unbrand yourself and let your weirdest body of work become a cosmic beacon for people who want to pay you
free yourself from the tyranny of shiny-ness
This is the third post in a series I'm writing about finding ruthless clarity in your life. I recommend reading about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation and desire hoarding before you climb into today's rabbit hole.
Last week I wrote about desire hoarding and, immediately upon publishing, panicked.
I worried that my point might be misinterpreted1 and that you might read that article and think, “I should delete my weird random *~*~biz ideas*~*~* notes in my Notes App and kill all my side projects and chew a pack of nicotine gum while I lock in and FOCUS.”
Please don't mistake what I'm saying here — I'm not suggesting that ruthless clarity isn't really about doing less. It's about doing what's yours.
It's not about transforming into some creative hermit who's sworn a blood oath of project monogamy. Rather, it's like that magical moment when you finally wipe those greasy fingerprints off your glasses after shambling around in a smudgy haze for nearly a month — suddenly the world snaps into glorious 4K high def. And there they are: all those deliciously weird projects you've been secretly lusting after, the ones that make your upper lip glisten with anticipation sweat. These are your true obsessions, waiting patiently while you've been schmoozing with dozens of half-hearted ideas that never really stood a chance.
If you couldn't already tell, I'm a huge proponent of working on lots of creative and professional projects. In fact, I think your life would probably improve in substantial ways if you turned yourself loose on the projects you’re excited about.
But from where I sit, most people don't even get to the starting line of any project because they're trying to work amongst mental clutter which makes it nearly impossible to:
Identify true desires
Prioritize acting on those desires
Hence my obsession with ruthless clarity.
Counterintuitive truth bomb incoming2: when you truly understand your priorities and motivations, you don't narrow yourself down — you expand up and out in the direction you’re aiming to go. Getting ruthlessly clear doesn't reduce your creative output. It removes the static, so your signal comes through loud and weird and unmistakably YOU.
When you're ruthlessly clear on your priorities, you eliminate the exhausting mental gymnastics of trying to make the "right" decision. Because there are no "right" choices — there are just actions that reflect your current priorities.3
And when it comes to figuring out which ideas to act on and which ones should stay in the drafts, you instantly recognize which projects belong in your universe versus ones that deserve a graceful, "No thanks, trying to quit."
Ruthless clarity doesn't force you to pick a single song for your life's soundtrack. It helps you recognize which instruments actually belong in your personal orchestra and which ones you picked up because someone at a party once mentioned you'd look cute playing the triangle.4 The things you genuinely desire don't compete; they complement each other like tracks on the perfect mix CD5 that my high school Bio partner Tucker S. snuck me under the lab table.
IMHO, getting ruthlessly clear will probably lead to MORE, BETTER tasks on your to-do list. Action steps that feel generative and exciting instead of soul-draining drudgery. Projects bursting with fresh vision, shocking and compelling and abundant and FUN. (Very cünt, big slay, huge serve.)
Is that Circe??? No, it’s the siren song of your creative portfolio!
And here's the wild thing: the more clarity you have, the easier it is to tell when a project is yours versus when it's you playing someone else's game.
Your projects get cleaner. Hungrier. More themselves.
I can’t explain why, but I think our ideas work themselves out more successfully when they can be as pure and philosophically uncompromising as possible. It’s like they can unfurl themselves naturally, without extra drama.6
In a world of content marketing that’s about as nutritionally dense as carnival cotton candy, a seemingly random collection of active or in-process projects becomes a cosmic lighthouse broadcasting your unique frequency into the universe and guiding the people who are begging to find someone like you to the safety of your magically weird shores.
Maybe you're warming up to this idea of showing instead of telling your clients who you are, but you’re still worried about this newfound freedom to pursue multiple passions.
What if some of your desires fall completely outside your "brand"?
What if they don't fit neatly into your current business model?
Won't your ideal clients be confused if you out yourself as a multidimensional being?
Absolutely not, showgirl! If anything, the people you dream of hiring you will pay more attention to you as you reveal your dimensionality. People don't pay attention to you when they understand you perfectly. They pay attention when they're trying to figure you out.
As I wrote in this post with global permish to be more confusing, the most charismatic and magnetic people are fundamentally puzzling. THEY WEIRD. They've got beautiful, fascinating, craggy edges that snag people's attention like vintage rhinestones catching on cashmere. These edges give people something to hold onto.
We're magnetically drawn to people who fascinate us. The UX designer who moonlights as a competitive pickleball player. The accountant who writes speculative fiction. The life coach with an encyclopedic knowledge of cult horror films from 1977-1983. These "side quests" don't dilute their professional brands — they make them intriguingly human in ways no ChatGPT-written About page ever could.
