Ideas and Your Personal Brand

When Tom Peters wrote his article, “The Brand Called You”, in Fast Company magazine in 1997, I was a second-year university student studying marketing in Lismore, northern NSW. Peters said that we need to see ourselves as organisations with skills, abilities and tasks that we can sell in exchange for money. We need a clear vision of where we’re trying to go and position ourselves for our future using our Personal Brand.

One of the challenges we all face when positioning and marketing ourselves with our Personal Brand is being able to capture ideas and manage distractions. Your Personal Brand is what you're known for. When you’re not in control of your time and when you struggle to capture your thoughts, your Personal Brand is like a pinball machine: pushed around by the world and other people’s agendas, as opposed to your own.

Your ideas add the most value to your work. They make you less of a commodity and more of a valuable contributor – in organisations and as business owners. Your ideas also help position you to be relevant and successful for the long-term. As Harvard University Professor Tony Schwarz found in his research, the real issue is that we can only hold 7 things at once in our head. We need to use the tools we have to capture them rather than our brains.

So, over the Christmas break, I worked with my good mate Dermot Crowley, productivity expert and author of Smart Work, to create an app called Memo Mailer.

The purpose of Memo Mailer is to capture your thoughts, ideas and distractions. It is essentially a home for your ideas so you can go back and process them at a later date. The regular version of Memo Mailer allows you to have the idea and capture it for yourself. The  premium version allows you to add a second email address so that you can delegate those thoughts and ideas, particularly if you have an assistant.

So download the app, even if you use the regular version, and start capturing those ideas so you can allocate time in your calendar to deal with them and keep focused on the tasks at hand. You’re more likely to be known for what you want to be known for.

As the incredibly talented comedian and actor Robin Williams said "No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world".

I would love to hear how you go using it!