Marcos Salazar - Career Adventurism & Psychological Development for Young Professionals, Gen Y, Millennials

My Personal Branding Journey Part 10 – Reflecting Back and Moving Forward

2009-09-23T08:28:56-04:00

It’s been an amazing month sharing my personal branding journey with all of you. I have received great feedback, engaged in some interesting discussions, and made some good friends along the way. For that, I thank all of you who took time out of your busy lives to read (my often long) blog posts and would love for you to continue following on my via email, RSS, and Twitter.

The value of taking a periodic step back

As I reflected back on my personal branding journey this past week, I thought about all that I have learned about what it means to create a personal brand today. Things such as the tricky balance of marketing yourself while not being seen as a pure self-promoter, the value of forming relationships via social media, or developing a brand that makes you a purple cow are just a few of many lessons I learned that will help me in building a strong personal brand going forward. However, what may have been the most important thing I have learned on this journey is that developing a strong personal brand can be used as a psychological tool for personal growth.

Instead of just seeing personal branding as tool to market yourself, it is important to see it as an avenue for digging deeper and deeper into who you truly are and who you want to eventually become. In today’s ever changing, hypercompetitive working world we are always on the go and often so focused on getting to that end goal that we don’t stop and see what’s right in front of us. Therefore, it is important for us from time to time to take a step back and ask ourselves if our current personal brand is in line with what we are passion about. So when you get a chance, set some time aside, look at the bigger picture, and see if your personal brand is aligned with your both your passions and professional goals.

Continue focusing your brand

While I decided to develop my brand that encompasses all my varied skills, talents, and work experiences into one identity, I have come to see that you simply can’t focus on all of them at once. A problem I often have is I sometimes take on too many projects at the same time and spread myself thin. Well, if you add too many slashes to your personal brand there is a potential to spread others people’s attentions too thin also. Therefore, as time goes on I will continue to tighten up my brand more and more while exploring the passions that are most important to me.

One example of getting more focused is deciding on the topics I will be writing about on my personal blog here at www.marcossalazar.com. As I was thinking about new blog posts I wanted to write, I realized I needed to focus my topics so people can know what type of information and resources I will be providing. This is why I have decided to put my writing under a smaller of themes:

1.    Psychological Development for Young Professionals
2.    Career adventurism in the 21st century
3.    Gen Y & Millennial issues (work, social, professional, & psychological topics)

I may throw in occasional posts from some of my other slashes such as girl and women leadership, social media, exercise and fitness, and a new area I am exploring – Gen Y & Millennial politics – but for the time being my writing will be focused on these three themes.

In addition to my blog, I have learned how valuable a tool Twitter is to raise awareness about your brand out. Therefore, I will also be focusing my Twitter streams just like my blog. I love how Dan does such a great job of being a resource for topics related to Personal Branding and highlights them with caps at the beginning of most tweets. I will be doing something similar but will focus my tweets on the topics above.

Syncing your growth

As you evolve as a person, so should your brand. In the 21st century we are not going to stay in the same job, or even the same field, for the rest of our lives. Therefore, as your passions, interests, and talents expand, so should your personal brand. This may not necessarily mean going the route I have gone of developing a whole brand around all of your passions and talents but rather, learning how to integrate your growth to serve and further your personal brand. Good luck and hope you enjoyed my personal branding journey!

My Personal Branding Journey Part 9: Maintaining Your Brand

2009-09-03T07:14:15-04:00

About a year ago, I received an email from someone who had commented on a post of mine on a series about postcollege depression. On the blog post he had written a long, personal comment explaining how he had suffered from postcollege depression after graduation and discussed the process he went through to get out of it. It was a heartfelt comment that touched many of my readers. The only problem: he used his real name when he posted the comment.

The reason he was writing me was that when you Googled his name, my website linking to his comment was the first search result to come up! He was in the process of applying to law school so he was scared that if (most likely when) the admissions committed looked him up, the first thing they would see was this highly personal confession of his. I quickly deleted the comment at his request.

In thinking about situations like these, it reiterated to me that anything we put online can come back and impact our personal brand – even it its something from many years ago. This is why the last step outlined in Me 2.0 – Maintain Your Brand – is such an important element in developing a strong personal brand.

