Make Something Personal- Understanding This Expression
What "Make Something Personal" Actually Means
When someone tells you to "make something personal," they're not asking for your life story. They're asking you to stop being generic.
The phrase means taking whatever you're creating or communicating and infusing it with specific details about the recipient. Their preferences. Their history. Their context.
It's the difference between:
"Thanks for your help"
and
"Thanks for staying late to fix that bug on Thursday—I know you had dinner plans, and the team noticed."
One lands. The other disappears into the noise.
Where This Expression Shows Up
In Professional Communication
Emails, Slack messages, client deliverables. Most people send the same template to everyone. Personalization breaks through the noise.
This doesn't mean adding their name to a form email. It means understanding what they actually care about and reflecting that back.
In Content Creation
Blog posts, videos, social media. Generic content gets ignored. When you write for a specific person—imagining their exact problem and their exact situation—your content hits different.
In Relationships
Remembering the small things. Bringing up past conversations. Showing you were actually paying attention. This is what makes interactions feel meaningful instead of transactional.
In Business
Customer experience, sales outreach, onboarding. Companies that personalize see higher retention. It's not magic—it's attention.
How to Actually Make Something Personal
Here's the process. No fluff.
Step 1: Research Before You Create
Before you write that email or design that product, gather information:
- Past interactions with this person or company
- What they've explicitly said they want
- What problems they've mentioned
- How they prefer to communicate
Step 2: Find the Specific Detail
Look for one thing nobody else would know. A preference they mentioned in passing. A goal they shared. A challenge they faced.
This detail becomes your anchor.
Step 3: Connect Your Ask to Their Context
Don't just state what you want. Frame it in terms of their situation:
- How does your proposal solve their specific problem?
- Why does your timing make sense for them?
- What benefit matters most to their goals?
Step 4: Use Their Language
Pay attention to words they use. If they call it "user flow" instead of "user journey," use their term. If they have a specific title or internal jargon, match it.
Common Mistakes
Adding a name to a template isn't personalization. People see through this instantly. It's insulting, actually—like you couldn't be bothered to actually read their message.
Going too deep is also a mistake. You don't need their entire life story. One well-placed specific detail beats an overwhelming amount of personal information.
Don't make it about you. "Personal" doesn't mean sharing your feelings. It means reflecting their reality back at them.
Quick Reference: Personal vs. Generic
| Generic | Personal |
|---|---|
| "Hope you're doing well" | "Hope the product launch went smoothly yesterday" |
| "Here's our services" | "Based on your question about API integration, here's specifically what you need" |
| "Thanks for your feedback" | "The point about load times you mentioned—I fixed that in the latest update" |
| "Let me know if you have questions" | "Since you mentioned confusion about pricing, I walked through the tiers in section 3" |
Getting Started: Your First Personal Touch
Pick one email you need to send today. Just one.
- Open their last message to you
- Find one specific thing they mentioned
- Reference it directly in your response
- Connect your reply to what they actually need
That's it. One email. One personal detail. See the difference in the response you get.
Most people won't do this. They send generic messages to generic lists and wonder why nothing lands. The bar for "personal" is lower than you think—most people just want proof that you're paying attention.
Start there.