the quiet path to getting noticed

What I got wrong about building a personal brand

For the past few years, I’ve been helping creators and founders craft their online presence to achieve business goals. I know which psychological buttons to press, which engagement tactics perform, and how to position someone as the expert they want to be seen as. I get them results and opportunities, which I hope means I’m decent at it.

And yet, when it comes time to “do it for myself”, I find it much harder. Many of my colleagues who work behind the scenes in the creator economy feel similar. It’s as though we hear the machinery grinding and find ourselves paralyzed. We’re the chefs who know exactly how the sausage gets made. And because we know the recipe so well, we can’t bring ourselves to cook it.

So, naturally, there was a phase when every “grow 10x faster on LinkedIn” post felt like a personal indictment; a reminder of all the career capital I was supposedly leaving on the table. I’d pause mid-scroll, feel that familiar pang of “I really should start posting about work,” then scroll past.

These days, I often find myself torn. On one hand, I want to stay visible, share insights, and document my work. I want the successes that the personal branding industry promises: the connections formed, the opportunities created, the hope of genuinely helping people solve real problems through what I share.

On the other hand, I’m reluctant to participate in a system where looking like you’re doing great work often pays better than actually doing great work.

As

Justin Welsh

writes,

“We’re living in what I call the ‘performance economy’ where showing the work is seen as more valuable than doing the actual work.”

You know what he’s talking about: LinkedIn feed of humblebrags disguised as insights, photos of laptops in coffee shops paired with profound revelations about B2B sales, carefully choreographed vulnerability designed to go viral. This is the dark side of our performance economy. It can often seem like we reward visibility over substance, encouraging performative branding rather than actual work.

(To be clear, this piece isn’t an argument for invisibility or that all personal branding is performance theater. There’s absolutely a place for well-curated visibility that serves others while showcasing your capabilities. Publishing your research notes, open-sourcing code, sharing frameworks you've developed, or writing about lessons learned from projects. I LOVE all this stuff and have benefited from many thoughtful pieces people put out. But sometimes I can’t help but feel that the line gets blurry between performance from a place of substance vs performance for the sake of performance.)

If you’ve ever felt this tug, this desire to stay visible without being on a hamster wheel of self-promotion, hopefully there’s something in this piece for you.

#1 Your “Brand” Lives in the Work, Not the Posts

For years, I operated under a fundamental misconception: I thought personal brand equaled online presence.

But an online presence is neither necessary nor sufficient. Your reputation isn’t built by what you post online. It’s built on what people remember after working with you.

I first stumbled on this idea through this LinkedIn post by Caleb Ralston who has helped some of the biggest creators out there like Gary Vee and the Hormozi’s scale their brands.

Caleb’s post

Your personal brand is shaped in every interaction, online or offline. It lives in the Slack messages you send. It’s embedded in the presentations you give at work. It shows up in the thoughtful questions you bring to your 1:1s (or the questions you don’t bring). It’s determined by how you make people feel when they work with you.

None of these activities feels like conscious brand-building activities, but they shape people’s perception of you and your work far more powerfully than any curated online presence ever could.

After all, the stuff you do “in real life” is what affects the reference your current employer gives to your next one. It determines how long people want to work for you and with you. It influences whether colleagues think of you when new opportunities arise, or whether they quietly hope you won't be assigned to their next project.

Questions:

If someone shadowed you for a week (read your Slack messages; saw your work deliverables; how you interacted with colleagues), what “brand” would they walk away with?

#2 Reputation is Separate From Brand

This is why it’s dangerous to confuse reputation with brand.

Your reputation is what people already believe about you based on direct experience. Your personal brand is what you try to project, often through digital platforms.

Before the digital era, your personal brand was essentially your reputation. There was no distinction because there was no alternative. Professionals built their standing through consistent delivery of good work, referrals, word-of-mouth recommendations.

Think of the icons who built legendary reputations long before anyone had heard the phrase “personal branding”:

Richard Feynman became synonymous with brilliant physics communication not through LinkedIn posts about quantum mechanics, but through lectures at Caltech and books that made complex concepts accessible. Coco Chanel developed one of the most distinctive brands in history through her revolutionary designs, not purely through what we know as modern-day personal branding or advertising.

