
If I were to pick one—just one—thing that you can start doing better towards building your personal brand, this would be it!
But, before I come to that, here’s a relevant excerpt from ‘Open: An Autobiography’, by Andre Agassi. This is a brilliant lesson about “obsessing about the few things you can control”!
“My racket stringer is old school, Old World, a Czech artiste named Roman. He’s the best, and he needs to be: a string job can mean the difference in a match, and a match can mean the difference in a career, and a career can mean the difference in countless lives.
I obsess about the few things I can control, and racket tension is one such thing.
My grip is as personal as my thumbprint, a by-product not just of my hand shape and finger length but the size of my calluses and the force of my squeeze. Roman has a mold of my grip, which he applies to the racket. Then he wraps the mold with calfskin, which he pounds thinner and thinner until it’s the width he wants. A millimeter difference, near the end of a four-hour match, can feel as irritating and distracting as a pebble in my shoe.
So vital is Roman to my game that I take him on the road. He’s officially a resident of New York, but when I’m playing in Wimbledon, he lives in London, and when I’m playing in the French Open, he’s a Parisian.
It reminds me of the singular importance in this world of a job done well.”

Now, what could be the ‘racket tension’ equivalent to your personal brand building exercise? Is it to share more online? Post more things that your audience seems to “like”? Is it to figure out the perfect time to post on LinkedIn? Is it about leaving thoughtful comments on others’ posts? Or, is it about obsessing over how well and sharply you define your brand?
None of the above, in my opinion.
In my view, and from personal experience, the one thing that can make a world of difference in how well you manage your personal brand is something that happens far beyond the public view. It happens when no one’s watching and you are all alone.
It is how thoughtfully and purposefully you consume content relevant to your brand. In other words, it is how deeply and meaningfully you read. Or watch (if the source is videos). Or listen (if the source is podcasts, audiobooks, etc.).
One of the crucial elements of personal branding, as I explain in my workshops, is that what we do in front of people (that is, presenting ourselves, and our brand) is merely the 10% effort.
The bigger—90%—effort happens away from the public glare. It is the sheer effort we put in constantly to learn more about the topics that we want people to associate with us (our ‘personal brand’ tenets).
Towards that, I help the participants build their content pipeline. Why? Because we are in an age of over-information. It is very easy to get drowned in information, and worse, totally pointless information. It is very easy to get sucked into the bottomless social media app scrolling and not even knowing how we waste time.
Even very senior participants, who have spent years in their respective industries, flippantly tell me that they get their news from ‘InShorts’ and others’ social media posts, and do not read deeply about the ‘why’ of such news. And almost all of them eagerly volunteer with the information that they have completely stopped reading any kind of newspaper.
So, what are these people’s top sources of information?
– Dipping into YouTube occasionally and letting the algorithm throw them things that it (the algorithm) believes is good for them.
– Opening InShorts multiple times during the day.
– Depending on Google’s new alerts (when you open a new page in Chrome, for instance).
– Office emails (usually from the corporate communications/PR team) that summarize news on the industry (relevant to their work).
In essence, this means that many people are leaving the all-important content consumption—relevant content consumption—at the mercy of algorithms and office teams!
Imagine how this would seem if we are talking about our health. It would be akin to letting our fridge or grocery store decide what we should eat!
Being on top of what is happening in your own industry is a small thing that you can control towards building your personal brand. Not just from a work perspective (your industry) but also your key interest areas because your interests also define how you are perceived. This is, of course, not all your interests, but just those that you want to known for. For example, you may want the world to know about your interest in say, marathon running, but not about interest in collecting antique furniture.
Recently, while working with a set of senior folks from a consulting organization, I came across participants with interest in things like Tintin comics (as a specific title/series), learning Sanskrit, temple architecture, traveling to one new country every year, among others. They had no clue that these could very well be added to their personal brand tenets too and assumed that these are too boring for the outside world to know about them, particularly the ‘professional’ world.
But that is such a mistaken notion. Being in consulting and being a visibly voracious fan of all-things-Tintin adds a wonderfully relatable human layer to that person’s personal brand. And while relevant content around the specific consulting area is easy to find and build into a pipeline, what about Tintin? When I showed the participant ways to be on top of what’s happening in the world of Tintin (even today, long after they have stopped publishing new titles), he was amazed, not just at the information he did not know about a topic he thought he was an expert in, but also from the fact that he found a world of fans that he was able to intricately relate to (a LOT of ‘people like me’).
So, the equivalent of Agassi’s ‘racket tension’ in terms of personal branding is you obsessing over how you spend time consuming relevant information about your areas of interest/expertise. Towards that, depending on algorithms has to stop. You would need to use tools and processes to ensure that content that is relevant to your personal brand comes to you on demand. When you get a 5-10 minute break during work, you should be able to quickly and directly dip into your content pipeline without wasting time in searching and scrolling.
From a personal health point of view, this is like filling your kitchen shelves and fridge with healthy items and vegetables so that everytime you feel like indulging in something, anything you pick is healthy.
For both personal health and for personal branding, what goes in (what you consume, food/information) is more important than what goes out (how you burn what you consume/what you share).
So, instead of obsessing over multiple things at once in the name of personal branding, start with this one unglamorous (because it is happening in solitude and no one is watching and encouraging/appreciating you) aspect. Fix ‘what goes in’ and the ‘what goes out’ will automatically start becoming superior.