To understand your purpose, look at what you can’t stop doing
Your purpose is much more important than individual goals. It’s the direction that’s right for you. Your purpose arises from your talents and your values. It’s like the horizon. You’ll never get there. You can pursue your purpose for the rest of your life. Martha Beck calls it your North Star. The fact that your purpose is infinite makes it hard – if not impossible –...
Read MoreThe Sage of Cavendish Square
Last week I went to a talk by Terry Smith at his office in Cavendish Square. He was on good form, as ever. He’s unusual among UK chief executives in having built a strong personal brand, partly by being right about a lot of things, and partly by being outspoken.
Terry first came to prominence in the late 1980s by issuing a ‘sell’ note on Barclays while working for BZW, Barclays’ in-house investment bank. He later wrote a book called Accounting for Growth, which exposed legal but dubious accounting practices used by certain companies. They included clients of his employer, UBS, which duly fired him.
These days Terry is Chief Executive of Tullett Prebon, a FTSE Mid-250 company. He is also one of the five founding partners in Fundsmith, a new investment fund in which he has invested £25m of his own money. The fund is off to a good start, with a total return of 11.5% over the first six months, compared to 9.9% for the MSCI world index.
Terry makes regular appearances on TV and radio. One of his tips for radio interviews is always to be interviewed on your own, never with another guest. That way, if the host tries to bully or interrupt you, you can just fall silent. Then he or she is stuck and has to let you say what you want to say.
In terms of the archetypes we described in chapter eight of Brand You, Terry is an interesting mixture. I’d say his main archetype is the Sage. He studied history at university and is knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects. He certainly helps people to understand their world. One of his investment heroes is Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha.
Terry’s subsidiary archetypes are an unusual combination: the Ruler and the Jester. The Ruler because I always see him in a suit and tie. He makes it clear to people that their money is protected by strict financial controls. At the same time, he has remained prominent for years by evoking the Jester. If the emperor has no clothes, Terry will be among the first to point it out.
Read MoreMeditation, juggling and chocolate
The 14th chapter of Brand You is called Presence. The first exercise is a form of mindfulness meditation, which has been practised for thousands of years. Mindfulness helps us to be present, which in turn gives us presence. It makes it much easier to connect with people and communicate with them.
Headspace is one of several organisations promoting mindfulness meditation in the West. On Saturday I attended a Headspace one-day event as a guest of the founders, Andy Puddicombe and Richard Pierson. Around 200 of us trooped into Jerwood Hall, home of the London Symphony Orchestra.
Their mission is to get as many people as possible “to take 10 minutes out of their day to sit in the here and now”. I’m all in favour. If everyone did so, the world would be a much happier, healthier and more peaceful place.
Mindfulness meditation is thousands of years old. However, it’s only now spreading rapidly in the West, and may one day be as popular as yoga.
You can learn basic mindfulness meditation for free, at places such as Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. In the UK, some people get their introduction to mindfulness on the National Health Service. (The National Institute for Clinical Excellence approved the use of mindfulness in 2006.)
However, Headspace steer a middle course between religion on the one hand and medicine on the other. In terms of the archetypes that David Royston-Lee and I discussed in Brand You, Headspace strongly evoke the Ordinary Guy or Girl. Their aim is to reach a global market.
Their marketing is very, very good. Richard worked in advertising before leaving to find the meaning of life and discovering meditation. Andy abandoned a degree in sports science to spend 10 years as a Buddhist monk. One consequence is that he can juggle orange balls while explaining how thoughts appear randomly in the mind. The chocolate meditation also proved popular.
Although I’ve been meditating for years, I learned a lot, both from Andy’s presentation and from the exercises. If you’re looking for a solid introduction to mindfulness, with some entertainment thrown in, I can highly recommend it.
Read MoreWelcome…
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Read MoreArchetypes versus stereotypes
In chapter eight of Brand You we use archetypes to help readers build a strong brand identity. Archetypes appear throughout our culture, including Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. The psychologist Carl Jung wrote extentisely on the subject. Archetypes are used in advertising and, increasingly, in personal branding.
On Friday night I gave a talk for Executive MBA students at Judge Business School, Cambridge University. One of them asked about the relationship between stereotypes and archetypes. Having done some more homework on the subject, here is my answer.
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