I was listening to the Design Better Podcast featuring Bill Burnett, author of How to Live a Meaningful Life, and it struck me that building a life you love is a very similar, if not an identical, process to building a brand. Please note: this is NOT an instructional post on how to build a personal brand, lord help us.
Burnett outlines four pillars of a life worth living: Wonder, Coherence, Community, and Flow. What struck me was how cleanly these map onto my approach in building brands (Essence → Structure → Expression), and how both frameworks invert Maslow’s hierarchy in the same way. Maslow placed self-actualization at the top of the pyramid, the peak you reach only after the lower rungs are secured. Safety and belonging first; meaning as reward. Burnett is suggesting that Wonder, which is the closest thing to self-actualization in his model, isn’t the destination but the starting orientation. Similarly, in my brand building process, “essence” is the starting point and gateway for all other elements of a brand.
Glossary:
Coherence: the logical, consistent, and orderly connection of parts, creating a unified whole
Dissonance: a lack of agreement, harmony, or consistency, referring to conflict between beliefs/actions (cognitive dissonance), or general discordance
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: a psychological theory proposing that human motivation is driven by a five-tier pyramid of needs, ranging from basic survival to self-actualization
Most brands are built from the bottom of the pyramid up. Safety first: secure the revenue, establish the category, prove the market. Then belonging: build community, find the audience. Then esteem: earn the reputation, collect the proof points. Meaning arrives last, if at all, usually in the form of a mission statement written by junior marketing team after the fact. The result is a brand that functions but doesn’t resonate. It has structure without soul, and the dissonance is LOUD.
What Burnett is describing, and what I keep coming back to in my own work, is that the most enduring lives and the most enduring brands begin with Coherence. This is where brand strategy and life design converge. Both require you to identify your core material, the essential stuff you're actually made of, before you decide how to express it outward. Both collapse when expression runs ahead of essence. And both are, at their best, an ongoing act of designing and editing (wayfinding, requiring real-time input and feedback).
The question I keep returning to is not “what do I want my life to look like” or “what do I want my brand to stand for,” because both of those questions assume you can see the destination clearly enough to reverse-engineer a path. Most of us can’t, and the ones who claim they can are usually editing the memory of how they got somewhere after they’ve already arrived.
The more useful question, and the one I point toward: what is already coherent in me, and how do I build the structure around it that lets that coherence hold over time? What’s the truth? And how does that get to come to life?
As many of you will remember, we recently decided to relocate our family from Aspen (where we spent the last 15 yearsish), to the Hudson Valley. Did we have a plan? Not really. But what we did have was a deep desire to build a life that better reflected our inner worlds.
I am creative to my core, and while my Aspen community is amazing (I love you!!!), I had started to feel the particular loneliness of speaking a language fluently that no one around me was quite understanding. Design objects are sacred, narrative and experience patterns are the air I breathe and the thoughtful energy behind a brand holds spiritual, life-affirming meaning. These things are not decorative concerns to me, they are how I understand the world. And so our move was an act of coherence. We deliberately changed the structure (chosen environment) of our life, to better express our true essence. Did it work? So far so good!
Most people, when something feels off, go straight for Expression. They redecorate, they rebrand, start a new project, or cut their bangs. It feels like action, and it is, but it’s action aimed at the wrong layer. Expression is the outermost ring (what people see), and because it’s visible, it’s also where we tend to perform our way through misalignment rather than actually resolve it.
But Expression is downstream of everything else. If it feels hollow, effortful, or like you’re constantly pushing something uphill, the problem almost certainly isn’t there. It’s most likely in your Structure, the conditions you’ve built or accepted around your life, or it traces all the way back to an Essence you haven’t been fully honest about yet (the choices that belong to someone else’s version of success; the income stream that pays well but costs you something more tender; the town, the house, the social circle that made sense at one point and is now feels off).
Which is why the framework moves in a specific direction and resists being reversed. Essence first, always. Not because it’s a philosophical nicety but because everything else is load-bearing on it. Structure is how you build conditions that allow your Essence to actually function in the world, and Expression is what naturally emerges when those two are in conversation with each other.
The three layers, in full:
Essence is your reason for being, your purest truth stripped of inherited expectations and performed identity. It’s what you were drawn to before anyone told you what was practical. It’s the themes that recur across every chapter of your life and it’s what you would do if outcome were irrelevant. Most people have a felt sense of their Essence but have never given themselves permission to build around it structurally.
Structure is the architecture you construct around that Essence, the conditions that either support your truth or contradict it. Where you live and the quality of light in your home. The rhythms of your day and how you protect your best creative energy. How you earn money and whether that process restores or depletes you. Your physical practices, your agreements about time. Structure is where most misalignment actually lives, and it’s also where the most meaningful change happens, because changing your structure changes what’s possible for you without requiring you to become a different person.
Expression is everything that radiates outward when Essence and Structure are in honest relationship with each other. Your style and the objects you choose to live with. Your business and the work you send into the world. Your social circle and the quality of conversation you’re regularly inside. Your creative output in any form. When Expression is working, it feels like more like true translation.
If this resonated and you want to go deeper, whether for your brand or for yourself, I built a 40+ page workbook around exactly this framework. It moves through Essence, Structure, and Expression in sequence to help you build a brand, or a life, with meaning and coherence.
And if you want to work through it together, that's what I'm here for.
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