Professional Growth Friday

Leadership and Professional Development Friday

One of our readers recently suggested that our professional development and leadership content should be clearly labeled. The concern is that newcomers might mistakenly assume that this is primarily a professional development newsletter, while our economics audience might find the content confusing.

That is great advice.

Moving forward, professional development and leadership content will be featured on Fridays, as well as in short-form content such as notes and my personal Instagram posts.

But let me be clear about something: I don’t see this as separate from economics.

In fact, this is economics. More specifically, the personal side of it. It is human capital investment, a labor market concern.

When we talk about improving your personal finances, most advice focuses on cutting costs and sticking to a budget. That works, but it’s only half the equation.

The other half? Increasing your income. And the upside there is far greater.

So how do you increase your income? You build skills. You increase your ability to create value. And just as importantly, you learn how to communicate that value so others recognize it.

That’s where today’s topic comes in.

Today, I want to talk about building your personal brand, labor markets, and some social media advice I strongly disagree with.

Why Build a Personal Brand?

Most of us are trying to increase our market value. Building a personal brand helps you communicate your value clearly and consistently. Over time, it allows you to develop a reputation that others can rely on.

When people need your expertise, they will be familiar with you and know where to find you.

The Economics

In labor market analysis, your wages are a function of your marginal productivity—the additional value you create for an employer with one more unit of your work. Firms pay you based on the economic value of your output. If hiring you adds $50 per hour to the firm's revenue, your wage will tend to move toward that amount. If it only adds $15, that becomes your ceiling. This is the core idea behind the marginal productivity theory of wages: compensation is tied to the value of what you produce at the margin, not the total importance of your role or how essential the job may feel to society.

But what happens when the firm doesn’t fully know how much value you add? That’s where the clean textbook story of wages equaling marginal productivity starts to break down, because in the real world, information is costly and often incomplete. Firms cannot perfectly observe your effort, your true output, or the full impact of your work—especially in roles where value is long-term, team-based, or hard to quantify. As a result, they rely on proxies: your resume, credentials, prior employers, job titles, performance reviews, and even how confidently you communicate. These signals stand in for your true productivity, but they are imperfect.

The Information Gap

This creates a gap between your actual value and your perceived value. And in many cases, your wages are determined more by what the firm believes you contribute than what you actually contribute. Economists would frame this as an information asymmetry problem. You know more about your abilities than the employer does, but unless you can credibly signal that value, the firm will price you based on observable indicators. This is why degrees, certifications, and even brand-name employers carry so much weight; they reduce uncertainty for the firm, even if they are not perfect measures of productivity.

The takeaway is straightforward but often overlooked: increasing your actual productivity is necessary, but it is not sufficient.

You also have to reduce the information gap. You have to make your value visible, measurable, and understandable to others. Because in a world of imperfect information, the market does not reward what you know you contribute—it rewards what you can credibly demonstrate.

And that is why telling your professional story matters; it is a signal, improves information, and reduces the gap between actual and perceived productivity. Helping you earn higher wages.

The Worst Social Media Advice

One of the most common pieces of advice is: “Don’t write for yourself. Write for your audience.”

In my view, this is terrible advice.

Write about what you care about and create what you genuinely believe in, because the right audience will find you—but that also means you have to be willing to lose the wrong audience, and that is where this becomes difficult.

I have struggled with this tension myself, because the moment you begin to build any kind of presence, a new pressure emerges, and you start to think less about what you believe and more about how it will be received. You begin to ask yourself

• whether people will agree

• whether they will judge

• whether they will approve

and that subtle shift is when things start to go off track. Instead of creating from a place of conviction, you start creating from a place of caution, becoming what I would call a “safe player,” someone who writes to avoid criticism and produces content designed to be accepted by everyone.

The result is predictable: you become average, your work loses its edge, and more importantly, you begin to lose your own voice in the process. If you are going to commit to creating, if you are going to show up consistently and build something meaningful, it has to be enjoyable and it has to reflect who you are, because without that authenticity, you will not sustain it over the long run.

The goal is not to be liked by everyone; the goal is to be valuable to the right people, and while that path is more uncomfortable and often slower, it is ultimately the one that leads to something real and lasting.

Lean into who you are and build from there.

Building a Personal Brand Is a Long Road

I have been creating content online for more than 15 years. I was an early adopter of social media platforms and have always found them fascinating. I am fascinated by organizational and social communities.

Some people join a platform and quickly go viral. But viral fame is often temporary.

Building a community that trusts you takes time. Don’t chase clout. Build relationships. Building 1,000 true fans is better than a million marginally attached followers.

Try New Things and Inspire Others

I have always experimented. For an academic, I tend to be quite entrepreneurial. That’s not my description; it’s something others have said after seeing the programs and initiatives I have started and built.

Over the years, it has been incredibly rewarding to see others experiment and build in similar ways. I find it extremely rewarding to see others start to find their own voices.

That experimentation even earned me the nickname “The Economics Vlogfather” from Economics Happy Hour. Make sure to follow Monday Morning Economist and Pop Culture & Economics with Dr. Matthew Rousu.

Bringing Economics to the Masses

Closing out

I love this subject and can talk about it for days. I will end with this.

Your personal brand isn’t built in a single post. It’s built in years of showing up, sharing what you believe and know, and helping others make sense of the world.