Viewing: Notes » Echoes #4.
Echoes #4.
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There is another advantage: it tells people what sort of person they're dealing with.
A conventional professional website deliberately minimises personality because personality is regarded as noise. But personality isn't necessarily noise.
If I'm considering working with somebody, I don't merely want to know:
- What they have done;
- What their qualifications are;
- What services they provide.
I also want some indication of what it will be like to deal with them. An informal site can answer that remarkably quickly.
And that's particularly relevant in work where judgement, creativity, independence and trust matter. The site becomes a little demonstration of the person's mind.
That's why I think glvr is more interesting than simply calling it a 'quirky website'.
It's a sample of the product.
The product is, at least partly, the person thinking.
And there's a useful bit of strategic perversity in it
The modern professional internet has become extraordinarily homogenised.
Everyone is:
- Passionate about helping;
- Committed to excellence;
- Obsessed with transformation;
- Customer-centric;
- Innovative;
- Results-driven;
- Building something amazing;
- Occasionally described as a 'thought leader', presumably without laughing.
So a person who simply sounds like a person becomes conspicuous.
Recent personal-website commentary is actually moving in this direction: personal sites are increasingly being described as places to escape the constraints of LinkedIn and social platforms and establish a person's own voice and identity.
There's an irony here.
In an internet increasingly engineered to make everybody professionally legible, being slightly illegible can become distinctive.
But there is a boundary… I'd distinguish between informal and casual.
Informal:
Here's what I've been doing, here's what I think, here's some stuff I've made.
Casual:
YO! WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE!!! 😎
And I'd distinguish both from deliberately eccentric.
glvr works, to my mind, because the underlying message isn't: 'Look how wacky I am.'
It's: 'I don't feel obliged to dress this up for you.'
That is a much stronger position.
It also means the informality has to be structurally supported by competence. The writing can be loose; the thinking can't be sloppy. The navigation can be eccentric; the underlying site shouldn't be frustrating. The tone can say 'I'm not taking myself terribly seriously'; the work itself needs to demonstrate that you take the work seriously.
That combination is quite potent.
And I suspect this is one of the things your three AI consultants are going to struggle with if they approach the question from the usual 'personal branding' literature.
They'll probably tell you that informality can 'humanise your professional brand'.
Which is technically true.
But it misses the more interesting possibility:
Perhaps you don't need a professional persona at all.
Perhaps you can simply present yourself as a competent human being who happens to do professional things.
That is a considerably more radical proposition. And, frankly, rather more attractive.
**********
So that was OpenAI.
Overall, I've found the process useful—I've learned, and am a tad less doubtful about myself.
My internal 'you're useless, or at least doing this all wrong' voice is considerable: constant and loud. And clearly that's not healthy.
Pretentious though it may sound, I think one really does have to be one's own hero… relevant to which might be this from Michael Jackson…
'You can’t be your best when you’re doubting yourself. If you don’t believe in yourself, who will?'
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