Justine Musk's Blog, page 16

stages of personal change + the unexpected shape of success

You broke your resolution. That’s ok.

You are not a loser.

Regression is a stage of personal change.

The first stage: Precontemplation.

When you’re living in the dark.

You have yet to come to consciousness

Or admit that anything’s wrong.

Denial is not just a river…yadda yadda.

The second stage: contemplation.

You are aware of the problem and ponder it.

(See you ponder. Ponder, you, ponder.)

The third stage: preparation/determination.

You’re committed, dammit! You promise

To shake the world.

The fourth stage: action/willpower.

You’re changing! You are! Except maybe

Not so much

(This is often the shortest of the stages.)

The fifth stage: maintenance.

You embed the change into your life

And avoid relapse.

(Or not.)

The sixth stage: um, relapse.

Fall from grace.

The cigarette. The cake. The inappropriate lover.

(Don’t judge the ones who sin

differently than you do.)

Take a breath.

Figure out what triggered the behavior.

Begin again.

You are not

back where you started

But somewhere higher

With a deepened understanding of yourself.

Success is not a straight line.

It is a spiral.

And the spiral is the ancient symbol

Of evolution

And the divine.

success is not a straight line

off the coast

there was

a splash quite unnoticed

this was

Icarus drowning

– William Carlos Williams

In his new book THE ICARUS DECEPTION, Seth Godin takes on the Icarus myth. You know the one: there’s this kid, his dad invents some wings made out of wax, the kid straps them on and flies high. Very high.

The sun melts the wings and the kid plunges down, down, down into the sea.

Not a feel-good Disney kind of ending.

Every culture uses stories to transmit the lessons teaching people to obey – and to encourage others to obey – the status quo. (If you want to understand a culture, get inside the stories of that culture. If you want to change a culture, find a way to change those stories.)

Godin writes:

“The lesson of this myth: Don’t disobey the king. Don’t disobey your dad. Don’t imagine that you’re better than you are, and most of all, don’t ever believe that you have the ability to do what a god might do.”

But then Godin adds:

“The part of the myth you weren’t told: In addition to telling Icarus not to fly too high, Daedalus instructed his son not to fly too low, too close to the sea, because the water would ruin the lift in his wings.

Society has altered the myth, encouraging us to forget the part about the sea, and created a culture where we constantly remind one another about the dangers of standing up, standing out, and making a ruckus.”

It reminds me of advice that Cheryl Strayed, writing as Dear Sugar, gave to a young wannabe writer who couldn’t write because she thought she was crud because she hadn’t achieved a certain writerly stature by her mid twenties:

“The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all that anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes that you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers so much longer to get there. It laments that you’ll never be as good as David Foster Wallace – a genius, a master of the craft – while at the same time describing how little you write. You loathe yourself and yet you’re consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.”

Strayed advises the young writer to, as she calls it, Surrender.

Which might be another way of telling her to Accept.

Find the humility to accept this moment simply for what it is; accept the reality you are in; accept the process of creation and through accepting it, give yourself over to it, and then accept what results from that process and let go and begin again.

When we’re grandiose, we won’t create because we don’t want to destroy our illusions about ourselves; when we’re depressed and despairing, we won’t create because we don’t see the point. Too close to the sun or too close to the water; too high or too low; neither is the place where we get any work done.

Recently I was at a yoga/hiking cleansing retreat in the hills of San Diego where I found myself the slowest, most inexperienced hiker in the group. This did not sit well with my ego. I knew I was in trouble the first day at our “small, introductory hike” which was, the guide explained, “forty-five minutes straight up.”

I took the hill by trying to take the hill; which is to say, I charged it. I didn’t last very long. Soon, I was beyond winded. Soon, I wanted to cry, or at least seriously ask myself, WTF, WTF, WTF am I doing here?

The guide hung back from the others, by now so far ahead they had climbed out of sight, and taught me what I so obviously needed to know. He advised me not to take such big steps. Take baby steps. And don’t go straight up the hill. Instead, do a constant zig-zag, weaving your way up by tracing diagonal lines across the path. “People tend not to like doing this because it means extra steps,” the guide told me. “But you can climb any hill this way. And anybody can do it.”

