The real, authentic you
It’s one of those words like innovation, disruptive, synergy, guru, and paradigm, that gets thrown around as a distractor.
By people who pretend they know things.
But it's a word with a meaning, that when it is used properly, is enormously powerful and important.
To me, “authenticity” is a way of being true to who you are and who you want to be.
Then, it's about how the outside world understands you.
Which is something you have little control over.
But something, when it's honest, is enormously attractive to other humans.
A meaning, that when it is used properly, is enormously powerful and important.
The dictionary definition lays it all out.
au· then· tic ə-ˈthen-tik
1 : not false or imitation : REAL, ACTUAL
2 : true to one's own personality, spirit, or character
3 a : worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact
b : conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features
c : made or done the same way as an original
So, to me, authenticity is a way of being true to who you are and who you want to be.
Then it's about how the outside world understands you.
Which is something you have little control over.
All you can control is your belief in who you are and what you're doing.
Then, when you are exactly who you are and who you want to be, the world really responds. You're causing an effect.
So much of marketing, of branding - or really bad branding - is wrapped up in trying to sell a perception of what you think the customers out there want to buy.
What they are telling you.
But that's an almost direct path to failure.
Trends expire.
You need to tell them who you are. And show them why it feels good to be that.
Be original and true to what you think is valuable, then it becomes a matter of the people with the same belief and understanding finding you.
"Some people say give the customers what they want, but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do," Steve Jobs famously said. "Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page."
Which is just true enough for his audience to mis-read the meaning.
You can't read what's not on the page. You WRITE on a blank page. You CREATE who you are.
And if you're honest, and direct, and true to who you are, you will make a statement.
It's about the "cool factor." Create something that is objectively cool - flavored iMac, iPod, iPhone - and people will flock to it.
The trick is, like most rules, this is only partly true.
It's not really about "cool" at all. It's about authenticity.
Jobs injected personality into the brand and the product line. Into an industry that had no personality before.
He was unapologetic about his beliefs. And the brand followed.
Apple told us how it believed the world should be.
They didn't guess.
They didn't research.
And when they failed... and they sometimes famously did - the Newton, AirPower, Apple Maps - they failed with authenticity. They showed themselves as taking a chance and failing UP. Never failing down.
In the end, this shows that you KNOW who you are and why you choose to do things the way you do them.
And that's the only way people learn to follow.