Building the Brands of My Future

I will use the past to visit the future and make it weird.

^{A special series about using the past to visit the future.}

Culture puts a huge emphasis on the concept of living in “the present moment,” and that’s fine—sometimes. In fact, I am the first to admit that we spend too much time online and not enough actually living life (and yes, my content businesses contribute to this dilemma).

But it’s a double-edged sword. Though colloquial, the saying still holds: The odds always favor the man with a plan.  Elon Musk founded Tesla to get money to make SpaceX to get money to send humans to Mars. Jeff Bezos sold books in his garage to get money to sell other products. He knew from the very beginning that he wanted Amazon to be “an everything store.” You get the idea.

We just cannot afford to trust our futures to chance or to the whims of “the present moment.” Though I understand why culture pushes this tragic trajectory. It’s the easy way out. It gives us the perfect opportunity to take any decisions which would invariably cause conflict, inner or relational, and defer them to another day.

The content business, out of necessity, makes it difficult NOT to live in the moment. Endless multitasking, perpetual deadlines, and administrative derangements are ample cause for even the best among us to mentally congratulate ourselves for a mere week spent according to plan. But as business leaders, we owe it to our companies, our employees, and ultimately ourselves, to create a vision of the future that gives purpose to the work of the day.

At a young age I quit a promising career path in golf to practice music. I turned down acceptance to a well-known violin conservatory to study economics and accounting at a state university. Looking back, many of the more momentous personal decisions I’ve made seemed outwardly ridiculous—appearing to exude a sense of social stupidity—except they weren’t, and they didn’t. With the advantage of hindsight, it became clear that each such decision made obvious sense. I made them with conviction, knowing that they would ultimately be best for my future.

“Sites like this one are an infinitely open book, and so is the future.”

Closing my content business was another one of those outwardly ridiculous choices. It was during the height of the pandemic when people were so bored sitting in bed all day that views for one of my verticals skyrocketed over 153% among male and female audiences YoY. But at the end of the day, millions of views don’t automatically translate into revenue, and advertisers were paying less despite expecting more content. I wasn’t making enough cash flow to justify my time spent on the business. Plus, I was in college, and I did not want my media escapades to turn troublesome for my studies.

In the summer between high school and college, I took classes at Harvard University. I took an obscure class on intellectual property law. It had no obvious relation to the digital media business, we learned about patents and how to become an IP lawyer for the US patent office. But as we used the Socratic method to study such classic but recondite trademark cases as Government of Quebec vs. Anything.com (a must-read regardless of your occupation or your level of intellectual curiosity), I was reminded about the value of brand name intellectual property when viewed as capital. Through online connections, I knew several people like Joey Ruben who made a six-figure income sourcing IP for brands on Instagram and TikTok, and GaryVee, who publicly touts his portfolio of social media brand IP as one of his media company’s biggest assets.

So I researched, and I hustled, and I created. In the span of three months, I turned what were originally two lean, highly concentrated content verticals into a portfolio of 25 digital brands across virtually every social media platform available, covering interests in sports, culture, innovation, fashion, beauty, food, and location-based services. It was a pivot, but one which allowed me to spend less time churning through massive ratings with senseless UGC content and more time on other ideas while still retaining strong media holdings.

Inevitably the end of the current tale is approaching, but that’s exactly the point. Once again, we’ve reached “the present moment,” where the future is in hazy limbo. The same buzz of the media age slowly fades back into focus, the deadlines, the rush to push the next “big thing.” But it all has meaning now. The past made a framework for the brands of my future.

Sites like this one are an infinitely open book, and so is the future. A fundamental question faced equally by writers and all fellow life-treaders is whether to allow the present to write the pages for us, or to take matters into our own hands, and use the past to visit the future.