Is this you, Dimitris?

I've been wrestling with the following question for over a year now. Is personal branding a waste of time? I'll speak from experience. I first started posting on my old X account 4 years ago. I had just started my online money journey as a video editor and needed to show my work to get clients, just like everyone else. Thankfully, a couple years later, I had managed to grow my page to a few hundred followers which was enough for a 7-figure creator to trust me to edit his videos. Personal branding definitely gifted me that client. He simply wouldn't have known me if I hadn't posted. Months later I decided to start posting on Instagram, to grow the business while also removing my fear of recording myself. Only problem was, I had no idea what I was doing. It was just spray and pray, posting over 300 videos in a matter of 4 months (not all of them were head talking ones). I ended up quitting Instagram 9 months in, which was a year ago. It was too time-consuming, and I decided not to scale the content agency with more clients so I could focus on my own projects. In the meantime I doubled down on my own brand and scaled it to over 600k followers, eventually selling it. 3 months ago, I decided to give personal branding one more chance. I deleted my old account and started fresh, but this time with a caveat. I'm not betting on my personal brand to build my business. Making money shouldn't rely on whether I decide to post here (or any other platform). This is just my best tool to meet other founders and cool people online. So imo, personal branding is a tool that should serve your business. The moment it starts running your life, you've built yourself a new 9-5.