Branding is no longer extra credit; it’s as essential as a resume today. Arguably, it’s more essential than a degree, at least in some arenas. The right personal branding team for your personal branding needs can be the most decisive element of branding you ever make.

Self-made Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Vietnamese immigrant, and marketing writer Tai Tran gave a TEDx Talk lecture at his alma mater, UC Berkeley, a few years ago that deconstructs the elements of a personal brand into abstract terms and then applies them anecdotally to his own successful personal branding narrative.

The lecture, titled “Designing a Personal Brand from Zero to Infinity,” leans more toward the DIY side of personal branding, likely influenced by his own success stumbling into branding after he he realized that a degree from even the top public university in the country wasn’t enough to land him the Silicon Valley job he craved, especially with no network. Tran humbly describes how he quickly learned, as the immigrant son of Vietnamese street food vendors with a degree from Berkeley, that making an identifiable niche for himself in a crowded space like Silicon Valley was the only way to climb himself out of overeducated obscurity. He describes his journey and lessons learned creating the personal brand that not only compensated for his weak network, but one in which he developed real relationships.

He encourages self-branding professionals to look at relationships with others as a key element of advancement. However, more than transactional stepping stones, these special relationships should be mutually reinforcing, as beneficial to oneself as one’s peers. Ever the data expert, he applied a formula to his own success: 50% getting to know those in your orbit who you aspire to be; 30% spending more time with colleagues; and 20% paying it forward by spending time with people who look up to you, your mentees.

Ultimately, he describes personal branding as the intersection of perception and reality, one in which you promote the best of yourself in the most authentic way possible. And that means knowing yourself in all facets, from strengths to weaknesses to the unique quirks that can make you stand out the way Tran’s mild foreign accent, which he thought of at first as a weakness, actually propelled him.

And while there is a lot of value in Tran’s speech for the uninitiated, we at Universal Admedia gently warn others about the risks of DIY personal branding. The very thing that makes personal branding so strong and lasting is also what makes it so delicate, so precarious. For once you introduce yourself to the world, your brand makes an almost indelible impression. If introduced recklessly or without elegance, a brand and all that goes with it can be rendered useless before it ever had a chance to shine. After all, the reason it’s called branding is because once born it’s burned into the psyche of the cognoscenti. It’s an idea that is conceptually branded into its market.

Tran, who is a gifted marketing writer and entrepreneur, has an innate and intuitive understanding of personal branding and its idiosyncrasies. This is rare. If personal branding is something you wish to capitalize on to push your way into an industry, reinvent yourself, or sell a new product, the consulting or agency team route is the way to go. Branding is no longer extra credit; it’s as essential as a resume today. Arguably, it’s more essential than a degree, at least in some arenas. The right personal branding team for your personal branding needs can be the most decisive element of branding you ever make.

Universal Admedia highly recommends Tran’s TEDx Talk for its fundamental explanation and exploration of the introductory elements of personal branding.

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