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- Your story isn't your whole brand
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Hey friend!
It's 11:47 PM.
I'm staring at my laptop screen, cursor blinking on a blank page.
I've been trying to write this newsletter for three hours. Nothing feels right.
Every sentence sounds like something I've read a thousand times before on LinkedIn.
"Build trust through storytelling." "Share your journey." "Be authentic."
Screw that noise.
Here's what actually happened today...
I had a call with Joseph. Successful entrepreneur. Makes seven figures. Wants help with his "personal brand story."
Thirty minutes in, he stops mid-sentence and says: "Stephen, can I be honest? I've read all the LinkedIn experts. I know I need to share my story. But honestly? My story is boring as shit. Middle-class kid, went to college, started a business. Where's the trauma? Where's the comeback story? How do I compete with the guy who was homeless and built a million-dollar company?"
I felt my stomach drop.
Because I've been asking myself the same question for months.
No bankruptcy. No addiction recovery. No dramatic phoenix-rising moment.
Just a journalist who got tired of writing other people's stories and decided to help them tell their own.
Sometimes I scroll LinkedIn and think: "Maybe I should make up a rock bottom story. Maybe I should find some trauma to monetize."
Then I hate myself for even thinking that.
Joseph is still talking: "I feel like a fraud. Everyone else has this incredible transformation story, and I'm just... a guy who figured out how to solve a problem and built a business around it."
And that's when I realized we're both suffering from the same disease:
Story Shame.
We've been brainwashed into thinking our stories need to be Netflix documentaries to matter.
But here's what I told Joseph (and what I'm telling myself right now as I write this):
Your story isn't your whole brand. But it's the entry point for trust.
And trust doesn't come from having the most dramatic backstory.
It comes from people feeling like you understand their Tuesday.
Not their rock bottom. Their Tuesday.
The ordinary struggle of trying to figure out what makes you different in a world where everyone's selling the same transformation.
Joseph doesn't need a sob story. He needs to own the fact that building a seven-figure business while trying to be present for his kids' football games and not losing his mind is hard as hell.
That's his story. That's what his audience is living right now.
See, while everyone's competing for who has the most dramatic origin story, there's this massive opportunity sitting right in front of us:
Being the person who admits that most of life isn't dramatic at all.
It's just hard. And confusing. And ordinary.
And that's exactly what people need to hear.
Because for every person with a rock bottom story, there are 10,000 people who feel like Joseph. Who feel like me. Who feel like they're not interesting enough to have a "brand."
What if your ordinary story is exactly what someone extraordinary needs to hear?
I told Joseph: "Stop trying to be the hero of a movie nobody asked for. Start being the friend who gets it."
That's when his whole energy shifted.
"You know what? I am tired of pretending building a business is some magical journey. It's mostly spreadsheets and difficult conversations, failures and wondering if you're making the right decisions."
Boom. There's his story.
Not the transformation. The Tuesday.
Your Tuesday is someone else's permission slip to keep going.
Hit reply. Tell me the ordinary thing you're wrestling with that feels too small to share. The thing that makes you human, not heroic.
I guarantee it's the exact thing someone needs to hear.
From my beautifully boring journey,
Stephen
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