Let’s do some spring cleaning

On this last phase of my personal branding journey, I wanted to make sure that everything about me online matched up with the personal brand I was creating. So I Googled my name (as well as Binged it) and found that there were a number of tech forums I had posted to many years ago that showed up. And more recently, I had a number of comments showing up from the Get Satisfaction! site many companies now use for their customer service report. On these I had mistakenly used my full name and because they were large sites with lots of traffic, they were showing up fairly high on search results.

So what I did (and I suggest you do as well) is contacted all of these sites and asked them to remove my name and account information. While nothing I had posted was controversial or would have damaged my personal brand, these sites were blocking other things I wanted higher on search results such as being featured in the New York Times or on Forbes.

I also highly suggest not using your real name on these sites. Get Satisfaction has a large userbase so it was showing up in the top 10 in terms of Google search results. It also took them weeks to figure out how to remove my username from the URL of my profile (it was finally fixed). In addition, it is a good idea to set up Google Alerts with your name so you can monitor anything you have missed (in addition to monitoring what others say about you).

Update everything

Updating and maintaining your personal brand is much different than updating your resume because with your resume you only really have to do it when you are applying for a new job. Too many times we put information on websites or social networks and don’t think to update this information whenever we gain new skills or work experiences. You certainly don’t want to lose out on potential opportunities because your personal brand information is not up-to-date therefore, it is important you look over and update these sites regularly.

There are many sites out there you can do this with besides your personal website, so I suggest only focusing on the major ones to save yourself time. Therefore at a minimum make sure your personal website, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are up-to-date. Then when doing a search for you name and you realize you have a profile on many other social networks, you can decide if you want to keep them or need to delete them.

Static vs. dynamic brand

In today’s hypercompetitive economy you need to be constantly learning new knowledge and skills to survive and maintain a competitive advantage. Therefore, it is important to get into the mindset that our personal branding is not something that is static but in fact, very dynamic and will evolve over time based on new passions, discoveries, and experiences. This doesn’t mean that you constantly change your brand at the whim of new things you are interested in but rather, that you are willing to be open and aware of new things that interest you and are willing to integrate them into them into your brand if you decide to pursue them.

For me personally, as an extension of my work on leadership development at the Girl Scouts, I have become much more interested in girl and women’s rights and am looking into writing more about these issues. In addition, I have also become much more interested in politics and am exploring the possibility of writing about how politics is impacting Gen Y and Millennials, and even thinking about the possibility of running for political office one day. All these, if I decide to pursue them, will require a tweaking of my brand in order to fit them in, and this is okay. We are all most likely going to be changing jobs and passions throughout our lifetime so it is important to be flexible enough with your brand that you will allow yourself to go after something that may not be related to your current brand. And when you do this, you will have learned the value of what it is like to be Renaissance Worker.

My Personal Branding Journey Part 8: Communicate Your Brand with Good Blogger Relations & Twitter

2009-08-25T09:03:03-04:00

In writing this series of posts, I’ve been trying to strike a balance between discussing why I began this personal branding journey while at the same time providing readers with useful information they can integrate into their own personal branding efforts. If I had simply been talking about myself the entire series and just trying to promote my books, websites, or clothing store, it wouldn’t have been very interesting or useful for readers.

So, in the third step of developing your personal brand found in Me. 2.0 – Communicate Your Brand – I will go over what I think are two of the most important strategies you can use today to communicate your brand effectively without being seen as a shameless self-promoter. They are developing meaningful blogger relationships and using Twitter as a connector and being a resource.

Why do you want to contact bloggers?

When I launched BoroThreads, the focus of connecting with bloggers was to get the word out about our hyperlocal clothing designs and hopefully sell some shirts. However, instead of making the mistake of simply pitching to bloggers and asking them to write about us, I decided to create a mutual beneficial situation that focused on the blogger directly. This usually involved emailing local bloggers about the possibility of a contest for their blog where BoroThreads would give away a free shirt to new subscribers or Twitter followers.

However, in promoting my personal brand of being a Renaissance Worker, my focus was not on selling some type of tangible product. Yes, in some ways it was about the selling of my ideas and what my personal brand has become. However, as I thought more about it I realized that I wanted something more then just some type of mutual promotion. What I really wanted was to reach out and develop meaningful relationships with people I found interesting, respected, and admired and use this as a vehicle for communicating my brand.

