Believe it or not, but we are all entrepreneurs in life and we are all putting out a product everyday. We manufacture it, we advertise it, we create publicity for it and we try to sell it. If we invest enough time and energy into creating the best product we can create, it gets noticed and people buy it, talk about it and recommend it. If we throw together a shoddy, broken down, piece of shit product with little care for how it works or what value it adds to the world, that also gets noticed, and people avoid it like the plague and tell everyone else to avoid it. The fact is:
Your life is your product.
What you wear is advertising.
What you say is publicity.
What you do is your value to the marketplace.
And all your personal profits and losses is your bottom line.
That’s right. Like it or not, you are a product and the world judges you by what you have to offer them. You are a product of your experiences, your beliefs, your ideas and your values and you manufacture that everyday and put it out into the world. Everything you put out there is being scrutinized by everyone who might buy into what you are selling. A job interview. A friendship. A relationship. A conversation with a stranger. Everyone you meet is sizing you up and asking themselves if that is something they are willing to invest in; is that something they want to buy?
Now, you don’t have to market your product to everyone. You can focus on a small niche market that will “get” you. You can say, fuck everyone who doesn’t wear open-toed sandals with socks on, and wear open-toed with socks on, fully understanding that only other people who wear open-toed sandals with socks on are going to appreciate that. But even within that small market, you still better be putting out a damn good product of yourself or no one is going to buy it. Whatever market you are trying to appeal to in your personal life, you need to make sure you are putting out the right product to the people who matter to you.
How do we do that?
Dress as advertising
Be it a first impression or a consistent style, how you dress impacts your life. It is your product packaging and your perpetual advertising. People see, in what you choose to wear, the opinion you have of yourself and the initial non-verbal statements you are putting out there. Now, before you throw a shit fit about the nonsense of dressing up everyday, I am not saying everyone should wear dresses or suits everyday. I am saying, dress as appropriate for the audience you are trying to appeal to and understand that other audiences might not give you the time of day depending upon how you are dressed.
When I was growing up, I went through a lot of different looks to advertise myself. I did the punk rock thing, in my way, with a colored mohawk and my rebel clothes, because that is how I felt and that was the message I wanted to send. I looked like an asshole and I got treated like an asshole. I expected that and I wanted that. After a while I changed my look, not because I was pressured to, or because I think it is a bad way to look, but because I didn’t want to be seen as that anymore. It was a conscious decision on my part to appeal to a different audience with the way I advertised myself. I am not saying that anyone has to, or should, change the way they dress, but everyone better damn well be cognizant of what it says about them and be ready to handle that scrutiny and reaction.
Think about it this way; you go into a job interview at a bank with a Hawaiian t-shirt, khaki shorts and flip-flops on, I feel pretty confident they are going to show your happy little ass the door. Wrong audience for that kind of dress. Now if you are wearing the same thing and are out on a beach, you will probably attract the right kind of audience; the kind that will buy you a margarita or ask you to put sunscreen on their hairy back. Different audience, different result.
The moral is; advertise yourself properly for the situation and make your advertising unique to you, so you stand out. You advertisement is going to appeal to certain people and what you wear is the first thing you say about yourself to anyone. Dress however you want, but remember that what you wear is what you are telling the rest of the world you are about.
What you say is publicity
I swear quite a bit. I like swearing and, not to toot my own horn, there is some proof that people who swear are smarter than mother fuckers who don’t. Regardless of that fact, I don’t swear in certain company, or in certain situations, because it’s fucking rude and inappropriate!
The way you talk – the words you use and the cadence and the tone and the delivery – these are all ways that you market yourself everyday and these are the ways that people develop a deeper insight into who you are and what you are about as a product.
If you are constantly gossiping about people behind their back, people know that you probably do the same to them when they are not around. If you are constantly being negative and insulting to everyone you meet, people know that all you are selling is misery and sadness and no one willingly buys that shitty product. If you are uplifting people in positive ways and going our of your way to be polite in your speech, people are going to notice that and be attracted to that.
The way you speak internally also defines what you are externally. If you are always beating yourself up and punishing yourself for your past and generally making sure that you are unsuccessful in life because of how you speak to yourself, well, that is going to show outwardly and, once again, people don’t want to buy that shit so stop trying to sell it and stop using it to create your product!
What you do is your value to the marketplace.
Despite all your advertising and publicity, the real reason people end up sticking with you, as a product, is what you do everyday to reinforce that they made a good investment in you. You can pull people in with some flashy advertising, you can throw around some good publicity, but at the end of the day, if your product doesn’t deliver on what it promised, people are not going to stick around. The true value and success of your product is what services you provide, on a daily basis, to the people who invest in you.
Sometimes, you are going to have to make some adjustments to give the most value to the people who you want to continue to invest in you. Wife. Husband. Friends. Family. You are going to have to make improvements in what you are selling and you are going to have to get to know the audience you really desire to appeal to them in a meaningful way and continue to appeal to them so that they continue to buy you, as a product.
I am not saying be deceptive in who you are, or be who people want you to be, I am telling you to create the most authentic product of yourself so that you attract the right kind of people and can retain the people you already value. Products go through many development life-cycles in order to get better and appeal more to their audience. Never believe that, just because you have put out the same product for a long time, that you can’t completely change it if you want. It’s your product, you can do whatever you want with it!
And all your personal profits and losses is your bottom line.
The friendships you make or break, the loves you lose or gain, the children you raise and that leave and the success you have or don’t; these are all the reds and blacks of your personal balance sheet. Sometimes you come out ahead and sometimes you fall behind, but, as in business, you always make an effort to be more profitable than the year before and to recover from any major losses. This means you have to tweak and improve your product. You look at the things that worked, and the type of people that invested in you, and you make sure that is what you want from life. If it’s not, rebrand yourself. Take your product to another audience, one that is more inline with what you want out of life and reevaluate your profits and losses.