It was a revelation. Instead of thinking of the hill as a whole, I chunked it down to tiny goals: I would zig over to this branch, then zag up to that rock, then zig over to this pile of dirt, and so on and so on, baby stepping all the way, until I could look behind me and marvel at how far I had come. I was still the slowest hiker in the group, but I began to realize that that hardly mattered. It just was what it was. (Also, it allowed me to bond with the cute dark-eyed hiking guide.)

I could Accept. I could Surrender to the process and let it carry me up that hill, and every hill that week (there were a lot of hills).

Now, thinking about Icarus, I suspect he got in trouble not because he dared to fly high.

He got in trouble when he went straight at the sun.

He should have zig-zagged.

so-called laws for the creative badass

“Life was never meant to be safe. It was meant to be lived right to the end.” — Caroline Myss

Thou shalt…

Listen to your body.

Take direction from your gut as well as your head.

Redefine power.

Cultivate passion.

Seek new experiences.

Connect the dots.

Live with intention.

Develop laser focus.

Make time to daydream.

Fuse your interests.

Ditch the rescue fantasy.

Master the game.

Take your own damn time.

Be strategically disruptive.

Learn to take the heat.

Find mentors.

Be a mentor.

Embrace the struggle.

Befriend the fear.

Talk money.

Negotiate.

Speak first.

Have good clean fights.

Don’t wait.

Choose yourself.

Be your own permission.

Start now.

Celebrate womaninity.

Travel.

Drink at dangerous waters.

Take calculated risks.

Have a vision.

Communicate that vision.

Support the sisterhood.

NEVER give up on yourself.

Enjoy your life. It’s the only one you’ve got.

Add to the list in the comment section below.

“those who tell the stories, rule the world”

Q: Do you think jealousy plays into…people scoffing at your work?

A: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think that anybody looks at me and says, “she looks amazing and I want to be that lady,” but I think that there’s a thing that people trying to present their own experience, there’s a little bit of “who told you you were allowed to do this and why do you think we’re interested?” phenomenon, which I completely understand, although I think that people challenge women more who want to tell their own story.

– excerpted from an interview with Lena Dunham

1

I was raised to be a good listener. Many women are.

(Sometimes we fake it.)

2

“I forgot,” a friend told a friend who then told me, “how segregated your dinner party conversations get.” What she meant was, the men talk to the men, and the women talk to the women, or listen and smile and don’t talk at all.

(And it’s understood on some basic unspoken level that the male conversation is important and the female conversation is not.)

I had theories for this. There’s maybe a big divide between the genders you don’t see in other social circles: in age (the men range from 10 to 20 years older than their female dates/playmates/significant others), in wealth (the men have it, the women don’t, even when married it’s understood to be the man’s money and he is often in total control of it), in interests (the men talk technology and business, the women talk children and culture).

But what it comes down to is the power dynamic. Attention is a limited resource. When you stand up and claim it – when you manage to keep it – you are asserting your right to be heard. You are taking attention away from others.

You can tell a lot by who speaks and who listens.

3

“Those who tell the stories rule the world.” — Plato.

When I was growing up, the masculine pronoun was used to refer to both men and women. This wasn’t supposed to be a big deal, but even as a little girl it bothered me because it made me feel invisible. Was I supposed to be invisible?

We learn to be invisible – to not speak up (and maybe offend people), to not blow our own horns (and be arrogant, obnoxious), to not ask for things (and be selfish), to not expect or demand our true worth (and be golddiggers).

We think our work should speak for itself and then wonder why we didn’t get that promotion.

Our work also tends to be invisible. It’s background: all the stuff needed to keep the show running, so like any other natural resource (water, electricity, oil) it’s expected to come cheap, and only truly noticed when it’s suddenly no longer there.