First who, then the what

While I do have books and clothing to sell, the reality is that these were never major reasons for wanting to go on this personal branding journey. As I mentioned in my first post, I had been out of the blogging and Gen Y/Millennials space for quite a long time and I really missed it. I missed all the connections I had made with people in the field and wanted to reconnect as well as get to know new people. It is this desire for connection and focus on quality vs. quantity that can be one of the best ways to communicate your brand as well as be the most psychologically rewarding.

In writing this post, I started thinking about Jim Collin’s book Good to Great and his principle, “first who, then what.” Often we are so focused on the “what” in our lives – what we want to do, who we want to be, where we want to go – that we forget about or push aside the “who.” But the truth is even if you picked the perfect what but also picked the wrong who, life is going to pretty much be crappy.

In a world that is constantly changing, it is the who that stay consistent in our lives. The what can change (and most likely will quite often in our lifetimes), so one of the main questions we need to ask ourselves in deciding on what approach to take when communicating our personal brand is who are the people we want to be communicating our brand to and do we want to focus on quantity or quality?

What I will be focusing on personally in communicating my brand is connecting with those bloggers that I want to develop strong relationships with. And as I said before, this is also a great personal branding strategy because if a blogger gets to know you well and respects you and your ideas or work, they are more likely to recommend you, and even become an evangelist.

Using Twitter as a connector and resource

So then the next question is where do you find these bloggers that you would want to develop strong relationships with? In the past you could find them on blog rolls, but since I started my personal branding journey I have come to see Twitter as the ultimate community builder where I am able to find and connect with new and interesting bloggers quickly and easily. In the tweets of the people I follow, I can quickly see who they think are important and instantly learn more about people in their network. It sure beats scrolling through blog rolls or searching Google to find people I want to reach out and connect with.

But great relationships are two-way streets so it is important to also use Twitter as a platform to become a resource for others in order to nurture those relationships. By sharing useful information, interesting links, and fun advice you can promote your brand by becoming a resource that engages your Twitter audience while also giving something back to the people you are trying to build good relationships with.

My Personal Branding Journey Part 7: Strategies for Creating an Online Presence

2009-08-20T07:12:30-04:00

In my last post, I discussed how to use the techniques of narrative, being a purple cow, and understanding context to create a strong offline presence. These same principles can be used to create a powerful online presence as well and prevent incidents such as the one above from happening to you. Below is how I’ve learned to use these strategies to help differentiate my personal brand online and how you can use them to create a brand that grabs your audience’s attention and keeps it.

Using a “blogsite” to create a narrative

Whether we realize it or not, we are all creating a narrative about ourselves online. Everything we post, comment on, or upload is contributing to the story of who we are online – potentially to millions. And even if you don’t make a conscious effort to create an online presence, that too is a narrative because you are leaving your personal brand to chance.

This is why a blogsite – a hybrid of a blog and a website – is so essential to creating a strong online presence and is one of the main principles found in Me 2.0. By having a website that allows you to both blog and provide addition biographical information, you can take control of your online narrative and begin telling people the unique story of who you are and what you think within the field that interests you.

Before venturing on this personal branding journey, my blogsite focused on personal development for young professionals. However, if you visit my main website you’ll see that the focus of it has shifted due to what I’ve learned on my personal branding journey. Now my site is centered around being a Renaissance Worker, Career Adventurism, and Psychology Development for Young Professionals. And as time goes on I will be providing more and more content that not only benefits people within these topics, but also adds to my narrative and makes my brand stronger.

Being a purple cow online

One thing you always want to do is try to differentiate your blogsite in some way. Common strategies are covering unique topics or through unique site design. For example, a great title to your blog such as Matt Cheuvront’s site Life Without Pants can turn you into a purple cow and draw people in to ask why you named your site a certain way. Or you can create a memorable logo and display well known news outlets associated with your site such as the ones found on the Personal Branding Blog home page.

Another great technique is to have a unique picture on your website. Seth Godin’s image is a great example of this. He is well known for his bald head and if you go to his site, he has a picture displaying the top of his head front and center. It is not a loud or crazy image. It simple, shows his personality, and draws you in.

