I have a friend who is in sales. I won’t say what they sell, but it’s a public job so their social media work is all about image. If they go to dinner with friends, they take pictures and add all of the same stock work related hashtags. Out on the lake with the family? Pictures and work hashtags. At the community parade? Pictures and hashtags. You get the picture…

…and hashtags…

They are trying to promote an image of success and wealth so that people will want to do more business with them. Like Andre Agassi said so many decades ago, image is everything.

But an image is just that, an image. My photograph looks just like me, but it isn’t me, it’s just an image. Images are essentially fake. If I need to give you the image of me as something, it might just mean that I am not really that thing that I want to make you believe that I am. That was a lot of words to suggest that we should be ourselves, not an image of something.

We should let our work and our walk do the talking for us. Let’s drop the hashtags and…

–RiseUp!!