[Cache #258]

It must have almost killed Sidney Crosby, to not play in the Olympic hockey gold medal game vs. the United States, due to injury.

That is what I would say if I didn’t know anything about the man. Or observed his downcast placidity in the post-loss news conference, in which he and coach Jon Cooper were the only two members of the Canadian team to appear.

A reporter asked him how he came to his decision not to play.

Sid’s answer: “I’m not going to compromise our team.”

Sid also spoke in that news conference about how much the team had wanted the gold medal for Connor McDavid, a statement that in its humility was truly an astonishing inversion of reality, or at least the reality that was painted in the media before and during the Olympic tournament. It was not McDavid, but Crosby – being the captain of the team, its most senior and worshipped member, and almost certainly playing in his last Olympics – who was understood by the public to be the player for whom everyone on the Canadian team wanted to win.

Yes, Crosby scored the Golden Goal for Canada at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Yes, he has won three Stanley Cups, and scored more than one point per game for all 20 seasons he has played in the NHL, a feat surpassing every player in history including Wayne Gretzky.

But his brand is more than that. It is the humility with which he plays – which allows Canadians in particular to project their national self-image on to him, and people more generally to project their personal self-image – that makes his brand the powerhouse it is.

People love humility in a personal brand.

That is what I would say if the world was not so full of bombast and egotists with massive and massively profitable followings.

There is indeed a continuum upon which you can pick your spot. Bombast tends to polarize, making your followers and haters enthusiastic in approximately equal measure. Humility is the safer path, less likely to inflame emotions in either direction.

Which brings me back to my opening shortlist of Crosby’s achievements: there is no avoiding that they are, in fact, the essential element to his brand. Excellence conquers all. The humility-ego axis is more tonal.

What are you shooting for?

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See the full personal brand conversation that I had with Megan Matthews; we talked about Sidney Crosby, and also about new Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel.

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Image of Sidney Crosby by Michael Miller – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link