In redoing my blogsite, I decided to use a simple and easy to navigate design as well as have a fun and interesting image on the sidebar. Such images can add to your narrative by providing readers with a sense of your personality, creativity, and display a more human side of you that can increase interest and make visitors want to find out more about your personal brand.

Online social networks and context

In many ways, social networks are extensions of your main website and can fill in important details to the narrative you are trying to create for your personal brand. For example, your LinkedIn profile provides people with a detailed look at your professional life and allows other to give recommendations that can add rich information to the story of who you are. Flickr can provide a concrete view of things you are involved in such as events, trips, or project. And YouTube allows you to create content that gives your narrative human elements and lets people see more of your personality.

But in thinking about each social network, it’s important to keep context in mind. For example, you won’t want to post information that is too personal on LinkedIn because this is where your professional network resides and you don’t want to potentially damage your reputation. You may use Facebook more for keeping up with friends, so will not want to inundate them with lots of posts or updates about things happening within your field. Or on Twitter, where everything posted is on public display, you may not want to post highly personal information that can make you look unprofessional or damage your brand.

How does this impact my narrative?

When using these (or just about any strategy) in developing your personal brand, one thing to always keep in mind is that anything you post could have an impact on the narrative you are trying to create. So when forming a strategy, ask yourself, “How is this going to contribute to the story I want to tell?” Finding answers to this question will provide you with a good guide in developing a strong personal brand both on and offline.

My Personal Branding Story Part 6: Narrative, Context, and Being a Purple Cow

2009-08-13T07:45:36-04:00

In my last two posts, I described why I decided to use the concept of being a Renaissance Worker as my personal brand. In many ways, adopting this brand was a risky because Renaissance Worker is not a term people are familiar with. In addition, if someone asks me what I do, am I going to say, “I am a Renaissance Worker.” Nope – that’s not going to fly and it probably never will. I was aware of both of these issues and while they may seem like obstacles to creating my personal brand, I actually see them as opportunities because they will require me to take a creative approach to communicating my brand.

In this post, I will be discussing three psychological strategies – creating a narrative, understanding context, and being a purple cow – in conjunction with the second step in Me 2.0 – Create Your Brand – to help you grab your audience’s attention and keep it. While I will be using these strategies in the context of being a Renaissance Worker, they can be applied to any personal brand. I will begin with offline strategies first and in my next post will transfer them to creating a strong online presence that will attract people to your personal brand.

Create a narrative

I was at a party this past weekend and like usual, I got the typical, “What do you do?” Now, if I had said, “I am a Renaissance Worker,” we all know I would have gotten a confused look. But even saying the typical, “I am a consultant at xyz company” would not have been any better.

I rarely answer this question by just stating my day job because simply put, it’s a pretty boring response. If I’m talking to someone, whether it’s a friend, a date, or someone at a networking event, I want to be engaged. So what I usually end up doing is telling some kind of story.

When I got asked what I did in New York, the person also said, “Nice shirt!” That night I was wearing one of my Brooklyn BoroThreads tees, so instead of simply mentioning my day job of, “I’m a psychology researcher for the Girl Scouts,” I took a cue from that person and started talking about how I had designed the shirt myself and it was from a clothing company I just launched in New York. I could have ended there, but that still would have not been too exciting.

So I began telling a story of how I had met my business partner Gabriel via Craigslist when I subletted an apartment after breaking up with the girlfriend I was living with. Gabriel was my roommate for that month and we hit it off right away as we hung out in the apartment talking about how much we loved Brooklyn, funny things about New York, Amherst (where he was from and I went to college), and general tech stuff. This led me to talk about how Gabriel and I were chatting at a café one day and noticed how New York was packed with clothing stores, but no one had ever really created hyperlocal clothing focused on interesting and quirky things about living in the 5 Boros.

So before you know it, I was creating a narrative on the origin of BoroThreads and discussing funny stories, the way we come up with the designs, and how we end up seeing people on the streets wearing our gear and make it a point to go introduce ourselves (and sometimes buy them a beer). The person was really enjoying the story and I can guarantee that they remembered who I was much better than if I had just said, “I am a clothing designer.”

