What others believe (their opinion) of you informs your personal reputation.  Reputation generally applies in a broader sense to what groups or collections of people think of you.

Different groups or random collections of people will often view a persons reputation differently and not surprising most often from their perspective.

Who Cares

Reputation is a powerful tool to leverage in achieving your goals.  Ideally you are keenly aware of your own reputation as it applies within a specific group or collection of people.

Understanding the required reputation to support your goals, coupled with an understanding with what your reputation is, allows you to modify your behaviour in ways to enhance your reputation to what you want it to be.

The viewing lens

Of course a critical aspect of knowing how to change your behaviour is understanding the audience.  If you are playing to an audience of folk music fans, playing electrified rock and roll will affect your reputation.

Bob Dylan did exactly this at the Newport Folk festival in 1965.  Predictably, on the whole the initial impact on  Dylans reputation  was negative.

For Dylan, he was fully aware of the effect this behaviour change would have on this audience, however, his personal goals required him to change his reputation.

History supports his decision.  His fame grew and he cemented his reputation across multiple music genres and fan bases.  Dylans approach was simple, he wanted to change his reputation and so planned and executed an approach to do so.

Of course this might not have worked, had that been the case I am pretty sure he would have tried another approach, until he achieved his goal.

More on this topic tomorrow.