Get this party started?

The weekly reminder was getting annoying. For the last year or so, I had set up a calendar reminder that was supposed to finally spur me on to do some of the things I knew I needed to do in the branding arena. After all, I strongly believe in practicing what I preach (and we in the career world are all intensifying our preaching on branding to each other and to our students and clients). And doing the blogging thing, and the LinkedIn thing and the twitter thing would only add to my "tool kit" in my profession and in working with my students.

So why did I hit the "snooze" button on this reminder for a year? Well, of course, time is one of the big reasons. All evidence points to branding failure if you don't stay on top of it. Committing ongoing time to the care and feeding of an inanimate object was way down on my list of priorities when I have the care and feeding of many, many living and breathing objects right in front of my face. I was balancing family, students and clients with the incredible task of developing and implementing a whole new program at work in record time. I already felt like I ran in 24/7 mode without adding new (and face it - nonessential) tasks to my list.

Another reason I was reluctant to embark on this is, well, fear of failure (or at least fear of inane, redundant mediocrity). I mean, who wants to spend time and energy on something only to realize that it just isn't very good. And while I am pretty good at knowing what I am pretty good at, this was uncharted territory. I had bad dreams of people whispering behind their hands and pointing saying, "yes, that's the one, the very boring yet slogging on irregardless one. What a pity."

And a final, very embarrassing reason is this... I don't type. Yes, there I've said it. While I once turned out a 250 page thesis and regularly churn out reams of written materials on a daily basis, I do this in under 30 words a minute. While it is not true that I only use two fingers (I am up to three fingers on one hand and two on the other, thank you very much), I do look at the keyboard, which slows things down a bit. So what would take a good typist very little time takes me a little more. And time is short.

But here I am. I finally set a "must do" date. I signed up for all the right venues and resources. And I googled myself. I saw to my amusement that Sam Leonard Beck (me) is the writer of several articles (including much work out there on the Junior Order of United American Mechanics and their Children's Home), the receiver of several awards and the employee of several organizations. And I realized that some of this information is in places that I didn't put it. So my "stuff" is out there already. As personal branding goes, my challenge then is to get that control (or at least direct it from my end). So here goes...