Your reputation may be accurate. It may also be out of date.
A few years ago, I wrote a book called Selling the Truth: A Semoir with Insights for Life and Business.
One of its central ideas was simple:
Before you brand yourself, know yourself.
I still think that’s pretty good advice.
I’ve also discovered a flaw in it.
You have to keep doing it.
Because while you’re busy building a career, a company, a reputation and, ideally, a life, something inconvenient happens.
You change.
The market (and Google), meanwhile, has a long memory.
Tell people what you do for long enough and eventually they believe you.
Congratulations.
Now they know you as the lawyer. The CEO. The photographer. The entrepreneur. The strategist. The person who solves that particular problem everyone has learned to bring you.
That’s what we wanted.
Until it isn’t.
Because while everyone else was learning who you are, you kept becoming.
Experience does that.
You learn things. Survive things. Get better at things.
Some things that once mattered enormously stop mattering quite so much.
Occasionally, you discover that something you’re exceptionally good at is something you don’t particularly want to do anymore.
That’s awkward.
Especially when people keep telling you how good you are at it. (example: people who hired me as a publicist might say, “Hersh is an amazing publicist!”)
This is one reason I change my LinkedIn banner and headline fairly often.
A LinkedIn banner is a billboard.
Billboards run campaigns.
Changing mine doesn’t mean I’ve adopted a new personality. Usually, it means I’ve figured something out about my business. Or resolved something I couldn’t quite articulate before. Or found better language for something that was already true.
LinkedIn will even let you put several messages in a carousel.
Fine.
But I’m not McDonald’s.
I don’t need a menu of Hershes.
I’d rather try to understand myself in 360 degrees and communicate that person as clearly and concisely as I can.
The billboard may change.
The person behind it should become clearer.
In fact, if you’re reading this on LinkedIn Wednesday, August 12, 2026, you may notice that I changed the billboard again today.
I think I’ve figured something out.
More on that another time.
But there’s a step before changing any billboard, website, bio or positioning.
Ask whether the person you’re describing is still you.
What do you care about now?
What have you become unusually good at seeing?
What are people coming to you for that they didn’t ten years ago?
What are you still doing because you’re good at it rather than because you want to?
What have you earned the right to stop proving?
When I wrote Selling the Truth, I believed that before we could communicate ourselves truthfully to anyone else, we first had to understand and embrace our own truth.
I believe that even more now.
I’d just add something.
Check again occasionally.
Your reputation may not be wrong.
It may simply describe an earlier version of you.
The communication problem doesn’t begin with what you tell people.
It begins with whether what you’re telling them is true now.
Before you decide what the world should see next, take a good look at the person standing there now.
Who have you become?
If that question is harder to answer than you expected, we should probably talk.
I spend a lot of my time helping accomplished people see what their experience has actually prepared them for—and what they want to do with it.