John Appiah’s 2nd Golden Law of ‘Successful and Powerful Personal Brands’

“Successful and Powerful Personal Brands are not built by chance or luck but rather by consistent and deliberate hard work”

It is said that when you work hard you can achieve success in any endeavor or task. Sadly, this has become a cliché and indeed has lost its meaning to many of us. Truth be told, everybody feels like he/she is working hard but for many of us in spite of this, it appears we are not making any meaningful strides or achieving much with the personal brands we have built. However, I postulate that the problem is not with hard work but rather with our definition and appreciation of what hard work means.

As per the definition and appreciation most of us have, we are already working hard in life. We have been to school and acquired a number of certificates. We managed to have achieved good grades and results whiles we were in school. Someway somehow we have landed good jobs. All our lives, we have heeded to the advice of our parents and done exactly what our lecturers in school taught us to do. On a daily basis we rise up to pay our bills and take care of our needs and we go to bed each night feeling somewhat exhausted. But frankly I think that most of what we do on a daily basis is essentially what we need to do to in order to exist and survive in life. Right from your job, your daily chores, your commitment and obligations to your family etc. really isn’t what I will call hard work. That’s really regular work and fact be said every other human being does that daily (at least one way or another).

For me, true hard work that will build for you a powerful and successful personal brand is the extra work you do on top of all the regular work. Hard work in my opinion translates into what you do after you’ve put in the regular eight hours, after you’ve been able to put food on the table for you or your family, after you’ve successfully met all your KPIs and deadlines and followed through on all your targets. Hard work is above and beyond regular work and that is the only sure guarantee of building a powerful and successful personal brand.

With this foundation, let me go ahead to give you my top three (3) components of real hard work necessary for building a powerful and successful personal brand.

1. The Motivation: Motivation is the quintessential reason you work hard. Motivation is the engine that propels you into action. Why do you bother waking up at dawn to train? Why do you bother working two or three jobs at a time while simultaneously furthering your education by attending lectures after close of work? Why bother economizing and saving and forgoing temporary pleasures in order to pour every spare coin into building a successful and powerful personal brand? Let me answer that for you; MOTIVATION. Motivation is what will keep us still progressive and productive in spite of the exhausting and arduous routines and the tough sacrifices we make along the line in building a powerful and successful personal brand. You surely need lots of motivation if you are determined to succeed and build that powerful and successful personal brand that will make you stand out from the crowd.

2. The Blue Print: For the purposes of this journey, let’s see Motivation as the engine in which case the Blue Print is the template or structure. The Blue Print is essentially the document or plan you develop after you painstakingly write down all the litany of actions and strategies to realizing your vision of building a successful and powerful personal brand. The Blue Print maps out your line of action and enables you to devise and strategize whilst ensuring that you stay on track. The Blue Print succinctly lays out the case for mapping out your actual steps that will lead you to achieve your goal of building a successful and powerful personal brand. Very often when you envisage your dreams, you tend to think of the dream in terms of a lifetime. Putting together the Blue Print enables you to take the dream of “What do you want to do with your life?” and then break it down into “What do you need to do over the next five years?”. The Blue Print is the founding document that will align all your efforts into building that successful and powerful personal brand. I admit that not everything will go exactly according to the Blue Print but I assure you that all actions, milestones, setbacks and decisions emanating from the Blue Print will surely lead you back to the drawing board so you can make the necessary adjustments and still set sail.

3. The Table of Action – It is always at the Table of Action that working hard stops being fun and begins to become tedious, stressful and perhaps even discouraging. How you handle your actions more often than not is what determines how successfully you build your personal brand. Sincerely speaking, many people when it comes to the Table of Action either ease up or give up just because it’s really very hard work at this stage. However truly motivated people get to the Table of Action and indeed keep on going. People, who have ever built successful and powerful personal brands when they got to the Table of Action, endured the bureaucracy and paper pushing, the boring and long winding meetings, the drowsy mornings when they clogged in their presence at their regular 8-to-5 job after staying up all night to work on a side project. Although at this stage of your life, you may feel like a latent celebrity or an underappreciated and uncelebrated genius, there will be times when you are simply discouraged. These are the times when everything seems like ‘nonsense’ and nothing seems worth it. These are the times when The Blue Print seems like a lofty dream and The Motivation seems like a hackneyed hallucination. Recognizing these moments for what they are and persevering through them is a major part of building that successful and powerful personal brand. In the end, it doesn’t matter when you quit because if you quit after three years of effort, the total result is the same as if you gave up three hours after you started since eventually you gave up on your dreams. Endure the hard work and commit to the Table of Action. Don’t ever quit.

So there you have it, clearly illustrated John Appiah’s 2nd Golden Law of ‘Successful and Powerful Personal Brands ’. “Successful and Powerful Personal Brands are not built by chance or luck but rather by consistent and deliberate hard work”. You can surely build that dream successful and powerful personal brand, just appreciate that it will take copious doses of hard work and perseverance. Whatever it is, don’t give up and keep working hard at that dream. It will surely come to reality. Kindly follow my Blog to get regular updates of all the write ups I do. Next week, I will write on my 3rd and final Golden Law of ‘Successful and Powerful Personal Brands’. #Inspired4Impact #Graced4Greatness

Author: John Affaidzi Appiah || Director, Corporate Communications and External Relations at Various