Truth Tastes Funny.
Hersh Rephun - Personal Brand Strategist
Your Personal Brand should open doors. That's how I build them, efficiently, easily, and enjoyably.
Humans. Hysterical, right?
All these complex systems that make our bodies run, pumping blood to our brains, where the most ridiculous thoughts swirl so feverishly that we become like one of those wind-up helicopter toys found in breakfast cereal, our emotional rubber bands holding incredible tension and ready to spin out at any moment. One could argue that we are so confounded by our frayed tether to reality that we’ve engineered a tool called “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) to get us off the hook. So terrified are we of our own minds that we’ve willingly replaced them with apps, social media, and virtual reality. And then, we have the audacity to be deathly afraid that AI will replace us (after all, AI was one of the biggest stories of 2023, and for all its utility and misuse, the notion that it controls us may be the funniest-tasting truth of all)! Or maybe…
Maybe the funniest-tasting truth is how difficult we sometimes find it to fathom our own ridiculousness. If our biology exists (Matrix-like theories aside), why is it hard to believe that we are addicted to pratfalls? To live on Earth is to engage in a continuous cover-up of our vulnerability. This façade of fortitude infects our otherwise beautiful beings with Jolly Green Giant Disease, or Goliath Syndrome (whichever one won’t result in a cease-and-desist order), whereby we must puff ourselves up and set impossible goals for ourselves that we pretend to accomplish (or we actually do achieve, but at the price of our humanity).
I know, this is kinda heavy. You heard I was funny. And I am. Believe me, if you’d seen me at five years old mimicking Rich Little’s impersonation of Richard Nixon (fingers wagging along with “I am not a crook!”) while shaking my naked butt in front of my sisters, it would remove any doubt. But whether it’s a refusal to acknowledge climate change when our only hope in fighting wildfires is the emergence of a sudden typhoon, or something as personal as our own ideas about what career we should pursue or what life we should lead, we would rather change the mirror than work on our reflection.
It seems we have a problem, to be sure, but we can’t solve a problem without establishing its presence. In this case, fear of the truth is the problem. And to go along with that fear, we appear to be confused about “truth” as a concept. We profess to live in a “post-truth world,” but without the anchor of truth, nothing can be verified. We have no idea what the h*ll we are doing here (or why placing asterisks in place of certain letters creates a softer impression than using those letters, or whether it’s acceptable to substitute other characters to get our d#$% point across!).
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The good news is, we are not living in an age of unverifiable truth, nor are we doomed to failure as a species (note that I said “failure,” not “extinction” — there’s nothing we can do about extinction but at least we can die a SUCCESS!). Yes, we live in an environment where facts vary, depending on where you get your truth. That’s a tough one. But rather than try to impose absolute verifiable reality on one another, why not take off the blinders (as my seventh-grade social studies teacher, Mrs. Strachman, used to urge us), step outside ourselves, gain some perspective, and see what our own private reality has to offer?
To what end, you ask? This “truth” stuff seems awfully ethereal. Is there a practical purpose here? I hate to reward your impatience, but yes, the other side of the equation is the first word of the book title: SELLING. Selling the Truth. Veracity on purpose. Building our brands and businesses from the inside out in pursuit of success in whatever ways we define it. That’s what this book is about.
The big idea here is that we must stop being afraid of reality and seek to embrace TRUTH as our ally, as our weapon of choice in the game of life-, business-, and brand-building.