This illustrates an extremely important idea to keep in mind when communicating your personal brand: our brains are wired to think in terms of narratives. Storytelling is one of the few universal human traits that spans across cultures and all of known history. They captivate the mind and elicit emotions that become tied to themes, events, or characters. When this happens, our story gets implanted into memory easier and much more permanently. This is why creating a narrative about your personal brand is infinitely better than simply stating your job title.

Context is key

When talking about your personal brand, especially if you are a Renaissance Worker with many slashes like me, you always have to take into account the context you are in. For example, at the party I picked up on the cue of the person making a comment about my shirt, so that was a perfect lead in to talk about BoroThreads and clothing design. If I had started talking about Girl Scouts or my books, it would have been out of context and may have been harder to create a story or get them interested in one of my slashes.

It’s the same when I am at a psychology conference. If someone asks me what I do, it wouldn’t really be appropriate to start talking about BoroThreads because that is not what people are there to discuss. So whenever you are in a situation where you may be talking about your personal brand, learn to take cues from your environment and the person you are speaking to, and then adapt your narrative appropriately.

Becoming the purple cow in the room

While telling a story will make you more memorable, one way to make your personal brand stand out is by having people see you as being unique or remarkable in some way. As a Renaissance Worker with many slashes, a good way to do this is by throwing out one of your other professional identities at the right time to create surprise and uniqueness.

So at the party, when I was telling the story about BoroThreads I could tell they were under the impression that it was my full time gig. So after I was done, I casually mentioned, “Oh, but for my day job I am a psychology and leadership researcher for the Girl Scouts.” This seemed to have come out of left field and I did this on purpose because we are psychologically programmed to notice novelty and pay attention to things that seem strange or different. When they heard this, the person was surprised because they were not expecting to hear something like that and became curious of not only the fact that the Girl Scouts have a Research Institute, but that there was a guy working for them.

So mentioning that I worked for the Girl Scouts as a psychology and leadership researcher right after talking about clothing design created a psychological disruption that forced the listener to spend more cognitive energy to understand what I had just said. The end result was creating a conversation that was a bit unusual and this led the person to pay attention at a much higher level.

This strategy is what Seth Godin calls being a purple cow. Godin says, “Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring. A Purple Cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow — the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows — is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to. Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible.”

Discussing being a renaissance worker

While I didn’t discuss the concept of a Renaissance Worker right off the bat, I did set the stage for talking about it using these strategies. And when I did bring it up, they loved the idea and felt they could really relate. So in creating a strategy for communicating your brand, always try to create a narrative, take your context into consideration, and find a way to present your uniqueness so you become the purple cow in the room.

My Personal Branding Story Part 5: Becoming a Renaissance Worker

2009-08-10T08:22:27-04:00

In my last post, I introduced the concept of a Renaissance Worker and how I came to see this term as a way to unify all of my skills, passions, and work experiences into a personal brand. It was an idea I had been thinking about for months, but during the discover phase of my personal branding journey I realized that it really encapsulated the career adventurist in me. In addition, the brand just felt right.

I have always been the type of person who loves learning from a wide array of fields, and I have made the conscious effort since college to develop skills from a diverse set of disciplines. This mindset has been at the heart of almost all my career decisions and I have seen many, many benefits of approaching my professional life in this way.

However, I am by far not the only person who has adopted the Renaissance Worker mindset. More importantly, I believe that developing a Renaissance Worker mindset will need to become an essential part of any personal brand if you want to succeed in the working world of the 21st century.

Twenty-First Century Renaissance Workers

What do Bono, Diddy, and Tim Ferriss have in common? They are all modern day Renaissance Workers.

Diddy, for example, owns Bad Boy Records, has his own clothing line Sean John, has a movie production company, and owns two restaurants. He has also taken the roles of recording executive, performer, producer of MTV’s Making the Band, writer, arranger, clothing designer, and Broadway actor.

Bono is a rock superstar, but he is also a dedicated humanitarian as well as owner of Dublin’s five star Clarence Hotel, on the board of the Elevation Partners private-equity firm, has invested in the Forbes Media group in the US through Elevation Partners, and been in multiple movies.

Tim Ferriss is a bestselling author and much sought after speaker, but he has also amassed a diverse (and often odd) roster of credentials. He has been a Princeton University guest lecturer, the first American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in tango, a National Chinese kickboxing champion, and was named Wired Magazine’s “Greatest Self-Promoter of 2008.”

