a somewhat apocryphal figure is 5,000 per day), is it at all surprising that the way a fairly large percentage of human interaction these days is basically advertising- the packaged, strategic version of ourselves?
In attention economies, not only are brands looking to stand out, but so are we. There are differences in what provokes attention on various platforms, but fundamentally, we have seemingly come to believe that ad-versions of ourselves are necessary. In some ways, even our "authenticity" can become no more than 'our brand.'
It seems that spaces that are public, are post-based, are profile-driven, and are economically driven by ads do not have space for non-ads. There's not advertising of ourselves that is authentic, because these selves are necessarily packaged.
I don't know if there's harm in this—or even that it's completely new—but it does seem like the last 10-15 years have changed how much we're investing in self-presentation and that means we're spending less time on something else. Given the monumental increases in loneliness, I have to wonder if that thing is investing in relationships.
With making friends, we'll get in trouble by focusing on the "gap" and the feeling we expect to have when we start making a new friend, in other words, the feeling of HAVING a friend.
But if we start to look at relationships from a "gain" perspective, maybe we'll start to see what actions we have taken that actually led to deepening relationships. Chances are that they will not be the advertising we're doing, they will be having conversations and spending time in connection.
This is why communities are so important. When you get to know a group of people and come to feel a sense of trust and belonging, you don’t have to be so vigilant. You can start to get a sense of yourself as a person among people without having to be transactional.
But if we run communities like “shadow social media,” where the community is about “posts” and “comments” and “thumbs-up emojis” - do we get that same benefit?
There’s just a quality-above-quantity paradigm that is counter to the way social technology shapes our conversations. But having one or two real conversations in a week will do more for your sense of connection than reading 500 posts in Slack, Facebook Groups, or Discord.
If you’re already making time to have those conversations, celebrate!
And if you’re not, what would it look like to meet with a few people from your community once a week for an hour (even 30 minutes?) for a month or so? My hunch is that you’ll have no regrets. And it’s easier to get into “gain” mindset when we have people to celebrate with.
Reads & Resources
Brand Communities Change Customer Attitudes – Here’s How You Prove It
How to Go Beyond Diversity and Inclusion to Community and Belonging [video]