How do you build a reputation?

It’s an interesting question. I don’t think too many people think about this very actively.

But your reputation is probably the most important thing for getting work and having a career in the creative industries.

Every business I’ve ever been in is a relationship business.

Yes, you might have a big brand as a client, but you always work with people. And people like to work with people they want to spend time with.

If we can choose between two talented people and one is nice to work with while the other is a pain in the ass, we’ll choose the person who is nice to work with and more aligned with our values.

You’re building a reputation regardless of whether you’re actively thinking about it.

By the way you show up.

By the way you do your work.

By the way you interact with others.

And through the creative output you produce.

The combination of all that creates your reputation.

If you work in a team and you’re always the one who comes late, that will become your reputation.

You’re the person who’s always late.

Or you might be the person who always checks whether people are doing okay or need anything.

You’re the person who takes care of everybody else.

Over the two decades of work I’ve done so far, I’ve probably built very different reputations with different groups of people.

At the beginning, during my television production days, people knew me as the guy who was really into lighting.

They also knew I didn’t like working long hours and would ask whether I could go home when the opportunity came up.

In New York and filmmaking, I continued to be the lighting guy.

I probably could have played more into my Austrian Europeanness, but I never did that.

In those circumstances, people really got to know me as a team player. I was the guy who got things done with the resources available.

That was what I kept hearing from people.

When I came back to Vienna and worked in marketing, I quickly became the person who knew more about video and filmmaking than anybody else.

In some instances, I also became known for creating structure, order, and systems for creative work. Systems that allowed us to focus on the work rather than the administration and automate the admin as much as possible.

More recently, with Orbit and everything in the creator economy, I’ve been the YouTuber who asks YouTubers how to become YouTubers.

The European Creator Guy.

But throughout my whole career and my whole life, people have probably known me as thoughtful, reserved, and patient.

That is what I project outwardly. On the inside, I can be very impatient, especially when it comes to achieving results.

When you think about building a reputation, pay attention to how people talk about you, how they describe you, and how they react to you.

That will give you an impression of your reputation.

It is also something you can actively steer by focusing on certain things.

I’m now entering a phase where my focus is simple:

I want to be useful.

I hope that within a year or two, people will really see that in me. If they need something, they know they can ask me for help and that I’m there to support them.

Right now, I am starting to build a new reputation.

The phrase about being a YouTuber who asks YouTubers how to become YouTubers got a chuckle for a while whenever I said it.

But I think by now this has been demystified.

We all understand how the bunny runs, as the Austrian saying goes.

Your reputation is not how you present yourself to the world. It is how other people perceive you.

You can play an active role in that, but it also depends on the people you present yourself to and how they perceive you.

Throughout building Orbit, I played with the title “journalist” for myself.

When I present myself as a journalist or creator-journalist to other creators, they see that and accept it. It can become part of my reputation.

But when I call myself a journalist around quote-unquote “real journalists,” they kind of roll their eyes at me:

“Not a real journalist.”

What that term even means is a whole other discussion we can have another time.

But it shows that there is a difference between how you actively present yourself and the people you present yourself to.

Ultimately, they are the ones who create your reputation.

That is also why it can be interesting to change where you live, what you do, or your environment every once in a while.

It brings you into contact with a different group of people who might perceive you in a very different way.