The expansion of the digital world has brought about new ways of constructing and expressing our identities.
Beyond its function as a repository of information and a hub for communication, it serves as a canvas on which we project our consciousness.
The value creator, in their pursuit of providing benefit to themselves and their audience through the content and offers they produce, also captures and crystallizes an ideal version of who they are and who they seek to become.
This alternate persona not only showcases the best aspects of yourself within your brand and business, but also helps to clarify the aspects of yourself worth spending greater degrees of time, energy, and attention to cultivate.
By intentionally constructing your ideal self in the digital world, you give rise to a mirror that shows you how to live as your ideal self in the physical world.
By using your brand and business as a means to project who you strive to be, while maintaining authenticity by not shying away from who you are or pretending to be someone you’re not, you give yourself a blueprint that outlines the architecture of your own self-improvement.
You create a positive feedback loop of physical and digital influence on yourself, where who you are in the world naturally directs who you are online, while allowing who you are online to refine who you are in the world.
In other words, your digital identity serves as the representation of your potential, revealing a path forward that allows you to fulfil it.
This is what exists at the heart of leveraging value creation as a means of self-actualization, and what we’ll be exploring in today’s article.
Crystalizing states of being through the creative process
Whenever you create a piece of content, you are capturing the state you occupied at the moment of creation.
The piece of content is a crystallization of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
Over time, these digital imprints leave clues to your idealized identity.
You can look at your body of work online as an ever-evolving representation of your awareness, reflecting back at you your beliefs, values, virtues, philosophies, and perceptions.
These digital imprints trend towards an idealized identity because they tend to be intentionally curated.
You (hopefully) craft the words you write, the videos you film, and/or the audio you record deliberately, meaning your acts of creation are always consciously directed, unlike our actions within the real world, which tend to be both consciously and unconsciously directed.
In a perfect world, this would be true of the physical as well – all of our actions would be intentional and consciously directed. But by nature of being imperfect beings, we take imperfect, unconscious, and/or mechanical action – even in our efforts to reduce the degree by which we do.
But since the actions we take in the digital world are highly deliberate, so too is the curation of our identity that exists online – highlighting the highest representation of the attributes we wish to embody and represent.
By reflecting on what we present digitally, we provide ourselves a window into the truest and purest portrayal of our being, fostering greater degrees of personal growth and self-discovery.
Evolution is a requirement for success as a value creator
Success in value creation and entrepreneurship requires you to evolve as an individual, because you continuously need to rise to the quality of identity necessary for achieving the success you desire.
You cannot fill your cup with that which it is unprepared to hold.
To get what you want, you must expand yourself to the point of being worthy of receiving it.
Everything you define as your version of “success” – as it relates to your ideal vision (the life you desire to live) and purpose (the work you must facilitate in order to bring that life into reality) – is bridged by your identity (who you exist as).
The path of value creation and entrepreneurship is one of the best paths to walk in pursuit of refining yourself because it is entirely self-directed.
It forces you to become aware of every aspect of your being – from your strengths to your weaknesses, your abilities and inabilities, your competence and incompetence – clarified even further through the contrast of who you are in the physical and who you are in the digital.
As you seek to evolve both “versions” of yourself, your intention should be for the line between them to continuously blur.
You start the process of curating your digital persona by channeling the highest aspects of yourself, but over time and cultivation, the digital representation of those aspects should further amplify the degree by which they exist within you.
I have undeniably become a better version of myself as a result of my value-creation journey.
There have been many instances in my own life where who I represented myself as online directly influenced my behavior offline – because I desire to uphold the standards represented by my digital identity within my physical identity.
If I’m portraying myself on the internet as one version of myself, a higher version of myself, I should continuously be striving towards that representation in my life as a whole.
To do otherwise would be to exercise inauthenticity, creating misalignment and a sense of dissonance within my self-perception.
By consciously crafting a digital identity that represents my ideal, I create a living version of myself online that helps me to stay accountable and strive to be better offline.
Final Thoughts
The internet is a modern miracle that offers a multitude of external benefits.
It has lowered barriers to entry, expanded the pursuits in which one can be successful, and has made connecting with the right people more accessible than ever before.
But it is far more than just a landscape from which to cultivate fruits of external success – it’s a mirror through which to face yourself, see more clearly all aspects of who you are, and consciously curate who you seek to be – expediting your evolution as a result.
Through this understanding, you are able to leverage your digital identity as a catalyst for self-improvement, aligning your offline behavior with the ideals represented by your digital persona.
The continuous process of creation, channeled through your content, your offers, and the ways in which you engage with your audience and network, becomes one of your most valuable tools for increasing your levels of self-awareness.
It turns the internet into more than just a space for your self-expression.
It becomes a medium for self-exploration, growth, and ultimately, the continuous expansion into your potential as a human being.
Much love and, as always, thank you for reading.
– JCS
P.S. If you want to learn how to apply the core philosophies, principles, & perspectives that have allowed me to scale my purpose-driven brand & business to a multi-six-figure following and income, you can check out my free 12 part video masterclass – The Absolute Abundance Compendium.
If you want to learn step by step exactly how to develop your infinite idea capture + content production system, create profitable purpose-driven offers, and build an impactful personal brand you can happily commit your life to – all while doing what you love, serving others, and adding value to the world – check out my flagship 8 week program, The Absolute Abundance Academy.
