How To Leverage Your Personal Brand Like Elon Musk

How well do you know Elon musk?

Did you know that Elon’s archetype is the outlaw mixed with a little magician that makes up his personal brand?
If you want to build and leverage your personal brand like Elon Musk —or Tony Stark— watch Lisa outline Elon Musk’s personal brand as the visionary entrepreneur.

“We want to have a future that is inspiring and exciting.” EM

Elon Musk has the reputation of being a change agent in energy, space, and technology. He’s a visionary who wants to grow humanity beyond planet Earth.

While Elon has clear advantages like being a visionary entrepreneur, a lot of what he does can be done by anyone who wants to leverage their own personal brand. Specifically, Elon has a vision and mission he wants to accomplish in his life.

For this personal brand profile, I will be highlighting two archetypes -the outlaw and Magician — that drives someone like Elon to achieve the levels of success towards his vision. For better or worse, archetypes include light and dark attributes and I’ll summarize these as well. 

If you feel that in the end, your personal brand parallels Elon’s, then I hope this inspires you on how to leverage your personal outlaw brand. 

As a co-founder of PayPal, Elon is a change agent within the energy and transportation industry. He leads the ev revolution with all 4 of his companies: Tesla, Space X, Neuralink, and the Boring Company. Also, co-founder of OpenAI.

The first aspect of Elon’s personal brand is his 

BRAND PROMISE

A brand promise is compelling, emotionally connects with your audience, and is credible. 

Elon promises to move humanity forward. Risk and mastery is the bedrock of Elon’s motivation towards achievement: to save humanity.

Next, 

VISION 

inspires and excites. Vision illustrates what you’re going achieve.
As a visionary, Elon is able to paint a picture of a desirable future -an amazing future for those he wants to help.

When you set a personal or business vision, you’re planning the future with imagination—usually positioned against a common enemy like drought, instability, or unsustainable practices found in every industry.

Even a remedy against something very small can make a huge impact in someone’s life. Something as simple as access to water can revive a community. Or spay and neuter programs for cats that allow them to lead long and healthy lives. 

Vision views a situation collectively. It implies that we’re all on the same team.

When you share your vision, as Elon does, you begin to grow your audience and eventually launch a movement. And to do that, your values need to resonate with your community to capture their imaginations as well.

While vision shows you where you’re going, 

MISSION 

shows us how you’re going to get there.

Of course, setbacks are inevitable -even with vision. But it’s vision that keeps the spark alive within you and continues to encourage everyone inside your organization to push forward.

The higher Elon sets his sights, the more often and spectacularly he fails. Through grit and persistence, he commits himself to constantly iterating his way to greatness. 

Angela Duckworth, a leading expert on grit, says that, “Grit is passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way. It combines resilience, ambition and self-control in the pursuit of goals that take months, years, or even decades.”

Elon’s passion is to land on Mars and become an interplanetary species. He perseveres through his frequent failures. 

Ask yourself — what’s your vision? Do you have the grit and stamina to get there?

Archetypal attributes include both Light and dark aspects of Elon’s personality. 

Elon’s tenacity for improving the human condition is boundless. Continuously working insane 80+ hour weeks is the sacrifice he’s willing to make to push his dreams forward while he’s still alive. Hardworking and persistent, Elon is driven to reform the transportation industry. 

With one foot inside the outlaw archetype, Elon promises a revolution that is challenging and exciting. His unorthodox pursuit to disrupt the auto and space industries introduces the Outlaw family members: reformer and maverick.

Elon’s second foot is squarely in the Magician archetype promising experience. 

As the Magician, he’s transforming lives through sustainable practices and energy consumption and production. 

In his words, “Tesla takes care of the Earth through solar panels and batteries. SpaceX takes care of Mars.”

The Innovator is one of the Magician’s family members as Elon transforms lives with tools for communicating with the brain. Neuralink is such a tool. As Elon explains, “The purpose is to solve important brand & spine problems with a seamlessly implanted device.”

I, for one, cannot wait to see how this device will empower many people with paraplegia in my lifetime. I’m also eager to see the myriad contributions to our lifestyle this device will make. 

High achievers are not without their dark side. At times they’re disconnected from reality, arrogant, and aggressive. 

And when high achievers weigh motivations vs risks, risks are of little importance. Elon —like Steve Jobs— are motivated thru impact and could care less about social failure. It’s not that they don’t care, but 1-10 on the scale of self-conscious emotion like guilt or shame, social failures and faux pas are trivial compared to the impact they ultimately want to make. 

If you feel you’re an outlaw archetype, what will you risk during the journey of reaching your goal? What’s trivial compared to the impact you ultimately want to make? 

“Life can’t be just about problems. Then what’s the point? There’s got to be things that people find inspiring and make life worth living.” EM

Those long hours are the result of driving his dream to fruition, not problems.

Ask yourself — what keeps you up at night? If you’re awake because you’re excited and inspired, then I applaud you. You might have just secured your vision.

LANGUAGE

Driven by rejecting the status quo and synchronicity, words and phrases that make up his personal brand include hope, courage, passion, with a dash of pride and vanity. 

Typically awkward in public, Elon’s monotone delivery lacks emotion and yet continues to persuade and influence. Elon tends to use fillers like ups and uhs. This isn’t a criticism – the take away here is that while he isn’t a polished speaker, he doesn’t use this as an excuse to limit his ability to interact or speak in public. 

Compared to that of the Marvel character —Tony Stark— who has a grasp of vocal variety to influence his audience no matter who it might be. They each have value similarities but their contrasting attributes is where they split —preventing them from being clones.

While some find the idea of public speaking debilitating (that used to be me), he doesn’t allow it to slow him down. He continues to share his vision and passion, regardless of ridicule. He’s one of the most sought after celebrities than most extraverts due to his future-facing passions.

Despite these two deficiencies, he’s able to make a profound impact on people and to gain brand awareness.

For that I applaud him. 

If you’re an individual with similar imperfections and shortcomings, don’t let that stop you from sharing your message. I help STEAM entrepreneurs clarify and build their brand message from the ground up. Together, we discover your archetype to hone in on your personality, define your voice, and influence your audience.

Check out my BYO Money Messsage course. It’s the only 4-hour brand building crash course that will help you attract, resonate, and connect with customers to build your small empire.

Overall, Elon may just be lauded the most influential person in our century. 

As a gifted and dedicated outlaw/magician archetype, Elon’s entrepreneurial journey inspires others to join in his pursuit to save humanity from itself or chase after their own visions.

Either way, I’m thrilled to be living in the George Jetson age of advancements; I hope you are too.

 “The future is going to be weird.”

So get out there and #keep building.

Resources Mentioned

BYO Money Message https://buildyourownsmb.com/byomoneymessage/

Archetype Quiz https://buildyourownsmb.com/your-small-business-archetype/

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