Are You Hiding From Yourself?

The toughest leap for marketers to make
is to move past marketing as their sole identity.
One big LinkedIn/AboutMe page
of achievements and laurels.
The candy wrapper becomes the candy itself.

As you become successful with the facade,
the incentive is to bury
who you are deeper and deeper.
So only the shiniest part shows.

This is a partial reason
why the impostor syndrome feels so painful.
It's presented as feeling like a fraud when you
should be taken seriously.

Lots of mixed messages:
"Fake it til you make it"
That translates to, uh, being fake. lol

So when marketers put a tense
and carefully curated version of themselves
out there, the worst thing that can happen
in some cases is that version does well.

Now you're carrying around your best image
and always trying to live up to it.
You can get what I call "image fatigue."

That's when you get
cranky and impatient
because you traded
important parts of who you are
and you're not seeing
whatever it is you were expecting
or someone promised you.

It can feel like a big betrayal
if you were promised
big things for the trade
or cause you to doubt yourself
if you made the promise to yourself.

Your whole online persona
could be about being real
while you're scared to death
of showing your "true self."

This is not where I tell you "just do it."
Maybe you have great
reasons to hide your real thoughts.
Saying how you really feel
in certain circumstances
could cause all kinds of problems.

This is just to show you
the inverse cost of your dreams.
When dreams denied
make you pay
for abandoning them.
There's a cost to burying
what's most important to you.

We're not just talking
about what pays your bills,
by the way.

We're talking about respecting
what moves you and not pretending
any part of who you are is trivial
if you are doing so out of fear.

Sometimes people play small
to protect their aces on their shelf.


Example: you work a low paying job
while you write your novel.

I'm writing to remind you
of your most valuable dreams.
Especially the ones you don't talk about a lot.
Are you checking up on those dreams?
Taking them out of the garage for a spin?

The biggest mistake is to assume your magic
will be there any time you want
whenever you're ready.
Whenever you can squeeze it in.

Giving up on that part of you
can hollow you out.
You'll be smiling for things
that don't make you smile.
Just to keep people
from worrying about you.

It will cost you so much more
to pretend your dreams don't matter
than to find a way to work them in.

When I compete,
I'm bringing all the things
I love with me.
It changes how I listen,
what I write and how far
I'm willing to go
to see a project succeed.

Let's say one of your loves is painting.
Look at the time you put
into learning how
great art is created.

Look at how many times
you're willing to paint terribly
regardless of what others think.
You'll fight through boredom,
doubt, bad times and more.

Measure what you love most
and who you are in the loving of it
against how you present yourself to the world.

The gap between the two points
can become a pain no one knows about.

What happens now?