Everything you create carries your energetic signature. When you share glimpses of your real life — through blog posts, podcasts, side projects, or that weirdly specific meme account dedicated to cataloging 90s movie phones — you're sending out a bat signal to your people. You show who you actually are instead of who some branding workshop told you to pretend to be in your LinkedIn bio.
Your collection of seemingly random projects functions as an intricate divination system summoning exactly who you're meant to work with. That history podcast about turn of the centch ghost hunters? Your astrocartography party trick? The unexpectedly viral thread about which Hollywood Chris would survive the longest during a zombie apocalypse? If we’re staying honest about our priorities and our motivations, these projects aren't distractions — they're the breadcrumb trail that leads people to your weird little gingerbread house of talents. [And yes, in this metaphor, you're absolutely the witch, but like, the cool kind who has great skincare recommendations and is probably vegan, or at least pescatarian, and definitely doesn’t kidnap random children in the forest.]
At this point, anyone with a paid Canva account and a can-do attitude can perform the identity of “polished brand.” It’s easy to spin up a gorgeous website, run some marketing copy through AI, and take some creative liberties with client testimonials to make yourself look legit on the internet… even without the chops or success to back it up.
So yeah, your non sequitur interests might turn some people off. Thank goddess they repel clients who would force you into one-dimensional boredom while attracting the ones ready to appreciate your full brilliance.
Consciously uncouple from the concept of “personal brand”
As we wade deeper into the AI content swamp, standing out means actually doing things in the real world and gathering experiences no language model can replicate.
A well-trained AI might churn out a pretty good blog post about content marketing strategies, but it will never write about that time you went down a three-week rabbit hole researching Victorian mourning jewelry, which somehow transformed your approach to client onboarding. Your distinctive blend of interests creates a signature impossible to replicate with any prompt engineering. What in the cinnamon toast fuck would AI know about your specific obsession with, say, the perfect taxonomy of Nickelodeon show dad archetypes?
The era of the neat, tidy personal brand is OVER.7 Your experimental blog post, the microsite you launched at 2am during Venus Retrograde, the unnecessarily detailed Instagram caption about your houseplant propagation system — all contribute to the Universe of You.
And that's exactly what people actually want to hire you for.
Your next dream client isn't just hiring your skill set — they're investing in the entire ecosystem that produced those skills. They want access to a brain that both understands user experience AND maintains strong opinions about which character in White Lotus (S3) deserved better. They're drawn to your lighthouse because somewhere deep in their soul, they recognize your particular wavelength.
I'm not saying to release all your half-baked ideas into the air at once. I'm just suggesting that your bizarre passion project about ranking breakfast cereals by their apocalypse survival utility might be exactly what separates you from the 37,000 other consultants with the same job title.
So unleash that seemingly random project from your drafts folder. It might just be the beacon that guides your perfect client home.
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my core wound, what’s good!
I am actually deeply anti-war so this is the only type of bomb I believe in, and honestly I’m not even totally sold on metaphorical bombs if I’m being honest with you right now. Yes, I have seriously considered adopting Quakerism and no we don’t have enough time to go into that right now.
You would, of course, duh, but this is not a triangle moment, honeybaby.
This 15-year-old boy put Bjork’s “hyperballad” on a burned CD and unwittingly raised the bar for every crush to come after him. True diva behavior!
The influence of
and on my concept of creative ideas and projects — that they’re things outside of us that have their own souls, their own destinies, and we’re meant to be custodians who usher them into being — is definitely showing here.I bet you and I could embark on a 17-hour tee-hee-hee convo about the grand paradox of authentic self-expression in our late-stage capitalist hellscape — a system that demands we serve ourselves up like some bizarre emotional pu pu platter of calculated vulnerability and marketable quirks. Picture us, like two Victorian gossips who've spotted scandal at the opera, chairs scooting ever closer, heads tilted in conspiracy as we rapid-fire dissect how those once-pristine uber-branded influencers now desperately scramble to push content boundaries to maintain social currency. We'd widen our eyes to saucer proportions while discussing how attempting to stay relevant for years (decades!!) inevitably leads to the soul-crushing burnout, or something disturbingly dystopian like farming out their children's bath time for engagement. Then we'd collapse into relieved sighs of gratitude that we don't need to sacrifice our innermost sanctums on the altar of algorithm appeasement. Like peasants who somehow survived the plague while the nobility perished, we'd thank whatever cosmic lottery we won that allows our constant evolution to delight rather than alienate our audience, the way Renaissance patrons actually preferred when their artists tried new techniques instead of screaming "YOU'VE CHANGED" into the void 🥹
this is what I think I've always worried about "being an influencer". part of what made Hollywood stars so enticing was their mysteriousness. love this - thank you for sharing!
This is the anti-niche-down and I love it