Much like the principles in taught by Dale Carnegie, I was pretty skeptical of creating a personal brand manifest before I began doing it. Similar to the rules in How to Win Friends and Influence people, though, I quickly was able to see the value in it.
The first step in creating my personal brand manifesto was determining what my purpose is in life. In order to do this I followed the instructions on Steve Pavlina's blog, which were to write down any ideas I had for what my purpose were, and to keep doing that until I felt a deep emotional response to what I had just written. After a number of times writing and moving on, I eventually felt a deep connection to this: My purpose in life is to leave the world a better place than it was when I found it, make a positive impact on the people close to me, and to achieve personal success which I can then share with those I care about, while myself being happy as well.
The next step was determining what my key values are. After careful consideration I was able to narrow down to five values as being the most important to me. Those five key values are honesty, creativity, trustworthiness, drive, and success. Nearly every decision I make and every action I take can be boiled down to one or more of these 5 values that are so important to me.
After defining my key values I moved on to assessing some of my competencies. My greatest strengths are my ability to make difficult decisions, confidence, critical thinking, working with numbers, being a good team member, teaching, working under pressure, listening, writing, retaining information, focusing on the task at hand, compassion, achieving the results I promised, and performing analysis.
Following my determinations of my greatest areas of strength, I then worked to determine what areas I am weakest in. My greatest weaknesses include my procrastination, disorganization, tendency to formulate reactions based on instinct when things go wrong, putting my own goals ahead of the goals of others, hubris, and occasional over-reliance on help from others.
Once I determined what I believed to be my key areas of strength and weakness, I asked some friends and family to fill out an anonymous survey about me, and in particular what they saw as my key strengths and weaknesses. The data that I got back had a great deal of similarity to what I identified for myself, but also had a number of surprising differences as well. Luckily, no one that I surveyed listed anything that I listed as a strength as a weakness, or anything I listed as a weakness as a strength, which I believe shows that I did at least a pretty good job of assessing myself. Obviously though, no one's responses lined up exactly with mine. The two most common answers for strengths were working under pressure and compassion. I listed the former as a strength but not the latter, as I felt that it was definitely something that I could be better in; however, it was very refreshing to see that people viewed it as a strength of mine. The two most common responses for weaknesses were disorganization and procrastination, both of which I listed as weaknesses for myself. I found this pretty unsurprising, as the people who I sent the survey out to were all people that I am close to in one way or another, who have all seen first hand how I am weak in these two areas. Some other results that I found interesting were the fact that 2 out of 10 people said that my delegating skills were a strength, which I hadn't really considered before, and that 3 out of 10 people said that my perfectionism was a weakness, which I considered but decided wasn't necessarily a weakness.
In all, I believe that my assessment of myself was mostly fair, albeit perhaps not entirely comprehensive, and that for the most part the way that others described me was due to limited exposure only in certain environments. A number of the characteristics that I described were school related, and the vast majority of people I sent the survey to had either never taken a class with me or never worked in a group with me. In my opinion people answered the survey as honestly as they could, but in some cases their answers were given without full information as to how I act in certain situations. For the most part though, I believe that the fact that my answers and the answers of my peers largely were in agreement supports the notion that I was mostly accurate in my self-assessment.
After reviewing my self-assessment and the survey results from my peers assessing me, I went on to determine my style by assessing which of my personality traits make an impact on others. Some of the traits that I believe define my style are my positivity, compassion, competitive spirit, and charisma.
In broad terms, my career goals are to go into the field of investment banking. In three years I hope to return to school to get an MBA after having worked as an analyst at an investment banking firm for the last two years. In five years I hope to be promoted to associate at that firm, having completed my MBA. In twenty years I hope to work as either a managing director for an investment bank or as a partner at a hedge fund or private equity firm.
Some of the things that differentiate me from the competition for this career path are my drive to succeed no matter the cost, my skill in working with numbers, my competitive spirit, and my ability to function well in high pressure situations.
The first step in creating my personal brand manifesto was determining what my purpose is in life. In order to do this I followed the instructions on Steve Pavlina's blog, which were to write down any ideas I had for what my purpose were, and to keep doing that until I felt a deep emotional response to what I had just written. After a number of times writing and moving on, I eventually felt a deep connection to this: My purpose in life is to leave the world a better place than it was when I found it, make a positive impact on the people close to me, and to achieve personal success which I can then share with those I care about, while myself being happy as well.
The next step was determining what my key values are. After careful consideration I was able to narrow down to five values as being the most important to me. Those five key values are honesty, creativity, trustworthiness, drive, and success. Nearly every decision I make and every action I take can be boiled down to one or more of these 5 values that are so important to me.
After defining my key values I moved on to assessing some of my competencies. My greatest strengths are my ability to make difficult decisions, confidence, critical thinking, working with numbers, being a good team member, teaching, working under pressure, listening, writing, retaining information, focusing on the task at hand, compassion, achieving the results I promised, and performing analysis.
Following my determinations of my greatest areas of strength, I then worked to determine what areas I am weakest in. My greatest weaknesses include my procrastination, disorganization, tendency to formulate reactions based on instinct when things go wrong, putting my own goals ahead of the goals of others, hubris, and occasional over-reliance on help from others.
Once I determined what I believed to be my key areas of strength and weakness, I asked some friends and family to fill out an anonymous survey about me, and in particular what they saw as my key strengths and weaknesses. The data that I got back had a great deal of similarity to what I identified for myself, but also had a number of surprising differences as well. Luckily, no one that I surveyed listed anything that I listed as a strength as a weakness, or anything I listed as a weakness as a strength, which I believe shows that I did at least a pretty good job of assessing myself. Obviously though, no one's responses lined up exactly with mine. The two most common answers for strengths were working under pressure and compassion. I listed the former as a strength but not the latter, as I felt that it was definitely something that I could be better in; however, it was very refreshing to see that people viewed it as a strength of mine. The two most common responses for weaknesses were disorganization and procrastination, both of which I listed as weaknesses for myself. I found this pretty unsurprising, as the people who I sent the survey out to were all people that I am close to in one way or another, who have all seen first hand how I am weak in these two areas. Some other results that I found interesting were the fact that 2 out of 10 people said that my delegating skills were a strength, which I hadn't really considered before, and that 3 out of 10 people said that my perfectionism was a weakness, which I considered but decided wasn't necessarily a weakness.
In all, I believe that my assessment of myself was mostly fair, albeit perhaps not entirely comprehensive, and that for the most part the way that others described me was due to limited exposure only in certain environments. A number of the characteristics that I described were school related, and the vast majority of people I sent the survey to had either never taken a class with me or never worked in a group with me. In my opinion people answered the survey as honestly as they could, but in some cases their answers were given without full information as to how I act in certain situations. For the most part though, I believe that the fact that my answers and the answers of my peers largely were in agreement supports the notion that I was mostly accurate in my self-assessment.
After reviewing my self-assessment and the survey results from my peers assessing me, I went on to determine my style by assessing which of my personality traits make an impact on others. Some of the traits that I believe define my style are my positivity, compassion, competitive spirit, and charisma.
In broad terms, my career goals are to go into the field of investment banking. In three years I hope to return to school to get an MBA after having worked as an analyst at an investment banking firm for the last two years. In five years I hope to be promoted to associate at that firm, having completed my MBA. In twenty years I hope to work as either a managing director for an investment bank or as a partner at a hedge fund or private equity firm.
Some of the things that differentiate me from the competition for this career path are my drive to succeed no matter the cost, my skill in working with numbers, my competitive spirit, and my ability to function well in high pressure situations.
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