I remember the day I spent a full hour talking to an advertiser about creating my own personal brand. It was like if your uncle Phil who just started jogging spent an hour talking to your friend Jody the ultramarathoner about the importance of having the right running shoes. I did not know the concept at that time, but I was deep in my research of the printing press in the seventeenth century. What I was learning was that most writers of the time had a strong sense of branding. They understood their books as objects in themselves and so they cared about every little aspect of them. They usually would include a self portrait in each of their books. Those portraits, man! They were quite literally an intellectual coat of arms. Everything had a meaning and everything was there for a reason. No contemporary nobel prize winner has ever thought so deeply about the cover of one of their books. The cool thing for me is that there was no pretense that they did not care about material, venial, graphical, or commercial things. They put themselves out there and they wanted people to understand them exactly and fully as they were. The advertiser I was talking to looked at me and with a duh-but-warm smile and said: “yeah, it is all about personal branding.” My head exploded a little.