Categories: Articles

Celebrate The Differences

When I first became interested in the power of developing a personal brand, it was long before the Internet took hold and it would be many years before anyone had uttered the phrase, "social media." In 2013, you hardly hear anyone talk about personal branding anymore. We call it reputation and other things. Nearly ten years ago, famed speaker Mike Lipkin would quote Oscar Wilde in his presentations when he would say: "be you, because others are already taken." We spend a lot of time talking about being different, standing out and our appreciation for individualism, but do we really mean it? Do we truly understand it?

This isn’t about business or marketing.

This time… it’s personal. Far From The Tree is a book by Andrew Solomon (special thanks to Julie Burstein for bringing this to my attention). From his website: "He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, as are the triumphs of love Solomon documents in every chapter." Solomon recently gave a presentation at Google. It is amazingly powerful. I urge you to put everything down for a bit and just watch this video. How do families deal with children who are radically different from who they are? It’s a fascinating question and it peers deep into the human condition and how special we can be…

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.