As years goes by you recognise different patterns in your life, given that you take your time and/or have the ability to reflect over which impact your behaviour have on the surroundings, and what this give you in some form of a ”brand” or which expectations people might have on you.
Your impact on others is usually composed by a number of subtle and more or less small elements that might be hard to wash out or even recognise in the daily clutter and distraction-filled existence called life – or maybe the part limited to living, weekday, whatever. Some people also define parts of these patterns as reputation, as for example Per Frykman in his unremitting propagation for the importance of your professional reputation, which I support wholeheartedly.
A couple of years ago I actually ordered an analysis of my Professional Rep by this guy, and it was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done in my life. This scariness told me quite a lot about my self confidence. I was quite affected by the feedback people gave. My fears when starting the survey was pendulating somewhere between getting really bad reviews and a compact silence in return, but I got an overwhelmingly positive picture of my reputation as a professional peer and have since then had that message in my tag line everywhere that i can possibly imagine.
Now is a time when I really find it necessary to take command over my business and really try to deal with my own value proposition and this isn’t so easy as one can believe, but it sure is a healthy clarifying process to go through.
And when I grind this in my mind, I find one of the possibly not-so-wished elements that makes me ME… people often ask me for advice about this and that (I know I SHOULD bill more for this, but…) and I often find myself passing their wonderings on to the information Behemoth Of All Time – I Google. And I mean Google as a verb you know, not the sub-company of Alphabet.
Almost as often as I Google on behalf of others I wonder why people isn’t capable of googling themselves? I’m thinking about adding a title to my list of skills – ”professional Googler”. It has been like this for many years and I consider myself quite nerdy when coming to digital adoption and this whole pack of modern attributes. The somewhat strange thing is that I’m totally illiterate when it comes to for instance asking SQL-questions into a database, though I have somewhat figured out how to suck out information of systems when real need has arisen and no one has been nearby to ask for support.
One of the things I don’t understand about this is why people never learn how to get real benefit from their gadgets. Everyone of us can go bananas over some more or less stupid writings on the internet, but to actually fact-check (or find a tutorial of some sort, or to, digitally supported, solve their own daily issues) seem to be totally out of reach for many. How can that be?
Meanwhile I sit here and wonder if my key differentiator is that I’m a really skilled googler – therefore considered a nice, wise guy that people go to with their questions… is my true title maybe ”Google broker” then? Or should I call myself ”Search Engine(er)”…? Or maybe I should study to become a priest?
How du you differentiate yourself in order to succeed in business?