REVISITING POINT OF VIEW V. PERSONALITY
Until it wasn't. If we can no longer manipulate our way to growth, what are our options? The answer comes from Carl—it is finding the utmost personal to resonate with a consumer community necessary to build your vision. But even that that needs clarification in this era overrun with personality-driven brands. A good example of this is the much beloved East Fork Pottery which built its audience on the personality of the founder only to recently discover that is not a sustainable method of growth.
So what is the difference between point of view and personality? I wrote about it two years ago in the three-part series about breaking the entrepreneurial fever. Last week, I touched on the lesson of knowing the difference between feeling alive versus intoxicated, and this lesson helps us avoid building personality-driven brands so we can clearly define our personal point of view - which Rick Rubin identifies as a gift. Here is what I said in 2021:
If you are seeking a different way, start by defining your values and your purpose from your life experience and personal point of view. Then remove the dependency of your personality to be able to execute on them and see them fully expressed in the world. When you have done this, you've successfully built a culture, not a cult. Your business becomes dynamic, not static, and growth becomes about evolution, not dominance.
Your point of view is the lens through which you see the world. It is something that you can share with others, engage in, dialogue about, disagree about, evolve, change and connect. It's dynamic. Cultivating a point of view takes a willingness to be vulnerable. It's often contradictory; it's got blind spots, and it cannot be neatly packaged into a brand pyramid! It, like the theme of this year, is regenerative.
If we are to believe in our vision, and that vision requires us to connect with a large consumer community to be realized, we may consider how the path to that connection does not start with the planning of an Instagram grid but with the curiosity for those values that our most personal to us and a reverence for, and a discipline to the process of sharing those with our team and our customers. If it works for Rick Rubin, it will work for you too.
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