4

When a woman shines the light on herself/ her life/ her experiences, she gets questioned and accused of narcissism in a way that men don’t. Elizabeth Gilbert writes an autobiographical girl-hits-the-road story – the kind of tale that men have been penning since the beginning of time – and gets accused of being a monster narcissist (and a bad wife and mother, for wanting neither marriage nor children).

But when monster narcissism comes in male packages – Donald Trump, anyone? – it’s more or less accepted as the price of great accomplishment. (So what if Steve Jobs was cruel and abusive? He gave us the iPod!)

This is part of why ambition in women is so problematic: ambition implies that you’ll seize some of that very limited recognition for yourself, which is so very unfeminine. So we give it up, over and over, to the menfolk. Standard wisdom in publishing and Hollywood: girls will read books about boys and women will see movies about men, but not the reverse, so better make it Harry rather than Harriet Potter unless it’s specifically for the pink ghetto.

Muriel Rukeyser once said, “When a woman tells the truth about her life, the world splits open.”

Adrienne Rich said, “When a woman tells the truth she makes room for more truth around her.”

They’re not implying that women are liars.

Men talk, women listen.

5

And when women talk, men have a tradition of dismissing it as yakking, as gossip, as trivial, and so they tune out.

What happens when a woman insists on the importance of her own experiences – especially when they don’t revolve around being desirable or a wife-and-mother?

6

When I first started seeing a shrink, I had to get over my own self-consciousness about talking about myself (even though I was paying someone in order to do so). It felt so incredibly self-indulgent.

Yet the more I learn about myself, the more I learn about other people and how best to navigate the world. The large is in the small. If the world is in a grain of sand, the world is also in each one of us, if we’re brave enough to look close and be utterly, utterly honest.

Our mistake is in thinking – in being trained to think – that we are separate, isolated, and cut-off; that our experiences, by virtue of being our experiences, aren’t relevant to others; that our stories are of little value. Too confessional. Too self-indulgent.

But when you tell your story, and it resonates with another, a connection is made.

Enough connections grow into community. Or even a movement.

And that is real power.

That is such real, dangerous power that one of the first actions of tyranny is to stamp out the voices of all but the chosen few.

Every act of magic begins with the words, the voice, to invoke that magic. To take away someone’s voice, to ground it into silence, is to steal their magic.

And if your story doesn’t resonate, it doesn’t mean it holds no value. People will tell you this – they might even mock you and try to shout you down, sometimes under the guise of ‘constructive criticism’ – but the fault is not with you. It’s with the storytelling. To amplify your voice so that others will listen is both a skill and an art.

Always be learning:

How to make better art.

How to work your magic.

it is time for you to go on an adventure

“It’s not what you’ve got. It’s how brave you’re prepared to be.” — Seth Godin

It is time for you to go on an adventure.

It is time to unlock your soul’s code

and confess what you know

You need to do with your life.

You are not yet what you need to be

The journey makes you what you need to be

The journey owns you

To resist it hurts yourself and others

(You die in drops and inches.)

It is time to look close and go where

the gold waits for you in the dark

(darkness is wisdom)

It is time to go deep

It is time to take back the power you’ve given to others.

The power and the light.

The power is your birthright.

It is time to reclaim the creative fire

that is also your birthright.

They stole it from you.

(Perhaps they didn’t mean to.)

It is time to get serious. It is time to get down.

It is time to do it anyway.

You are ready to start.

Seriously.

You are ready to start.

It is time to feel how the world

flows to you through your wounds

inside a heart broken open

and makes it bigger.

So let it in.

And the strategies you used to survive

no longer serve you.

So let them go.

This is how we find our deeper selves.

It is time to quit the old place.

An adventure begins with the knowing

that here is somewhere you can’t stay.

It is time to face the void

and see the space for new creation.

It is time to be brave.

If you’re on someone else’s path

It’s not your own path

If someone else tells the story

It’s not your own story

The room you are afraid to enter

is the source of what you’re looking for.

Where you stumble and fall

is your entry point

Into the bigger life

It is time for you to go on an adventure.

searching for the female mark zuckerberg

I was on a balcony enjoying balmy Hawaiian breezes and nursing a beer when I asked my buddy, one of those tech entrepreneur types who made his many millions in his twenties, “So why aren’t there more women in tech?”

