Published in On Our Selection News September 28, 2016

You don’t need to be legendary to be a legend.

The other night I went along to a seminar about personal branding. The learned and hallowed Wikipedia has a good definition of branding, which I have tweaked to make said definition less about a company and more about me. Personal branding, therefore, is: “a set of marketing and communication methods that help to distinguish a mad-dawg from every other dingbat and create a lasting impression in the minds of every man and his dog.”

Basically it was about figuring out what my brand was and how to best get that message across to my legion of imaginary followers. In the space of about 45 minutes, I had to work out what my unique shtick was. I had to work out just what exactly was the essence of me (as an aside, “the essence of me” would make a great name for the first in a line of many fragrances I release at the height of my fame. It will smell of tea, chicken schnitzel and my leave-in conditioner). This is no easy task on just one glass of champagne.

And I had a feeling that my ability to make fart noises with my neck skin was perhaps not what the charismatic guest speaker meant when he told me and the other audience members with fabulous haircuts to think about what made us distinctive.

In a room full of newsreaders and lawyers and a bloody host of a show trying to encourage children to care about science, I didn’t feel my aim of “sharing the LOLs” stacked up.

We were then asked to come up with a personal mission statement – to summarize who we were and what we were trying to do in a short, snappy statement.

This might be easy if you’re a serious newshound, committed to sniffing out corruption and disembowelling the carcasses of injustice, displaying the rotting innards of perversion for the world to see. Sure, your statement might not be as dramatic, but the general vibe and honour in what it is you do would be reasonably easy to get across. And people would be able to get behind your mission with nods of approval and fists raised in agreeance, because your cause is noble, and, more importantly, useful to society.

Coming up with a powerful mission statement is demonstrably more difficult when you write stories about your vomit and post pictures of your father buying bread on Instagram.

When you boil it down to the big questions, it’s confronting just how frivolous our lives may seem. I mean, my objective is to make enough to support my expensive scented candle habit. My passion, at the moment anyway, is for developing ways to turn the old bananas in the fruit bowl into semi-healthy desserts. And maybe that’s ok.

Maybe we don’t need to have grandiose goals or plans to conquer the world; maybe “I’m just trying to share a smile and not be a jerk” is enough of a mission statement.

But that being said, I still wouldn’t mind having a multi-million dollar perfume empire to my name.