A different way to position your personal brand

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian who became a global public intellectual by asking questions about the long-term future of our species. Brené Brown is a research professor who spent years studying shame and vulnerability, and built one of the largest professional followings in the world by giving leaders a rigorous language for something many of them already suspected: that the model of the infallible, invulnerable boss is neither real nor effective, and that the capacity to lead with honesty about one's own limits is a form of strength. Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and journalist who challenged the dominant assumptions of Western political culture, first with a book arguing for universal basic income and then with one making the case that human beings are, by nature, more cooperative than we are taught to believe. Francesca Albanese is an Italian international law scholar serving as UN Special Rapporteur, who has become a figure of rare moral authority by holding the gap between the formal commitments of international law and the reality of its application consistently visible and accountable. And Diego Maradona, who never constructed a personal brand in any deliberate sense, became one anyway: in Naples, he gave a city that had long been treated as peripheral and subordinate a myth of dignity recovered, and that myth outlived him by decades.

These are five very different people, operating in very different fields, with no obvious common thread in what they do or how they do it. And yet something connects them at a deeper level than talent or visibility. Each of them built, or became, a public presence because they somehow interpreted a tension that was at play in the society. Harari at the intersection of technological promise and existential risk. Brown at the intersection of a dominant model of leadership built on invulnerability and the growing recognition, among leaders themselves, that this model comes with a high personal cost. Bregman at the intersection of wealth and inequality. Albanese at the intersection of the rule of law and the power of nations. Maradona at the intersection of social problems and the dream of greatness of a city that is almost a civilisation. In each case, the personal brand is a response to something the culture was already feeling, and that is what gives it the weight it carries.

A pattern worth paying attention to

This is the idea I want to explore in this article, because I think it has practical implications for how we think about personal brand value, particularly in the kind of turbulent moment we are living through.

Every society, at any given moment, carries tensions between what exists and what a significant part of the population wishes existed. Douglas Holt, in his research on how brands become culturally iconic, identified a pattern worth paying attention to. Some brands become deeply relevant and successful when they address with credibility and coherence one of the tensions that emerge in society or in a specific culture.

Sometimes, and I want to be careful about that word, the success of a personal brand rests not only on the quality of what it offers, but on its capacity to represent and interpret one of these tensions. When that happens, the brand becomes a resource for identity, a way for its public to make sense of a shared experience that had been felt but not yet given shape. That is a different order of value, and it produces a different quality of relationship.

The architecture of legitimacy

Harari's case makes this visible at every level. His personal brand, built across Sapiens and consolidated over years of public presence, is that of the historian-philosopher who reads deep time to illuminate the present. That position is stable. It defines his credibility, the territory he legitimately occupies, and the reason people turn to him rather than to the thousands of other intelligent people writing about the future. It is the architecture that holds everything else up.

His cultural strategy is something different, and more specific. From Homo Deus onwards, and more sharply in Nexus, he has positioned himself at the intersection of a contradiction that a very large public is living right now: the genuine excitement about what artificial intelligence and biotechnology make possible, alongside a growing unease about whether the ambition driving those technologies is outpacing our collective capacity to govern them. That unease is widely felt. It surfaces in conversations about jobs, about privacy, about the concentration of power in a small number of companies, about what it means to be human in a world where machines can do more and more of what we thought only humans could do. Harari gave that tension a frame. He offered his public a way to hold the contradiction consciously, to think about it with some historical perspective, rather than simply to oscillate between enthusiasm and anxiety.

The cultural strategy works because it flows directly from the brand architecture. His public grants him the authority to speak to that tension, and that grant is the product of a position built over time. It is what makes the cultural intervention land with the force it does.

What makes this kind of positioning available to a personal brand is, above all, legitimacy. The cultural tension must be genuinely felt by the public you address, and you must be recognised by that public as someone with the standing to interpret it. That recognition is the product of a position built over time, coherent enough and grounded enough that when you speak to the tension, your public understands why it is you speaking.

My friend Jorge Magán is a useful example at a different scale. An engineer who rose to the highest levels of a large technology multinational, he is now an independent adviser to boards and companies, and is gathering a growing public around a humanist view of leadership. The tension he inhabits is the distance between a shallow interpretation of corporate success, built on the brute exercise of power and a zero-sum view of the world, and the need that most people in organisations feel to be treated as human beings capable of cooperation and growth. He has chosen to navigate that tension through the figure of Don Quixote, one of the richest repositories of wisdom about human folly and human dignity in the Western literary tradition. When Jorge uses a Quixote reference to illuminate an incongruence or to point towards a different interpretation of a situation, his public listens with particular attention. His legitimacy is built from every direction at once: his nationality, his professional trajectory, his unusual depth of reading. The reference lands because the person making it has earned the right to make it.

Without that kind of legitimacy, the attempt to occupy a cultural tension reads as opportunistic, and the public always notices.

Framing as a form of value

George Lakoff's work on framing helps explain why the opportunity is significant when it is real. People do not respond to information in isolation; they respond to the conceptual frame through which information arrives. A personal brand that names a cultural tension and proposes a coherent way of inhabiting it is performing an act of framing. It is organising the way its public perceives a shared experience. Jorge Magán is framing the pressure put on us in a dehumanised working environment as a truly foolish view of organisations. Yuval Noah Harari is framing the reckless race to technological advancement as the danger of our species's self destruction. That is a different order of value from demonstrating competence or communicating a clear message, and it produces a different quality of relationship.

The moment we are living through makes this worth thinking about carefully. Turbulence sharpens contradictions. The gaps between what exists and what people wish existed become more visible, more widely felt. For personal brands with the positioning and the legitimacy to speak to those gaps, this is a moment of genuine opportunity. For those without that positioning, the temptation to jump into the cultural conversation without the necessary grounding is also greater. The difference between the two is not always obvious from the outside, but it is always legible to the public being addressed.