In this article, you are going to learn 3 reasons why creating your Personal Brand today is the single best decision you can take to exponentially grow your income levels.
- Shifting Realities from the Physical World to the Digital World
- Living In The Third Era of Knowledge
- Content Creation for Exponential Growth
1. Shifting Realities from Physical to the Digital World
Today we are living in 2 worlds – there is a physical world and then there is a digital world.
As of 2022, Millennials and Generation Z are spending as much as 50% of their waking hours in the digital world. In the world of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, Microsoft & Google services.
Millennials and Gen Z are increasingly detaching themselves from the physical world and living more in the digital space.
This has become their new reality.
They learn here, order groceries here, find entertainment here, and build social relations here.
And this is only growing.
Take a minute and see your screen time average over the last week on your smartphone to verify it. And then add the time you might be spending on laptops, TV, and tablets on top of that.
Take me as an example, I spend on average 10-12 hours a day in the digital world, living through my mobile, laptop, TV, and camera screens.
My window to the world including my friends, my work, and entertainment is now associated with the digital world.
Personal Brand As An Asset
What this trend means is that whatever asset you own here in the digital world – your YouTube channel, Instagram page, email list, or any presence in the digital world – is going to grow way faster than any other physical asset.
Let’s understand this idea using numbers:
If you are, let’s say, holding $10,000 worth of real estate or $10,000 worth of stocks. If you look at all the projections of growth, you will see that the $10,000 will be worth roughly only $25,000 after 10 years.
On the contrary, let us assume that you make an investment of $10,000 over the next 2 years in building your Personal Brand.
This can include the actual amount spent on learning new skills, purchasing equipment, running promotions to accelerate your growth, and the opportunity cost of the hours spent in building your Brand.
This $10,000 investment in 10 years can be anywhere from $100,000 to multi-million dollars.
No asset in the physical world can give such returns in 10 years.
And that is one of the reasons why developing a Personal Brand today is the most business-savvy decision you can take.
2. We’re Living In The Third Era of Knowledge
When you look back at the history of evolution, humans have been hunter-gatherers and nomads for a very long time.
They used to travel in small tribes, eat in one place, hunt animals, and move on to the next place.
And then for the first time around 12,000 years ago, they started settling into communities and villages.
This gave birth to the first era of knowledge.
In the first era of knowledge, humans settled into communities that were centered around a religious place.
In each of these religious centers, there used to be a priest who was responsible for creating and sharing knowledge. Everyone used to go to these religious institutions to learn from a priest.
That’s how human societies evolved.
In the second era of knowledge, knowledge became the responsibility of academic institutions. Knowledge began to institutionalize in the era of Newton, Galileo, Da Vinci, and the Renaissance; it was the time when the first universities started springing up.
This era has continued until the present and we have all grown up in it.
In our era as well, creating and distributing knowledge has been the responsibility of academic institutions including schools, colleges, universities, and so on.
In the third era of knowledge which started post-2010 and picked up pace only in the last few years, for the first time, knowledge has been democratized.
It started getting created, transferred, and shared with peers because of the internet.
Today’s Era
In this internet world, people are creating knowledge without any academic credibility and sharing it with community members.
If you look at your YouTube and Instagram today and just scroll down for let’s say 15 minutes, you will see so many followers, influencers, and content creators you are following who are teaching you one thing or the other.
These people are not institutions, they are your peers.
You are a content consumer and your peers are the content creators.
Today, if you want to learn guitar, improve your speaking skills, learn a foreign language, or want to learn to cook, chances are you will prefer to learn from YouTube or any online course rather than an academic institute.
This has an impact on the behavioral patterns of upcoming generations. Unlike us, they are primarily learning from peer-to-peer content.
That’s why content creation is the highest paid skill of this decade. And developing your Personal Brand is the number one decision you can take today.
3. Form Of Leverage To Grow Exponential Wealth
No matter how skilled you are, if you’re trading your time for money, there’s a cap on how much you can earn.
There’s only one way to break that cycle: Leverage.
There are two most scalable forms of leverage:
- Technology
- Content
In technology, if you’re a coder/programmer, you invest your time in making an app, writing software, or creating a game, just for once and it can then be used by millions of people.
There’s an exponential increase in the number of consumers without an increase in the number of hours.
The second, equally scalable, highly paying leverage is content creation.
You put your time into creating content just once. Then, it can be consumed by hundreds and millions of people.
Content creation is how I earned my laptop lifestyle as well.
In 2019 (last year before covid wrecked world travel), I spent 270 out of 365 days traveling to more than 15 countries and working from all of those places.
And those places included all the way north of Norway and Sweden under the Northern Lights, to the desert of Arabia in Qatar, and the Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Vietnam.
And all this happened in just the 2nd year of my journey of starting my Personal Brand.
Building your Personal Brand would mean that within your 1st year, you will start becoming independent – working for yourself instead of looking for a job.
And by your 2nd year, you will become completely location independent, working for yourself from anywhere in the world.
In this article, we saw 3 reasons why you should be investing time in building your Personal Brand.
The next one is about how to start building your Personal Brand from scratch.
Over on my blog, Digital Nomad Academy, you can find several other articles and masterclasses that will teach you different aspects of building your own laptop lifestyle.
Also, for behind-the-scenes mischief, you can follow me on Instagram and join 30K+ others like you who are in different phases of building their location independent lifestyles.
Hope to see you around globe-trotting one day 🙂
