Identifying with your Brand

Most people get their identities from other people’s brands. You get a job with a company, which comes with a title, and suddenly you are somebody. 

You have position and prestige by association. But how substantial can that be? The giver of that status can take it away, plus they can demand all sorts of compromise in exchange for it. You are strutting around on shaky ground.

You may convince others of your standing but you know the bottom line. You are nothing without that brand and you are nothing with it too. Your delusion will not stand you in good stead.

Some people get their identities from their own brands. You start your own business and instantly call yourself the CEO, even though you are the one and only member, who does every task, including wondering where the money is going to come from.

You have prestige by positioning, which is potentially empowering, but people can easily see through it, too. You have given yourself status, which may not be worth much in the end.

You can make the most of it over time, building something substantial, but that might make you full of yourself. Is there anything more off-putting than someone stuffed with being self-made?

A sincere personal brand can be a healthy, living thing, one of the greatest creative experiences available to us. Part of its wellness, though, is that we do not over-associate with it. It is a wholesome expression of who we are and how we are of service, but it is not us.

It is our legacy but not our identity. We work with it but we are not it. In fact, by not being synonymous with us, it teaches us who we really are. We grow into the truth behind the brand and the business.

Identifying with someone else’s brand is sad and pathetic. Identifying with your own brand can be even more dangerous. It’s essential to remain nobody behind whatever role you play and fulfil.

Being yourself for a living means thriving freely beyond the trappings of identity.

New Business

Business is in bad taste. It is beneath us.

Of course we all need to earn a living, so to speak, but the universe brought us here without us selling ourselves, did it not? We are in good hands. We are, in fact, those hands, inseparable from the big picture. So why make ourselves small and sell out? 

Stay in tune instead and let the whole do what it does. Stay integrated and see. Business is petty and we are quite the opposite. There is no need to trade for a few pennies what is priceless.

We all need to earn a living because the world is upside down. The planet provides for us, we have just turned everything inside out. We are inverted ourselves, making a case for what we do not want. 

Tell someone that earning a living is a red herring and they will argue with you, insisting that you are out of touch with reality. They want to be free but they build a prison instead. That’s why we all need to earn a living: we won’t have it any other way. 

It’s time to have it another way. A better, more enlightened and happier way.

In a global scenario where business rules the roost and exploits every individual out there, of course earning a living will be viewed as non-negotiable. But in a situation where robots and artificial intelligence are taking over most jobs, when those jobs have been alienating people for decades, is the idea of earning a living even valid anymore? 

Aren’t we all going out of the old way of doing business? Do we not need a revolutionary approach? 

In such a new setting, would people not be taken care of on a basic level, with food and housing and transport, all provided sustainably and pollution-free, and thus be able to share their talents and love and joy and creativity in a blooming, awakened world? Wouldn’t the human contribution be prized instead of repressed? Wouldn’t we be empowered to be ourselves?

Here we will not have to earn our living, we will have it automatically provided as a matter of intelligence, dignity and respect, and what we give will just make it all the richer. Being yourself for a living will not be a business, it will be way above that. 

We will not be reduced to the lowest common denominator controlled from behind the curtain by corruption. We will have awakened and claimed our power. Politics, police and exploitation will have no place in our world. 

Stand your ground, because this future is here.

We are learning and thriving on a new earth.