My gosh, time does fly! So, here are a couple of things to help you make the most of the remaining 90% of the year.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got in business was “income follows assets”.

Pretty simple – if you want rent, you need a house; if you want dividends, you need some shares; if you want a viable business, you need business assets.

There is also an asset that is undervalued by most people – their personal brand.

What does a personal brand give you? It allows you to charge a premium for your time, it attracts opportunities, gets you speaking gigs and drives high-paid consulting work to you.

A personal brand can also lead to ridiculously high income in numerous ways. In good times and in bad times it can make you the go-to person.

So what goes into creating a valuable personal brand?

TWO key things

1. Valuable insights

Ideas, case studies, methods, strategies and stories that solve problems or improve lives.

2. Reach

The number and quality of people who know you, like you and trust you. 

The first issue with this is that most people (perhaps even you) don’t place a high value on what they know. Because your knowledge was acquired over decades, and you also know other insightful people in your field, you don’t tend to think of yourself as having valuable insights – or at least not unique insights.

The second issue is that in the UK, one of the worst possible things to be labelled as is a “shameless self-promoter“. For fear of being seen as a narcissist, most good people never make a fuss about their achievements or expertise. If anything they play down their achievements and act with humility when in the spotlight.

This causes three further problems.

– Firstly, the world misses out on the value you have to offer and they never get a chance to access your insights.

– Secondly, you miss out on all the money and appreciation people would gladly offer you for helping to solve a problem or improve a situation.

– Thirdly, the disgusting, shameless self-promoters who have no agenda other than to get themselves noticed are left to indulge themselves in the spotlight despite the fact you could have offered way more value.

In the coming weeks you will see the media going crazy about the economy dipping and a new recession looming. All I want you to hear is “the commodity asset class is no longer hot – what’s next?”

I can assure you the best asset you can invest in is your own personal brand because it’s yours for life, it goes with you wherever you travel (thanks to Google) and it’s not affected by the price of oil.

If you want to explore this asset further, consider coming along to the World’s Leading Personal Brand Accelerator (dubbed by The Huffington Post) this March in London.