Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader
You don't need a brand, you need a mythos
I am 24,505 words into a book about finding your calling and building a sustainable practice around it, and yet, I still struggle to define the work for people.
It happens constantly. Someone asks what the book is about, or what my work is for, and the answer comes out incomplete. Messy. Lacking the polish of a rehearsed line.
The shortcut sellers would say I have a communication problem. They would have it scripted and ready, neatly redacting my past into a definitive promise about my future. And yours too, for a price.
And it’s a tempting solution. Why wouldn’t I want to settle into some certainty?
But this incomplete answer is not a failure of communication. It’s a failure of the question and the constraints it demands as it collides with a mythos it can’t contain.
People expect a clear and definitive answer. It gives them the security of being able to quickly categorise you and whether you are worth their time. They want to scan the bio line and make a split-second decision.
But I’m still mid-paragraph.
The context demands certainty. It wants me to define myself clearly, project a consistent persona, dominate a niche. This book defies all three.
And despite your best efforts, you do too.
There’s no problem with your story, you just don’t fit the template on offer. The beating heart of your practice isn’t out there waiting to be boxed in, wrapped in a sentence, or confined by an elevator pitch. It’s found on a limitless canvas where every fragment of your story can find its place.
But before we forge that path, we need to drop a bomb on the detour. And if you’re out there serving the work, you’ll have been drawn to its insidious invitation.
Personal brand.
Yay! I’m a brand
I’m calling it. Personal brand is a cult.
First, you submit to the gospel of a chosen guru or a trending framework, adopting their aesthetic and sacrificing your voice on the altar of their proven template. The promise of salvation, of visibility, revenue, and relevance? Simply a matter of compliance and relentless hustle.
You can even ascend closer to the founder themselves, for a nice juicy fee.
Here’s what they don’t want you to know (and perhaps can’t admit themselves): this ecosystem is a lottery disguised as a meritocracy.
It requires hundreds to burn up just to produce the handful of glossy testimonials used to recruit the next batch of lost souls. When the formula inevitably fails to capture the nuance of your actual life, the cult doesn’t take the blame. It simply tells you that you didn’t grind hard enough.
And it gets worse. I’ve seen countless creators become evangelists for personal brand. They continue to carve themselves down to a recognisable silhouette, discarding the messy, vibrant pieces of their humanity that didn’t fit the algorithm, and choosing quirks in their story that get clicks. They trade the service they once provided for systems that ‘guarantee’ results, willing hostages to the dogma of their own self-appointed niche.
Congratulations, you’re a cult leader.
And here’s its darkest joke: it doesn’t even matter if anyone actually follows you. Whether you command an audience of ten thousand or speak entirely into the void, the trap snaps shut all the same. You become the undisputed king of your own prison empire: trapped by a story you must maintain, and enslaved by the idea that if you can just cling on long enough, grind hard enough, and be consistent enough, eventually they’ll recognise your magnificence.
This path demands that you trade the wild, unpredictable terrain of a true calling for the sterile, predictable safety of a rigid system and a paint-by-numbers story. And that’s great, assuming you want everyone in your field to feel like a threat (because you all sound the same), to self-censor, and to befriend so you can pitch. It’s the right call if you’re willing to bury the weirdness that makes you compelling because it doesn’t fit your designated content pillars.
You can try, but you can’t dance while chained to the spot.
The shadow of all this is that these middle managers of the Isolation Economy know you almost certainly won’t make their testimonials board, but they’ll willingly extract wealth, security, and valuable time from you all the same. The good news is that the security of the corporate climb is already waiting with loving arms.
To follow this path is to lose yourself to the exhausting project of remaining “on brand” and convincing others to follow you. It will suffocate your story as you maintain the illusion that you have resolved your past and figured out your future.
To break free you have to walk out of the temple and leave your polished avatar at the altar and give yourself permission to be a moving target: a complex, evolving human being whose best work is found outside the categories the market wants you to choose.
Personal brand can work, for some people, for some of the time, but it demands a brittle kind of certainty that’s destined to shatter as your mythos tries to break free.
The Mosaic Self
In 2011 I was standing on Parker’s Piece in Cambridge with a friend, staring down the barrel of my first redundancy.
Using the geometry of the park, he asked me to think of my life along a line, with the present me standing in the middle. We walked backward to speak to my younger self. What does your unwounded, uncynical self have to say to you? Then we walked forward to meet the future version. What does the one who has made it through have to say?
