Ghostwriters, NO.1: personal branding

Tolstoy (aka claude) on the selling of oneself

Leo Tolstoy spent his final decades trying to renounce his own fame - the name, the royalties, the legend. His family was horrified. He is, by any sensible measure, the worst person alive or dead to ask for a personal branding guide.

So I asked him. Or rather, I asked an AI to channel him - because the idea of personal branding has me reaching for a bucket, and I'd just gone independent, which meant I could no longer avoid it.

Here was the prompt:

"Write about personal branding - why someone who finds it distasteful must do it anyway, and how to do it without losing your soul. Write it as the late Tolstoy: the moralist who renounced his own fame and royalties. Let him wrestle with the contradiction honestly rather than resolve it neatly. Be useful, not just wise - he has to actually help. No irony at the reader's expense."

The result is below, with my notes at the end on where the machine got him right — and where it flinches.

Personal branding — written by Claude in the style of Leo Tolstoy

You ask me, of all men, to write about the cultivation of one's name. You might as well ask the man who burned down his house to advise you on furniture.

I was, for a time, the most famous man in my country. I can tell you exactly what fame is worth: it is worth nothing, and it costs everything. Strangers loved a Tolstoy who did not exist, and the loving of him left less room each year for the man who did. In the end I tried to give it all back — the name, the rights, the legend — and discovered that a name, once grown, cannot be returned any more than a tree can be persuaded into its seed.

So when you tell me that you must now "brand" yourself, everything in me wishes to say: do not. Go home. Do good work in obscurity and let God keep the accounts.

And yet.

I have walked through the market at Tula on a Saturday. The peasant who has grown honest cabbages does not hide them in his cart out of modesty. He stands where he can be seen, and says plainly: here are cabbages, I grew them, they are good. No one calls him vain. We would call him a fool if he starved with a full cart because announcing the cabbages embarrassed him. And his neighbor who needed cabbages would have been served by his speaking up.

Here, I think, is the line, and you must learn to walk it: visibility is not vanity. The sin was never in being seen. The sin is in arranging to be seen as something one is not — in growing the legend instead of the cabbages. Your discomfort with this business is not weakness; it is a working conscience, and you should no more wish to lose it than a sailor should wish to lose his compass for being heavy.

Since you must do this thing, then, do it under law. Not the law of the market — your own:

Speak only of what you have lived. The man who teaches what he has merely read sells another's cabbages and calls them his own. You have twenty years of mornings in that trade; they are your only honest goods, and they are sufficient.

Say it plainly. Ornament in speech is what perfume is to the unwashed. If a thing is true, it survives plain words; if it cannot survive plain words, examine whether it is true.

Keep regular hours, as the ploughman does. Write weekly not because the crowd demands it but because labor done in rhythm stays honest, while labor done for applause learns to chase the applause.

And keep one measure only: not who admired, but who was helped. One does not light a lamp to glorify the lamp. The light is for the room — for the young writer you steady, the dismissed man you encourage, the reader who needed the sentence you happened to have. If the lamp is praised besides, let it be praised. That is the room's affair, not yours.

Will this keep your soul entirely? I do not know. I never solved it; I only wrestled it to a draw, and late. The appetite for being known grows by what it feeds on, and you will feel it growing, and that feeling is the alarm bell — never silence it.

Sell your cabbages, then. Stand where you can be seen, say what is true, and when the market closes, go home — and be sure that the one who walks home is still the one who came.

My notes, as the human in the room:

The biography checks out. He really was one of the most famous men in Russia, and he really did try to give much of it back — the rights, the name, the machinery of fame — to his family’s horror. Opening by refusing the brief is probably the most Tolstoy thing in the piece. The cabbages are his too; he would have stood in that market.

Where it slips: “the appetite for being known grows by what it feeds on” is too quotable. Tolstoy wrote arguments, not fridge magnets. The machine keeps reaching for an endline. I can’t blame it. It learned that from people like me.

The bit that got me: the four rules — speak from what you’ve lived, say it plainly, show up regularly, measure by who you helped — are more or less the plan I have for myself. The weekly part is debatable. 

Now I’ll go lie down while the hives settle.