Parliament | Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.
The Mirror You Didn't Know You Needed
Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.
— Jim Rohn
Tomorrow I'm presenting to a sales team, and I'll lead with a stat from Harvard Business School that makes people uncomfortable: 95% of buying decisions are emotional. Even in B2B.
Those spreadsheets they're requesting? The ROI calculations? They matter, but they're not what closes the deal.
What closes the deal is story. Connection. The feeling that you understand them in a way their other three finalists don't.
And you can't tell a compelling story about your brand if you don't know your own narrative.
You can't read the label from inside the jar.
What Self-Education Really Means
Rohn wasn't talking about YouTube tutorials. He was talking about the harder work: understanding who you are, what you believe, and why it matters. The kind of knowledge that shows up in every decision you make.
Traditional agencies start with the market—what's trending, what competitors are doing. They're asking: "Who should you be?"
The Brand Being Method asks a different question: "Who are you already?"
That question isn't for everyone. If you started your business purely for work-life balance or to get rich, we're probably not a good fit. We're here for the founders doing the hard work of making change—in their industries, in their communities, in themselves. And that work starts with brutal self-honesty about who you are and what you're actually building.
The Mirror, Not the Makeover
Our job isn't transformation. It's translation.
We're the mirror that reflects back what you've been too close to see. The patterns in your founder story that explain why certain clients light you up and others drain you. The values you've been living but never named. The vision you've been building toward without quite realizing it.
We help you clarify that truth, name it and articulate it so we call the right people to action, and repel the wrong.
From Internal Clarity to External Magnetism
Once you can articulate your identity, you can operationalize it.
Your team stops guessing what "on-brand" means. Your hiring becomes more precise. Your marketing gets sharper because you're speaking directly to the people who already believe what you believe.
Your customers stop seeing you as one option among many. They see you as the only option that gets it.
The businesses we remember knew exactly who they were and had the courage to be precisely that. Patagonia doesn't apologize for environmental activism. Basecamp doesn't pretend to be the tool for every team.
They educated themselves on their own identity. Then they built their fortune by refusing to be anything else.
The Work Nobody Teaches You
Business school teaches you financial modeling, competitive analysis, growth strategies. What it doesn't teach is how to look in the mirror and see yourself clearly. How to mine your own story for the themes that will define your next decade.
That's self-education. And it's the work that determines whether you build a company that makes you a living or a brand that makes you a fortune.
