Monday, June 1, 2026
My friend Robbie used to be good at reminding me to make things “my own.” Don’t strip out your personal touch. Why would you want to? Your charm is the appeal.
One of the things I love about my neighborhood is its charm. In some of the so-called prestigious neighborhoods in my city, there is what one might call glamor. To me, glamor projects a faceless, nameless sterility stripped of charm. Each year, my neighborhood does a home tour. What I love about it, is how individualized each home is – a precious reflection of the owner’s “brand.”
In the glamorous neighborhoods, the home tours showcase something different – “the designer look.” Who is this designer, but a sterile Pinterest page that looks like an intrusion of Pottery Barn! How many businesses sellout? They expand and become faceless, charmless, whitewashed corporations. Who’s hiding in their anonymous visage? Who is the delicate face of something as monolithic as Bank of America?
Grassroots charm often morphs into corporate childlessness. Who’s behind the walls and layers of branding and administration? Who or what is the intimate underlay, the substance of impressive complexity too engrossing to consider?
How do we have “wild success” and keep the luminosity of our charm and personal touch? How do we stay true to ourselves? Grounding – our unique brand of love should not be forsaken, merely because we expand and become successful. Chase it once it starts, and lose it.
Keep it on the ground, honest, personable, and invariably “you.” Don’t be ashamed of what constitutes that baseness – your smells, your look, your tastes, your expressions, and your touch – the personal one.
The faceless “designer look” sanitizes the loving intimacy of the indigenousness that made a start from nothing but a unique expression of that childlike love to begin with. Return to the ground. Keep the charm and honesty, and wild success follows you. Keep it in that order.