There’s a pop in the left side of my neck, just below the ear. It’s not a satisfying, joint-releasing crack, but a tight, angry little signal that I’ve been holding my head at the wrong angle again. Probably for the last 3 hours. It’s the posture of forced concentration, of trying to contort my thoughts into a shape they weren’t meant to hold. It’s the physical manifestation of building a box and then trying to cram yourself inside it, hoping nobody notices the awkward limbs sticking out.
We do this constantly with our words. We call it “brand voice.” I once spent a week-a full, billable week-crafting a brand voice guide for my own one-person operation. It had columns. On one side, “We Are…” and on the other, “We Are Not…” It was filled with beautiful, aspirational words like “erudite but not academic,” “witty but not flippant.” I printed it out. It looked professional. Then I wrote my next article and violated 13 of my own rules in the first 233 words. The document was a monument to a person I thought I should be, not the person who was actually typing the words. The entire exercise was a failure.
I used to believe that the path to distinction was paved with this kind of meticulous construction. That if you just defined your parameters tightly enough, you’d eventually carve out a unique space. It’s a seductive idea, the notion of being the architect of your own identity. But it leads, almost without exception, to the same place: a beige, perfectly rendered room with no windows and recycled air. Everyone is following the same blueprints for building a “unique” structure, and we end up with a cul-de-sac of identical houses, each with a different color door.
Discovering the Grain: João S.K.’s Perspective
This is why I started thinking about João S.K. He’s a handwriting analyst I met years ago for a story I never finished. His office was on the third floor of a dusty building, and it smelled of old paper and stale coffee. João didn’t care about what you were trying to say. He cared about the vessel. He’d point a trembling, ink-stained finger at the loop of a ‘g’ or the cross of a ‘t’ and tell you things you hadn’t even told your therapist. He wasn’t looking for the brand; he was looking for the grain.
I admit, at first I thought it was all a bit much. This obsession with minutiae felt like a form of professional navel-gazing, another way to get lost in the weeds instead of seeing the field. We spend so much time analyzing our own output, tweaking and polishing, that we lose the very impulse that made us create in the first place. It seemed counterproductive to add another layer of microscopic analysis to the process. Just write the thing, ship it, move on. Don’t get bogged down in whether your lowercase ‘f’ indicates a latent fear of commitment.
And yet. The more I do this work, the more I realize I was completely wrong. João’s method is the perfect antidote to the brand voice spreadsheet. He wasn’t analyzing the conscious choices, the parts we polish for public view. He was looking at the involuntary signatures, the things the hand does when the brain is too busy thinking about the words themselves. The pressure of the pen, the drift of the baseline, the way letters connect or pull apart-that’s where the truth is. It’s the stuff you can’t fake, not for long anyway. Your authentic self isn’t in the mission statement; it’s in the smudges and the hesitations.
Embracing Inconsistency: The Human Brand
Think about your own signature. You have the official, careful version you use for legal documents. Then you have the hurried scribble for a delivery receipt. They are recognizably yours, but they express different states of being. The pressure to perform, the lack of time, the emotional state-it all comes out in the ink. João once showed me 43 signatures from the same CEO. In the ones from internal memos, the letters were tight, almost strangling each other. In a birthday card to his daughter, they were open, flowing, generous. Same person, same hand, different soul peeking through.
Tight Signature (Pressure)
Flowing Signature (Generosity)
This is the stuff we try to sand down. The inconsistencies, the contradictions, the moments our carefully constructed facade cracks. But that’s the whole point. That’s where the humanity is. Your brand isn’t the consistent, unwavering voice you project; it’s the pattern of your inconsistencies. It’s the topics you can’t help but return to, the odd metaphors that feel natural to you, the rhythm of your sentences when you’re excited versus when you’re explaining something complex.
It’s like an unforeseen physical reaction. You can build a personal brand around being stoic and unflappable, but that curated identity offers zero defense when your body decides to betray you with a sudden, inexplicable allergic reaction. Your system doesn’t care about your brand guide. A histamine response is brutally authentic; it’s a non-negotiable truth your body is telling. You can’t strategize it away. Getting to the root of such a real, physical signal often requires a specialist who can see past the surface, much like João. In a world of remote work and digital-first lives, being able to consult an expert on these authentic, involuntary responses is crucial. Seeking out a telemedicina alergista is an act of acknowledging a truth deeper than the one you perform. It’s about listening to the body’s un-brandable signature.
Unleashing Your Authentic Baseline
This shift in perspective is liberating. It means you can stop trying to be consistent. I once gave a talk about the importance of rigorous, data-backed systems, and then spent 13 minutes on a tangent about my grandmother’s garden. In the feedback, 3 people mentioned the systems. 33 people mentioned my grandmother. The digression was the point. It was the part that was unmistakably me. It was the messy loop in my ‘g’.
So what do we do with this? We stop writing brand guides and start keeping journals. We stop asking “Is this on-brand?” and start asking “Is this true?” We stop trying to sand down our quirks and instead look for the patterns within them. The goal is not to be messy for the sake of being messy, but to recognize that your most valuable, unique asset is the unpolished, un-designed, un-copyable grain of your own mind. It’s the way you connect disparate ideas. It’s the rhythm that feels like your own breathing. It’s the voice you use when you forget you’re supposed to be using a voice.
That tension in my neck is starting to ease up, not because I fixed my posture, but because I’ve stopped trying to hold a pose. The most interesting work happens when you allow your baseline to drift, when you let the pressure of the pen change, when you stop trying to forge a perfect signature and just let your hand write.