A personal edition of Content with a View
A few days ago, I wrote about the Afterlife Test for brand partnerships. The question was simple: when a brand stops paying to be associated with a powerful entertainment property, what remains? Did it build a relationship of its own, or did it briefly borrow someone else’s attention?
I’ve been thinking about how that question applies to people.
For years, I worked under company names that made it easy to introduce myself. Later, when I was outside those organisations, another description began to follow me: Emanuele is good at finding clients. He can bring partnerships to agencies and media companies.
There was some truth in it. I have commercial experience. I’ve brought ideas to clients and persuaded them to back those ideas. But “the person who finds clients” was becoming the answer to a question I hadn’t asked: What should we use you for?
I began saying no to opportunities that would reinforce that answer. This wasn’t a grand, cost-free act of reinvention. Some of those opportunities might have brought in money I needed. Saying no did not immediately produce a better alternative. But continuing to say yes would have made me increasingly visible for work I no longer wanted to do.
I had to ask a harder question: what was I actually doing in the work that had felt most like mine?
I kept coming back to the same ability. I could take a complicated situation, find a point of view and give it a form other people could understand and respond to. Sometimes that meant shaping a proposal or helping an organisation explain who it was. Sometimes it meant asking the question that opened up a conversation. I had exercised that ability in different jobs without ever giving it a clear name.
A recent post from Francesca Gino gave me another way to think about it. She suggests describing what you’re able to do across roles, rather than relying on the title of the role you held. It struck me because my title had made my work legible for years, while also hiding the part of it I could carry elsewhere.
So I started putting that part of myself in public. I wrote about media, content and attention. I began Content with a View. I also wrote about the less tidy process of trying to build a voice without a company logo beside my name.
Some of the posts about that process drew the strongest response. People wrote to tell me that my story made them think about their own. Over roughly a year, my LinkedIn following has grown organically by almost 2,000 people and is approaching 5,000. The people choosing to follow include senior figures in my industry, former colleagues and people I had never met.
More revealing than the number was what people began asking me to do. I was invited to moderate conversations, conduct interviews, speak and teach. Some of that work was paid. In smaller communication projects, I heard a related request from clients: Help us explain who we are, what we do and why it matters.
I haven’t turned that attention into a secure income. I want to be clear about that. But the invitations tell me something real: a different part of my work has become recognisable to others.
The Afterlife Test, for people
My original recent afterlife test for brands asked what survives after the borrowed IP is gone. For a person, the question is: what of your contribution remains visible when a title, employer or assignment is gone?
You can ask it while you’re still inside an organisation:
What do people come to me for, beyond the duties in my job description?
Is that the contribution I want to become known for, or merely the one that is easiest for others to use?
Where can I make that contribution more visible inside the organisation?
Which ideas can I express outside it, while respecting the work and people I’m responsible for?
If this role ended, what work, relationships and point of view could I carry forward?
What of my true identity and energy I can build upon to create a meaningful network?
The test isn’t an argument for turning every employee into a LinkedIn creator. Nor is it advice to refuse work you need in order to pay your bills. Sometimes the most useful move is to negotiate the role you already have: to ask for a different project, make an overlooked contribution visible, or stop letting one convenient label describe everything you can do.
An external voice can help too. It gives people another way to encounter your thinking. It does not make you immune to job loss or guarantee that an audience will pay you. I know the distance between attention and income very well. But a voice you have built over time may allow the conversation to continue when your circumstances change.
That is the part of the Afterlife Test I’m still working through myself. I know what I chose to stop reinforcing. I can see some evidence of what has begun to replace it. I don’t yet have a neat ending to the story.
I’m curious whether you recognise the same tension in your work: what do people currently seek you out for, and is it what you want to be chosen for next?
If you’re willing, reply and tell me where those two answers diverge. I’d like to understand whether this is a question others are trying to solve too.