I had a buddy in high school who used to fire bottle rockets out of his hindquarters, had people pay him to watch get crazy piercings and would get naked parties because he was the “fat naked guy.” This was his brand. I won’t give his nickname as to not incriminate him, he’s changed very much from those days. His brand was the big naked crazy guy. He was also one of my buds.

I have another very close person in my life who grew up in apartheid Zimbabwe. He couldn’t walk on the sidewalk until he was 14 years old. He was the only black kid in his high school and he had to bust his ass through primary school to have an inkling of a chance to even get to high school. Then to get to college, this guy organized a 120+ kilometer run (just over 3 marathons) over the course of 3 days from his high school to the country’s capital to raise money for an orphanage. He didn’t realize when he was organizing this run that a scholarship would be the result, but it was!

This guy branded himself as the guy who will get shit done. By 27, apartheid was lifted and he ran a company with 4,000 employees. By 40, he chaired multiple publicly traded companies and by 50 he retired. His brand was that of an executive. He was a leader. He was a capitalist. He told me that he branded himself as all of these things early and he never stopped!

We are all responsible for the brand we want to project for ourselves. This is something we need to start thinking about now and forever. What do we want to be, how do we want to be perceived and how are we going to start projecting that image out to the world?

This is not something we are taught in school and I think it’s a shame. Our brand is our everything. Who the hell are you?! If this is something you haven’t thought about, it’s something you must begin to think about. We are one in a world of billions. We are competing for jobs, attention and resources. What are you going to contribute? What are you going to create or what are you going to add value to?

If you haven’t started to think about your personal brand, I want to give you a homework assignment. This is real, it’s grown up shit! If you want to grow and compete, you need to start thinking about this.

Here it is, before you do anything else, write down these questions and answer them.

1. Do you have a superpower? Is there something you can do better than anyone else, or even better than most?
2. If you could picture your dream self in 5 years, what would that dream self look like? This could be physical, mental, financial, social or all.
3. What do people praise you for and what do you want to be praised for?
4. What gets you fired up? What makes you the most excited version of you?
5. Now, a bit deeper into the woods — How do I define myself and why do I matter?
6. What’s my mission in life and what do I believe in?
7. Finally, what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?

Answer these questions and remember, we are the authors of our own destiny. We can be the crazy naked guy at parties or we can run industries, let’s go make something happen!