Certainly for many people, a successful personal brand is a straightforward way to make a living, through honest hard work. But for people with a weakness for escapism and a strength for narrating their lives in a compelling way, life behind a beloved personal brand can be a shelter from accountability. You can hide from what you don’t want to deal with while engaging with a group of strangers. When asked for your opinions, you are granted an enormous amount of leeway, because ‘brand authenticity’ is basically the gold standard of 2015, and if being rude or late or a decidedly mediocre writer is part of the innate, organic, impossible-to-reproduce truth of your personal brand, that is OK.

“On Being an OK Person in an Age of Personal Brands”.