The Importance of Publicly Displaying Your Knowledge and Skills: 5 Insights from a 30-Day Writing Challenge
I’ve procrastinated on building a “personal brand” for a long time.
Since graduating college in 2018, I’ve worked my butt off in the digital marketing space to learn, grow, and leverage my skills. My naïve young mind underestimated what it took to unlock quality opportunities. It took a while to get my bearings. And it involved multiple internships, freelance jobs, passion projects, and working as a W-2 employee.
Admittedly, I made it harder than it had to be.
I was privately building my skills and experience.
And that was a big mistake. You see, I used to get upset that people didn’t see my value. But this mindset was flawed. Hard work doesn’t lead to more opportunities — at least, not by itself. Instead, it comes from publicly displaying our knowledge and skills to the world. And this is the power of creating a personal brand.
So to kick off 2023, I started my personal branding voyage by joining a 30-day writing challenge hosted by Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole.
The goal? Publish one compelling essay on Twitter for 30 days in a row.
Here are my top 5 insights on how writing impacts your personal brand, learning potential, and growth opportunities.
1. The Opportunity Cost of Not Creating Content Online Is Missed Opportunities and Lost Income
A great piece of content is a unit of value — that is, if you’re displaying your expertise or learning potential.
Now consider this: If I published content every day for the last 5 years, I’d have over 1,500 units of value. Each would’ve been an asset, capable of unlocking income and networking opportunities. It’s hard to imagine what it’s cost me to procrastinate on this.
Not creating content is costing you a lot.
2. Follow The 85% Rule For Optimal Learning
I organized the 30-day challenge so that I had an 85% likelihood of success. And here’s my reasoning.
According to Neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen, we’re most effective at learning and hitting milestones when we succeed 85% of the time. In other words, moderately challenging goals are best for making progress and growth.
Make it too easy and you’ll become bored because it’s not challenging enough.
But make it too hard and it’ll be impossible to hit your milestones, eventually demoralizing you from taking action.
Momentum is better than stagnation, so it’s important to set realistic objectives. My initial goal was to publish one essay every day on Twitter. But by itself, this made my success rate 95% — 100% since I have a background in content marketing. It would’ve been too easy. So I added another component to the challenge: Comment on five creators’ posts every day. This made it more challenging and brought the likelihood of success down to 85%.
What conditions will give you an 85% chance of success in building a personal brand?
3. Clarify And Refine Ideas So They’re Worth Sharing (Here’s My 8-Step Checklist)
A clear idea is your north star.
It’s essential when setting out on any writing voyage. But many people struggle with clarifying and refining an idea before writing. And as a result, they’ll waste willpower and get stuck. An unclear idea is like leaving the harbor without a compass or a sense of direction.
It’s madness.
So here’s the 8-step checklist I use to refine ideas worth sharing, inspired by digital writers Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole. I’ll use one of my Twitter posts as an example:
1: What do you want to write about? Example: I want to write about the technology I used to write 100 articles in 2022.
2: What, specifically? Example: What kind of technology? Tech stack for ideating, organizing, creating, and editing content.
3: For Who/So That? Example: FOR content marketers and SaaS startups SO THAT they can maximize their content output.
4. Are you using personal or borrowed credibility? Example: Personal. This is what I did.
5. Which content type are you using? Example: Analytical. Here’s a breakdown of what I used to create 100 articles.
6: Choose a headline style. Example: Story. “In 2022 I Wrote 100 Articles For A SaaS Startup — Here Was My Tech Stack”
7: Choose a single-sentence opener. Example: Moment in time. “In 2022, I wrote 100 articles for Undock as a Marketing Coordinator.”
8: Create a brief outline. Example: Introduction + 11 tools and software.
Borrow this checklist to save yourself time and energy.
4. Supercharge Your Content By Following The “Right” Kind Of Curiosity
Curiosity is the precursor to excitement and exploration.
Without it, the content creation process will become tedious and mundane. Your focus will become so intensely fixed on the end goal that you’ll forget to enjoy the journey and find pleasure in the process. This lack of passion will be evident in your content, making it lack any emotion or spark (and be much less interesting).
But there’s a caveat with curiosity: It doesn’t always lead to learning, expertise, and innovation.
Psychologists have identified two types:
- Diversive curiosity. This is our impulse to seek new and novel things. It’s shiny object syndrome. We seek these experiences through social media feeds and trending Netflix shows.
- Epistemic curiosity. This is what happens when diversive curiosity grows up. It involves adding effort, discipline, and focus when exploring your curiosities.
Diversive curiosity isn’t inherently bad.
It helps by redirecting our attention toward new possibilities. But it’s superficial by itself. For instance, let’s say you’re writing an article about health and wellness. Diversive curiosity would lead you to the latest diet and workout trends, without much regard for research or fact-checking.
It’d lack substance.
But epistemic curiosity would lead to deeper research and learning.
You’d have more well-rounded ideas and a nuanced perspective on the topic. The end result is an informative, engaging, and credible piece of content. And this creates more value for you and the reader.
Curiosity becomes an engine for growth only if we add the proper fuel — effort, discipline, and focus.
5. A Strong Personal Brand Focuses On Learning and Building A Portfolio
Since your personal brand won’t be an overnight success, how will you stay motivated to build it?
Don’t focus on gaining clout or status — they ebb and flow at unpredictable times. Creators who only focus on increasing status eventually lose momentum. Or, if they’re lucky, they become a one-hit wonder. Content for your personal brand virtually advertises what you’re all about.
And people can tell if you’re just trying to chase fame.
Instead, focus on learning and sharing value.
Writing leads to deeper understanding, whether you’re sharing an achievement or explaining what you’re learning. It showcases your knowledge, skills, achievements, experiences, and learning potential. And it makes you clarify and articulate your ideas. By the time you taste success, you’ll have become skillful and experienced enough to sustain it.
And this increases your odds of unlocking opportunities that serve your long-term growth.
Next Steps:
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I unpack the mindsets, frameworks, and strategies of the top content writers and copywriters. Plus, I curate my curiosity along the way.
