A couple of months ago, I got a WhatsApp forward titled ‘Permanent Address’. It had the ‘Forwarded many times’ tag, implying that it had truly gone places.
It’s a poignant exploration of our relentless interest in building a home at great cost and our obsession in having a ‘permanent address’ despite our fleeting time on Earth.
The WhatsApp message credited the note to India’s finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman! And since the first line of the post was, “Our joint family home in Tiruchirappalli housed 14 of us from age 5 to 95 years”, it would be easy to conclude that she did (Nirmala, a Tamil name + Tiruchirappalli, a city in Tamil Nadu; she did do part of her school and college in Tiruchirappalli) indeed write this piece.
But the prose did not sound like something Ms. Nirmala Sitharaman would have written based on whatever little I have read from her (speeches, op-ed articles in newspapers, etc.). The language, nuance, emotion, etc, did not seem like her usual tone.
So, I copied specific sentences from the WhatsApp forward and searched Google.
A couple of top search results led me to many people sharing the same piece as written by lyricist Javed Akhtar! These pieces did not have the Tiruchirappalli mention in the first line.
The piece, though, could be something Javed Akhtar could have written – it had a poetic nature to the flow.
But I dug further, not convinced.
And I found a tweet by Javed Akhtar himself clarifying that the much-shared piece credited to him is not by him, and that he was unaware of the author, though he appreciated it as ‘beautiful piece of writing’.
That’s when I noticed a reply to the tweet, by Aseem Dhru, mentioning that he was the author of this post!
I got curious about Aseem mainly because in his reply, he had added a link for a post from LinkedIn! Upon checking out that link, I found out something extraordinary!
Aseem shares a thought-through and well-articulated piece every Monday. Monday after Monday, without fail. On some weeks, it may be on a Tuesday, but this is fairly rare – Monday is the main fixture. And usually, the piece lands on a Monday morning.
Now, think about this. Someone like Santosh Desai, a veteran marketing professional, has a weekly column in The Times of India called ‘City City Bang Bang‘ that comes out every Monday. He is not a journalist (like, say Vir Sanghvi, who has a weekly column in Hindustan Times, on food), but has a regular, weekly column. He may have been invited by The Times of India or he may have pitched it and they would have agreed to carry his column, weekly.
Who asked Aseem to write a weekly column on LinkedIn (he also cross-posts the same on Twitter)? No one. He shares these on his own volition.
In a post last October, I had mentioned an underrated tip for personal branding: the art of showing up.
Aseem exemplifies that tip. He shows up regularly every Monday.
I had a brief chat with Aseem to understand why he does what he does so regularly, and he was disarmingly candid about the whole process. He writes when he gets pockets of time during the day – while being stuck in traffic, while waiting at airport lounges, during flights, etc. And the topics are always from what he observes, reads, witnesses, etc. in daily life.
Why does he do this? For him, the writing is a process to discover his own thoughts. It is, to me too – I find myself pondering about a topic more deeply only when I start articulating my views on it. In these days of excessive content, we rarely take the time to sit and assimilate what we consume/read/listen/watch. But writing about it becomes a process of clarifying our own feelings towards what we consumed.
In terms of the process, while Aseem is conscious about his Monday deadline (just like how Santhosh Desai has to send his material on the previous week’s Thursday/Friday so that The Times of India could put it to print for Monday), he is flexible enough to understand that on some weeks, he may not be able to manage the Monday deadline. But by and large, he has managed to make his Monday visit as a steady habit.
As for the kind of audience he writes for, he doesn’t have one. He writes to express, and not to pander to any particular type of audience. This means he doesn’t care too much about the feedback each piece gets (in terms of Likes, Shares, comments, etc.) though he reads most of them out of curiosity and gratitude.
Aseem’s habit is the perfect template for everything I recommend about personal branding in my workshops.
1. Showing up is 80% of your personal branding effort.
2. Because you have to show up regularly, at periodic intervals, you work in the background to ensure that your showing up is meaningful to you. This means you put in the effort to read more, research more, explore more, and think more. The more you do this within the confines of a few specifically chosen topics, the better you are building an association with those topics and your name – the very essence of personal branding, and branding in general.
3. A two-sided habit-forming exercise – When you show up week after week (or it could be twice a week, thrice, or any cadence that you can comfortably fit in your schedule), not only are you forming a habit, but you are also creating a habit in your dedicated readers. The readers form a mental note to ‘check out’ your showing up because they know that you are predictable. Like a newspaper, for instance. The No. 1 reason why many people read the newspaper is not because it is useful. They do that because it predictably arrives every morning. Newspapers, by creating a habit of printing every night and delivering to you every morning, have in turn created a morning reading habit in you.
4. Show up for yourself and not to impress an invisible audience. The need for showing up should be because you have something to share/express, not because you are keen to perform in front of an audience. But you are indeed ‘performing’ when you do show up – only difference is that this performance is restricted to presenting yourself/your writing in a way that adds value to you/your brand. Think of this way: you show up on stage and perform to the best of abilities every Monday, but you are not obsessively tracking how many are in the audience and how they are reacting. You show up because you enjoy the effort you put behind ‘showing up’, week after week.
Over time, you would start valuing the time and effort you put in to read more widely and thinking deeply about what you read. Not all that you read may become ‘posts’ worth ‘showing up’, but everything you read consciously adds to your large thought process, thereby making you richer.
In short, the entire process eventually becomes a habit to improve your self-awareness.
While Aseem doesn’t show up every Monday with a thoughtful piece in terms of building his personal brand, people do associate him with the kind of thoughts he shares. But the one caveat I offer here is to be more thoughtful about the kinds of things you write about.
Aseem’s writing, in terms of the topics and themes he touches, is very diverse and disparate. And he can afford to be like that given that he is the MD & CEO of SBFC Finance Ltd. This is not very different from Santhosh Desai writing about anything and everything in his Monday column in The Times of India.
To make this ‘showing up’ effort work harder towards your personal brand, it would help first define the areas that you would want to associate your name with clearly. For instance, my chosen area is ‘communications’ and I look at everything around me from the lens of ‘communications’.
If you find your ‘lens’, that will help you clarify the process of ‘showing up’ frequently and enjoy the entire exercise.