While these are examples of individuals at the far end of the Renaissance Worker success spectrum, Diddy, Bono, and Ferriss demonstrate how you don’t have to stay in a single niche anymore. Today, you are able to diversify your professional life and succeed in many areas that don’t always seem to relate to each other.

Gen Y and Millennials – Renaissance Workers in the making

What I have discovered on my personal branding journey is that my generation (Gen Y) and Millennials are all adopting the Renaissance Worker concept – both out of choice as well as necessity.

In many ways, the foundation for becoming a Renaissance Worker was laid out for us by our educational system. Most students are required to take liberal arts classes where they learn about topics unrelated to their major (sadly, colleges still don’t do a good job of helping students see how the knowledge and skills they learn in one field could be beneficial other fields as well as in the potential career paths they may take after graduation).

In addition, there has never been a time where we have access to so much knowledge, are able to use so many tools to express our creative potentialities, and are not penalized when we jump from job to job. Today’s working world is perfectly set up to become a Renaissance Worker.

Our generation has also come to see that work is no longer designed for someone who is going to stay in one job, or even profession, for 30 years. These jobs are vanishing each day therefore, we are all forced to constantly seek out new knowledge and develop new skills just to survive.

The benefits of diversifying your professional life

On March 12, 2009, Bernard Madoff pled guilty to 11 felonies and admitted to operating what has been called the largest investor fraud ever committed by an individual. Prosecutors estimate that his 4,800 clients lost over $64.8 billion.

Now, what does Bernard Madoff have to do with being a Renaissance Worker and personal branding? Three words: Diversify, Diversify, Diversify! Many of the people Madoff defrauded lost virtually everything because they decided to put all their money into one single investment. Then when things went bad, poof – all their money was gone!

Today, we are told to diversify our investments and this is why people buy mutual funds instead of putting all their money into one stock. Sure, sometimes a single stock can pay off short-term, but in the long run this strategy could be extremely risky and potentially catastrophic. So when it comes to the career investment game, doesn’t it make sense for you to start diversifying your knowledge and skills as well?

In her book One Person/Multiple Careers, Marci Alboher says that adding “slashes” i.e., having multiple jobs or professional identities, is just like diversifying your investment portfolio. This way, if the market goes south or one employer runs into trouble, a diversified career portfolio can buffer you against hard times, especially if you have other potential income streams.

Becoming a highly valuable worker

Adopting the Renaissance Worker life can also benefit you by making you a much more desirable job candidate. If you have many more slashes on your resume then the other candidate, you have a much better shot at landing the job because your additional skill set sets you apart and will bring added value to the organization. And if you are already within an organization, your slashes will create new opportunities and potential promotions.

In my own professional life, my day job is a psychology and leadership researcher for the Girl Scouts Research Institute. However, on a daily basis I am constantly using the creative and entrepreneurial skills I developed when opening up my clothing business, am being sought for my technology skills, and am helping IT, Marketing, and Communications create a social media strategy that will increase awareness of our new Girl Scout Leadership Experience that will help usher in a new generation of girl leaders for the 21st century. So because of my diverse set of knowledge and diversified skill set as a Renaissance Worker, I add value to my organization in a way that is far outside my job description.

How do you become a Renaissance Worker?

To answer this question, I am going to take you back to my previous posts. They are all related to the discover phase of personal branding outlined in Me 2.0 and will help set the foundation for becoming a Renaissance Worker.

First, you have to get a better sense of who you are and see if this professional lifestyle fits with you (however, like I said earlier, I think sooner or later everyone is going to have to become a Renaissance Worker). Next, you have to figure out what are you passionate about. I have never done a job in my career that I didn’t enjoy or feel I was growing from. If the learning curved leveled off or I lost interest, I realized that job was not for me and I went exploring for something else I was passionate about. Never settle for a mediocre job experience.

Next you have to figure out what you were born to do and see if this aligns with your passions. As I said in my third post, there is a huge difference between doing what you are good at versus what you were made to do. Next, you have to figure out how to connect all your interest, skills, and work experiences so there is a level of synergy that all your professional identities benefit from each other. Once this is done, you can then see how to put them all under a unified personal brand.

Do you think you will adopt a Renaissance Worker mindset soon? What value do you see it bringing to your professional life?