The modern concept of “personal branding” only emerged at the turn of the 21st century. Management consultant Tom Peters coined the phrase in his 1997 article “The Brand Called You” and expanded it in his book “The Brand You 50,” explicitly linking personal identity to corporate branding logic.

When personal branding is done authentically and backed by genuine, consistent quality work, it naturally reinforces a strong reputation. The two become aligned and mutually reinforcing.

But when personal branding becomes primarily about optics—emphasizing style over substance—the gap between what you portray and what people actually experience can widen.

Questions:

Does the way you present yourself online match how colleagues experience you offline?

#3. Brand Is a Lagging Indicator, Not a Leading One

Andrew Chen

has a brilliant piece called “The Startup Brand Fallacy” where he writes:

“Great brand is the lagging indicator of success. The buzz is created by the hard work that the entrepreneurs put in: Finding product/market fit, hiring a great core team, finding acquisition channels that scale. Brand marketing is great, but it should be layered on later.”

I think personal brands work in a similar way. Your brand is a lagging indicator of exceptional work, not a leading indicator of effort expended on self-promotion.

So maybe, instead of trying to build a personal brand through strategic posting and careful image management, we’d be better off focusing obsessively on doing the best work of our life. Then let the brand follows naturally when the work is genuinely excellent.

Maybe the only way to build a lasting professional reputation isn’t by shining a spotlight on yourself. It’s by doing work so exceptional that other people want to shine the spotlight on you.

Questions:

Imagine your professional shadow a year from now: what do you want it to look like, and what are you doing today to shape it?

#4. Your Reputation/Brand Isn't Really About You

Nike and Apple are legendary brands not because of clever marketing (though that certainly helps), but because they consistently serve their customers exceptionally well. If these brands delivered mediocre products wrapped in brilliant advertising, the marketing budget wouldn’t matter much. People would see through the performance eventually.

Personal brands work the same way. Your professional reputation succeeds only insofar as you have something genuinely valuable to offer to clearly defined people. The most effective personal brands aren’t really about the person at all. They’re about the people they serve.

When I was teaching economics earlier in my career, my “customers” were students who needed to understand economics well enough to use it in their future careers, not just pass the exam. And so the purpose of the “product” was to serve my students, not me, which means: clear lecture slides that made complex concepts accessible, engaging delivery that kept students awake during 9 AM micro theory, and insightful office hours where I could untangle their confusion about market failures or fiscal policy.

This principle applies regardless of your role. If you’re an employee, your customer isn’t just your boss. It’s ultimately whoever your company serves. University lecturers aren’t just serving the university administration—they’re serving students who showed up to learn something useful. Consultants creating PowerPoint presentations aren’t just serving their managers; they’re serving the clients who will use those slides to make important decisions. Software engineers aren’t just serving the product manager who wrote the requirements; they’re serving the users who will depend on that code working flawlessly.

If you’re a knowledge worker, get crystal clear about your service—whether it's writing skills, technical expertise, or analytical thinking—and who genuinely benefits from it.

When you shift your focus from “How do I look impressive?” to “How do I serve these specific people exceptionally well?”, the work gets better because you’re solving real problems instead of performing solutions. And better work, consistently delivered, builds the kind of reputation that actually matters for the “brand”.

Questions:

Whose life gets tangibly better when you do your job well? Can you picture them? Who are you actually serving through your work right now? Could you name them?

Final Thoughts

In an ideal world, you do exceptional work and share it thoughtfully with your audience. Some people genuinely excel at both. They create value and communicate it effectively without falling into performance theater. We can only aspire to be like that.

But the reality most of us face is finite time and finite bandwidth. When forced to choose, as we often might be, I like to think the right thing is to choose substance over performance.

Instead of doing work to build your brand, do exceptional work and let your brand become the natural byproduct. Think of your reputation as a shadow that follows the substance of your contributions, not a spotlight you aim at yourself.

When everyone else is chasing the spotlight, maybe the most radical act is to quietly become exceptionally good at what you do and let your brand build itself.

—

Ines