Are you engaged?

The ideas here are a sort of mashup of different conversations I’ve had with various people — maybe you might recognize some of your own thoughts in here, but none of this is really “quoted” or attributable to a single person. It harkens back to something I wrote about a week ago, but I’m also taking this off on a tangent towards a new space.

If you are engaged, then that means you are involved with something else. It isn’t possible for you to be engaged and at the same time for there to be no trace of your engagement. You can write all you want on your resumé or curriculum vitae, but if there are no repercussions of your action “out there”, whether “in real life” or online, then all of your words are just dreamy fantasies.

If the only place you exist online is at your personal name (i.e., your personal brand name — something like “First Name – Last Name dot com”), then that means you are only engaging with yourself. Sure, being in touch with yourself is all good and fine, important too, but it means little or nothing to society, the world, the universe, whatever.

Have you ventured out outside of your own skin today? Where to? Were the interactions fruitful? Did your engagement with others lead to results? Whether you interpret such results as “positive” or “negative” is entirely up to you — in any case you would have learned something new, and you would have cared about something, and probably also interacted with someone in some way. You would have been engaged.

If you think you need to devote more attention to your personal brand name, then here’s another hint: Your brand means little or nothing — it will only mean something as the result of actual engagement. All of the hot air you blurt into retard media channels… no one pays attention to that.