Vishen Lakhiani argues you should build your personal brand around what makes you weird. He points to Steve Jobs, whose calligraphy hobby became Apple's distinctive typography, and says combining your odd interests with your work makes you impossible to copy in an AI world.
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Don't be copyable. In an age where AI can copy everything, you must identify what makes you you. Maybe it's the tonality of your voice. Maybe it's your weird hair. Remember Richard Simmons, the guy with the weird hair who was the funky exercise instructor in America? That's it. You're doing fantastic. It could be anything. But take a unique edge and make it part of that brand. That's what this guy did while studying at Reed College. He got obsessed with calligraphy, and he would spend hours just mastering the stroke of a pen to create the most beautiful lettering. There were at least 20 other personal computer companies emerging. All the others had ugly tech style fonts. Apple had gorgeous fonts. And the fonts mattered. Steve Jobs wasn't the engineer. That was Steve Wozniak. Steve Jobs was the calligrapher, the artist. He merged his wisdom and knowledge of fontology with technology. Now he had another unique edge. He was a naturally gifted storyteller. He used that to take Apple to trillion dollar valuation. He merged his three unique edges, design, storytelling, and understanding of consumer tech to build Apple. And that's why Apple absolutely dominated computing. Jobs famously said, you cannot connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect the dots looking backwards. If you go backwards in your life, there were certain moments, certain dots, certain things that maybe pulled you. Interest, passions, weird quirks, things that people said, oh, my God, you're so strange for liking that. That's a gift. And if you can figure out how to merge that together into your business, that might be what you are destined to do.
