Signal this week from Kenzie Collins, audience psychology, brand trust.

You've been breakdancing for years, in rooms with thirty people in them and nobody filming.

Then breaking gets added to the Olympics for the first time. You win the qualifier, and you're the one going to Paris, with your husband, who is also your coach, because there isn't anybody else.

Before the big day, you go you sit down with your therapist and talk through the worst case. You say it out loud: the whole world could laugh at me.

Then you get your turn on the floor, and it does.

Zero votes. Not one judge. Not one round. Snoop Dogg has something to say. Adele has something to say. Two years later you've quit your job. You describe it as feeling like you've been charged with some crime. On Tuesday, Netflix puts out a documentary about the worst day of your life.

None of that is new to you, of course. Everyone saw the clip, and everyone had an opinion in about two seconds… which is about how long an opinion takes to form.

The same clip was two different events, depending on who was watching it.

To the internet, Raygun was a joke, a woman doing a kangaroo hop and a sprinkler at the Olympic Games.

To the breaking scene she was a betrayal. B-girl “Tinylocks” called it their worst nightmare. B-girl Flix, who'd been her friend for fifteen years, sat down on camera and said she was offended, and embarrassed. Nobody in that group was laughing. They were angry about something the internet never mentioned once, which is that breaking got one shot at the Olympics and there it was.

The routine was bad. Zero votes is zero votes. It doesn't explain a fraction of what came next.

Nobody knew who she was that morning. By the afternoon everybody did, and they'd built her out of about four things: thirty-six, a university lecturer, a PhD in breaking, and here she is breaking (or at least, thinking she is) at the Olympics. The moves gave people somewhere to start. Everything else got filled in for her.

Within days there were conspiracy theories about how she'd got there at all. People had four facts and needed a whole person, so they made the rest up. Whatever they could find.

Fact-checked or, more often, not.

Once she was a character instead of a person, everybody could pick a side. It said more about them than it did about her.

The ones who defended her hardest recognised a piece of themselves in that label, the try-hard, being the one who’s out of their depth and doing it anyway. The ones who piled on were actively distancing themselves from that label, because cringing at her felt like cringing at the most imperfect parts of themselves. To attack Raygun was all about personal protection. A signal to the world that they are not that.

There was plenty more of her to find. Nobody went looking, because filling in the gaps is quicker than checking, and a lot more entertaining. So one bad routine became her whole reputation, and let’s be honest, it still is.

We all want to think we're different. We're not.

Here's how it happens to you. No documentary, no Snoop Dogg. Just somebody clicking your name from a comment, or a post you recently shared. Reading your bio, staying for another three posts and leaving with a file on you. You'll never be told, and they won't come back for a second look.

Filing is free. Judging someone’s work properly takes an hour nobody is willing to give. So people file according to their own experience of the world, and they move on. Your book gets read by the cover they put on it.

Before you close out this newsletter and decide you're not Raygun, think twice.

The path forward goes one of three ways.

You never sit down and work out what you want people to think, so good or bad, your file gets written for you.

You work it out, share it with the world, and never find out how it's landing until it's too late to change anything. That's Rachael Gunn. The feedback came all at once, and none of saw the vision she’d hoped for.

Or, you work it out, find out how it’s landing, and keep adjusting until the gap closes.

Best case, you're taking road three. Becoming known for one thing, before that thing is not your decision to make.

More details on how below. It's the best 5 minutes you'll spend today.

Head of Brand & Communications, 1DS Collective

INSIDE AUTHORITYOS

Closing the gap between who you are and who you show up as is most of what we do in here, and it's the part you can't do on your own, because you're the one person who can't read your own cover without bias.

The first 1000 members pay $27 a month and keep that price for life. Everyone after them pays $197. Same room, same sessions, seven times the price, decided entirely by when you walk in.

ONE TO WATCH

Untold: The Liver King, if you want the other half of this email. He wrote his own file better than almost anyone alive, which is exactly why there was nothing left to stand on when it turned out not to be true.

THIS WEEK

Send your profile to two people who've never met you and ask what they'd guess you do for work. Don't explain first, and don't argue with the answer.

That's your file and it's the one thing Rachael Gunn never got in time.

NOT HAPPY WITH YOUR ANSWER? CHANGE IT.