5harathFounding Growth Lead, Willow Voice

Building a Personal Brand - Jack Appleby

13 Jan 2024 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:00

In this monologue, Jack Appleby shares his approach to building a professional personal brand by primarily curating and highlighting high‑quality work created by others. He advises consistently sharing content you admire, tagging the original creators, and publicly praising their work, which positions you as a valuable resource and a go‑to source for industry insights. Appleby acknowledges that pure curation has limits; he explains that his ability to demonstrate critical thinking about the curated work has been a key factor in landing jobs, even though this candid analysis sometimes costs him opportunities. The overall message balances a simple, foolproof starting point—curation and tagging—with the longer‑term benefit of showcasing thoughtful, analytical commentary on industry work.

Chapters

Because you can build quite a brand for yourself by just highlighting other people's work that you think is very good, just by curating things that you like. And I think that's the best way for people to start. If you're building a professional personal brand, is just curate, curate and highlight, tag the people responsible for it, tell them they did a great job, and you become a resource to other people in your industry because like, oh, they follow you to see other stuff like that. I think it's the most easy, foolproof, positive way to build a personal brand. I do think there are some ceilings to it. I think, like, I think one of the reasons that I've gotten hired for the jobs I've gotten is because I've shown, like, critical thinking towards a lot of different types of work. And don't get me wrong, it came with plenty of cons. And I'm sure there's jobs I haven't gotten specifically because of that. But that was true to who I am, like, being very thinking critically about work. That's what I'm most fascinated by.