One of the good things about having a fairly unique name is that you are generally able to be found when you want to be. You don’t have to put much effort into standing out, and you can rest assured that your personal brand is on distinct footing.
There are only so many Sawalichs in the world (a dozen or so, near as I can tell) and I know many of them personally. There is a faction up in Minnesota I’ve never met, though. The descendents of my grandfather’s cousin, it appears they are some interesting and talented people. I know this because I have a Google alert set up for our family name, and once a week I get an email digest of the recent headlines we’ve made. When there are so few of you, alerts are a good way to keep tabs on your own profile and by extension the interesting things your fellow Sawalichs may be up to.
For many years those weekly digests were all but empty save for my own occasional byline or photo credit, or the rare instances in which a distant cousin made headlines in local politics or community service.
Imagine my chagrin when I, William Sawalich, possessor of an utterly unique moniker, discovered that one of those far flung cousins had named their kid William Sawalich too. One of the few benefits of having such a name is its absolute exclusivity. But now, instead of being the only William Sawalich in the world, I account for barely half the William Sawalichs in existence. How dare he.
Cut to 2021 and this kid, 15 at the time, starts making headlines.
It turns out the other William Sawalich is incredibly talented. He’s a racecar driver, which is not a job I realized real people could have, much less people with exactly my name. This was all charming enough as I loosely began keeping tabs on his career via those weekly emails alerting me to his local Minnesota racing successes. But eventually the headlines started getting bigger and more frequent. Which is all well and good to literally everyone else in the world not named William Sawalich, but to me it was getting worrisome. Sure enough, at the ripe old age of 16, new William goes and gets signed to a bigtime stock car racing team. Next thing you know the kid’s on TV, winning races left and right and entirely decimating my share of our name. For every headline I muster he rolls off a dozen.1
By the time the 2023 racing season finished, young Master Sawalich was crowned champion of the ARCA Menards Series East. I don’t know exactly what that is, but I do know this: It’s better than anything I’ve ever accomplished, and he’s only a third of my age. He’s already got his own Wikipedia page too. Oy.
It gets worse. I’m walking around with a ticking time bomb of a name. If he becomes super famous I’m done for. Imagine walking into a meeting or a party and introducing yourself with, “Hi, I’m Dale Earnhardt Junior.”
I’m dead.
At the rate this kid is going I had better get used to the idea of being the next big thing in NASCAR. Which is not exactly ideal in a world where personal brands are more important than ever.
Are there any silver linings to this situation? Well, I guess so, but I definitely have to stretch to find them. First is the fact that I can like and follow him on Facebook, so every once in a while he (or his marketing team) will see somebody named William Sawalich liking and commenting on William Sawalich’s posts. That’s mildly amusing.
And then there’s the schwag. I have yet to pull the trigger, but it occurs to me that I can and should purchase some cool hats and shirts and jackets emblazoned with the flaming chicken logo that loudly proclaims my affinity for William Sawalich Racing.
Are there any advantages I have over this interloper? Not many. I know I’m older than him, so maybe I’m smarter too? TBD. He’s a professional racecar driver at the age of 17, which seems pretty smart to me. I do know I weigh more than him, so it’s likely I’ll have a better shot at surviving our impending post-apocalyptic hellscape in which resources are scarce.
You may be wondering what I really make of this competition for the right to our name. I think there's no competition at all. In just the last year Racecar William has earned way more headlines than I ever have. I concede. No contest. He wins. In the battle of William Sawalichs I have been relegated to “the other one.”
If there’s any saving grace it’s the fact that my friends and family have always called me Bill, not William. But I’ve always preferred William as my formal name, on bylines and photo credits and such—like Robert DeNiro’s friends call him Bob.
My William Sawalich brand has always been miniscule2 but it was mine and I liked it. So it was after an embarrassing amount of thought that I made the decision last year to rebrand myself professionally. After all those old bylines disappeared there wasn’t much evidence remaining of the millions of words I’d written over the course of two decades, so the only thing that remained, really, was my website. “Midwest Photographer William Sawalich” became “Midwest Photographer Bill Sawalich” and just like that I had a new brand. When I launched this very newsletter it belonged to Bill. Badass non-racecar driver Bill.
Brand advisors will tell you to be careful when considering such a change—usually. When I consulted with an expert she made a good point: it only matters if your existing brand has some value.
If you are in any way participating in the creator economy, it seems to me you ignore your personal brand at your peril. Whether you’re an illustrator, sculptor or poet, it’s no longer enough to just do the thing you do, you have to work equally hard to promote it. Maybe it’s always been that way, but it seems to me something has fundamentally changed. And that is that nobody—not publishers or record labels—is going to provide you with an audience. You have to bring your own.
As Rebecca Jennings wrote for Vox last week, everyone’s a sellout now.
“The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do,” Jennings writes, “from nine-to-five middle managers to astronauts to house cleaners—you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand… Hardly anyone wants to ‘build a platform;’ we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream—working for yourself and making money doing what you love. The labor of self-promotion or platform-building or audience-growing or whatever our tech overlords want us to call it is uncomfortable; it is by no means guaranteed to be effective; and it is inescapable unless you are very, very lucky.”
In this creator economy, the tasteless and tacky job of being shameless self promoters is now a necessity. That’s why everything online that you like, no matter how successful and sophisticated, includes a plea to like and subscribe, to comment and share. That stuff matters immensely to the algorithm, and nothing grows without it. I see it firsthand having spent the last eight months starting all this from scratch.
The thing about selling yourself is it’s no fun, often downright crass. Nobody wants to sell to their friends and family, that’s what MLMs do. You want to do good work, have it amplified by those with reach, and garner more opportunities to do more good work. I don’t want to sell to you any more than I want to be sold to. And I really don’t want to be sold to.
Twenty years ago when I relocated from Los Angeles and abandoned my budding magazine career to become a photographer, what I should have done was begin in earnest to build my brand and my audience. But I didn’t. I just did the work and tried to get good. That was a mistake.
It’s like the old saying: When is the best time to plant a tree? Thirty years ago. When’s the second best time? Now.
William Sawalich was no sellout. Bill Sawalich is gonna have to be.
My headlines are like “Photo by William Sawalich.” His are like “The Amazing 200mph Awesome Racecar Kid William Sawalich!!!” Can you spot the difference?
Due to my persistent belief that doing the work was enough and the rest would take care of itself, largely by way of the publishers for which I worked handling that. Whoops.
Wonderful Bill. And as Willian II profile grows larger, they may need a team photographer.