The present Dan was sitting with grief and dead ends, feeling like a failure. But Dan junior had a wide-eyed reminder: the world is big and full of surprising things to explore. And Dan senior had made it through to the other side. Those experiences were so long ago that he barely thought of the specifics anymore. But he was grateful for them, and for how they had shaped the steward he was to become.
It was the first time I understood that my storyline is not a fixed narrative.
The same story can be true in multiple ways simultaneously. Dan junior, present Dan, and Dan senior were all looking at the same life, and all of them were right.
Life. Viewed as a mosaic. A collection of disparate pieces working together to tell a different and evolving story. Each version of myself holding different fragments that revealed a clearer picture, not of who I was, but who I was becoming.
It’s actually a skill we’ve all practiced. One that personal brand hijacks.
Think about the last time you updated your CV (Resume for my international readers). You read the role specification and tailor your story for a line of best fit. You amplify what is relevant and turn the volume down elsewhere. You tell a curated version of the truth in order to support your ambitions. Applying for a job gives the story of your life permission to become fluid.
A personal brand demands the same thing. But in that world, the context doesn’t end when the business closes its doors at the end of the day. And you can’t just hand in your notice when you’re ready for a new challenge.
And it carries the same risk too: if we are successful (but not careful), that curated version becomes canon. A professional brand with new walls to live within.
Here is the difference. A brand is a monument. You carve it, maintain it, and occasionally update it. The cracks and imperfections that don’t immediately support whatever story we’ve decided to tell are scrubbed from the record.
But you are not a brand, you are a mosaic. Still placing the pieces. Every fragment feels lost: the redundancy, the false start, the career that looked like chaos, until you stand back far enough to see the story unfolding. Where everything finds its place.
The mosaic is your personal mythos: the living interpretation of your story that holds every fragment, true in multiple readings at once, discovered rather than decided, and the antithesis of personal brand. It’s not something you build, project, and protect. A personal mythos is something you find by looking honestly at everything you’ve been.
By now, you know my story. Some would say that I’m a failure. And honestly, from certain angles, it is true. Others see a survivor, someone with extraordinary breadth, and a resilience that only comes from fighting for your feet when the ground has fallen away. Someone with the capacity to sit with people in their difficulty and give their experience a name precise enough that it loses some of its grip.
Two completely different ways to see the same story. Both are true. The question I need to ask, and you do too as you consider the fullness of your story, is: which one do I want to live in?
And if you need a second opinion, what would future you have to say?
Honour Every Fragment
Imagine standing where I stood on Parker’s Piece. The work you’re serving today, a person waiting just ahead of you on life’s line. They are disinterested in who you are today, chained to the moment and all its worries. No, they’re asking something different.
Who are you becoming.
The answer is unlikely to fit on a business card, or be pithy enough to impress the scrollers. Your personal mythos contains too many fragments, too much depth, breadth, and possibility for that, and that’s exactly why it’s something you can build your practice around.
So unlike the certainty sellers, I’m not going to ask you to define anything. Instead I’d like to offer three questions to help illuminate the mosaic. Not to build something new, but to see what’s already there:
A question of your heart: What do you want to do?
Forget should/must/need to do. This is a question of emotional pull and what moves you. The pathos or ‘itch’ of your story.
A question of your history: What have you experienced?
This is not about credentials and what you’ve achieved, it’s about your credibility and the scars you’ve earned. The ethos or ‘stitch’ of your story.
A question of your mind: Where can you serve?
This is about how your experience, skills, and gifts can rise to meet a real problem others are facing. The logos or ‘pitch’ of your story.
Yes, I know, this is begging for a Venn diagram where the answer is revealed in the middle, but that would only serve to stylise and sanitise a searching of the soul that simply cannot be contained by a template. Instead, imagine the endless canvas, notice a few fragments, and consider where you might place the ones you didn’t think had a home in your story.
Ultimately, you do not need to have made a final decision about your past before you can offer something real. You do not need to have sectioned things away into neat, marketable boxes. The full story? The grief, the resilience, the apparent chaos? It’s not a liability.
It is the thing.
Today, you are not a conclusion.
You’re mid-paragraph.
And you can choose the next line.
Where We Are:
This is Week 20 of a year-long practice.
Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.
Congratulations, You’re A Cult Leader ← You are here
The Power of And
Community is the Great Leveller
Think Like an Artist
You Can’t See the View When You’re in the View
Click here to read the Overture and Movement 1.