Justin Foster’s Human Bacon
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Synopsis
Human Bacon
is a short read by Justin Foster that teaches you the fundamentals of personal branding. It’s an interactive book, one that will challenge you to look inside yourself – to be brutally honest about who you are and what you have to offer.
Branding is one of those things too many people never think about – or don’t think about until it’s too late. All the talk about logos, core values, and “brand identity” can seem wishy washy to some people. Yet as any Fortune 500 marketing director will tell you, strong brands rule the world. There are deep, important, and powerful reasons to get branding right.
This is equally true on the personal level as on the corporate level. In both cases, brands connect our core values and beliefs with our communications; they connect our mission and purpose with our products. They provide context, meaning, and feeling. Great brands inspire customer loyalty while weak brands die off silently in the background.
We live in an era where individuality is coveted, success is desired, and authenticity is desperately needed. Human Bacon can help you with all three. Justin will encourage you to discover your individuality and express it in an authentic way, paving the road towards happiness and opportunity in your personal and professional life.
My rating: 9.0/10.0
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Justin Foster is someone I have had the pleasure of working with personally. He is something of a brand wizard, having worked with companies of all sizes – from small-time entrepreneurs like me to corporate giants like Verizon. He is a man of passion and purpose.
During our first brand meeting Justin challenged me to get in touch with my core beliefs. He asked me to put into words those things I am most passionate about, which proved to be quite difficult. This led to a number of “aha” moments, wherein it occurred to me just how out of touch I’d been with myself.
In fact, this first meeting with Justin left me all but paralyzed for the next few weeks. What we discovered together felt 100% right but was somewhat unexpected. This was the magician at work, I realized – helping me to uncover things I wouldn’t have been able to uncover on my own.
This awakening began before my first meeting with Justin, however, during the time I was reading Human Bacon. The book’s interactive exercises challenged me to open up my mind and define what makes me unique. They helped me realize my interactions with others needed to be more strongly rooted in my passions and beliefs. To this extent, while the book doesn’t include everything from Justin’s mentoring program, it does contain quite a bit.
On a side note, anytime we talk about things like “passions” and “beliefs,” there will be a group of highly intelligent yet skeptical people who, despite their intelligence, are not smart enough to take these matters seriously. They are usually technical types who doubt the significance or validity of anything outside their familiar realm of rationale and logic.
It’s no secret many human beings distrust and dislike things they do not understand, or are incapable of understanding. Herein lies the deeper truth about branding, however, which is that seemingly qualitative variables such as passions and beliefs are in fact quantitative elements; that the impact of such variables can be defined and measured. In business we might measure these things in dollars and cents, whereas in one’s personal life we can measure them by the number of quality relationships someone beholds, and the number of times they smile and laugh every day.
This is something I have begun to understand in greater detail through my consulting work. Human beings are social creatures whose thoughts, decisions, and actions depend largely on emotion and feeling – and to these things our passions and beliefs are closely tied. Those who understand and observe these physical laws do better in business and life than those who choose to remain in ignorance.
For all these reasons Justin’s book really hit home for me. Like many of my own books it’s a short and practical read that leaves a little to be wanted, but it gets the job done. It’s an inspiring read that will challenge you to broaden your horizons and get in touch with your authentic self.