I was thinking of a cover story: Where is the female Mark Zuckerberg?

He hemmed and hawed as graciously as possible – “they definitely have the ability” – and said something to the effect of female brains being “wired differently” – while also acknowledging that a lot of it was “social”.

It might have been an unfair question to spring on him. I ascribe to what I think of as the plane crash theory due to something I read when I was taking flying lessons some years ago. Basically: a small plane crashes not because of one big thing going wrong, but a bunch of small things going wrong that accumulate into total disaster.

I suspect it’s that way with women in tech. Lots of small things going wrong that work to keep them out of tech, or at the margins of tech.

The woman question has irked writer Michael Arrington, who blogged in TechCrunch:

“….the problem is that not enough women want to become entrepreneurs.

….The next time you women want to start pointing the finger at men when discussing the problem of too few women in tech, just stop. Look in the mirror. And realize this – there are women like [Rachel] Sklar who complain about how there are too few women in tech, and then there are women just who go out and start companies… Let’s have less of the former and more of the latter, please.”



Oh, well, that makes it easy then.

(Let’s take a moment here to distinguish between a startup and a small business. A startup is a company with a tech element that is built to scale as quickly and massively as possible. Lots of women start and run small businesses, which remain small businesses, but apparently that doesn’t qualify them as entrepreneurial or interested in entrepreneurship.)

“So why don’t women want to start startups?” asks Jessica Livingston, the only female partner at investment firm Y Combinator, the subject of the book THE LAUNCH PAD: Inside Silicon Valley’s Most Exclusive School for Startups.

Jessica blogged in her post What Stops Female Founders:

I wonder if it’s not that not enough women want to start startups, but that not enough women even consider it as an option. I was one of them. I wish now that I’d started a startup in my twenties instead of wasting those years in a series of boring corporate jobs. But the idea never occurred to me.

2

Maybe women just aren’t interested in tech.

Maybe male and female brains really are wired differently.

But maybe those differences have been exaggerated.

Maybe we overestimate the nature and underestimate the nurture that shapes those brains growing up.

There’s a psychologist named Ellen Langer from Harvard University who might suggest that this is the case. In 1981 she conducted the “Counter Clockwise experiment”, which inspired a BBC documentary. The purpose was

“….to find out what would happen when a group of eight elderly men were given the experience of living 20 years earlier. She and her team created a living environment complete with food, films, photos from the period. The group discussed news, politics and sport in the present tense as if they had travelled back in time.

Astonishingly the group became physically and psychologically younger. Their hearing, grip strength and manual dexterity improved. Memory and IQ scores also improved. Because their minds were actively engaged in living 20 years earlier, their bodies seemed to follow. Ellen believes this is a demonstration of how our bodies don’t let us down as we get older, it’s our minds that accept the labels of ageing. Freeing ourselves from that state of mind can turn back the clock.”

This experiment addresses health, but it’s worth thinking about all the things in our own shared environment that cue us about gender, what it means and how to be a man or a woman, the state of mind that gets created.

“Free your mind,” as the saying goes, “and your ass will follow.”

But first you have to see those self-imposed limitations for what they are in the first place.

3

Paul Graham, the founder and CEO of Y Combinator, points out that founders of tech companies tend to be friends who knew each other in high school and/or college, tend to be technical, and tend to have started computer programming pretty young. (In a culture that praises the rugged self-made individual, we tend to forget – or at least downplay – the fact that even Mark Zuckerberg didn’t found his company alone.) Those sets of friends tend to be same-sex “and if one group is a minority in some population, pairs of them will be a minority squared.”

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a bright young twentysomething female in tech. She identified herself as a geek in junior high and high school who wanted, she said, to be friends with the people who shared her geek tech interests, who were all…guys. They were nerdy and uncool and they recognized her as nerdy and uncool and so “wouldn’t have anything to do with me”. They were only interested in the “hot girls”.

So maybe Arrington is right and there isn’t any sexual discrimination whatsoever in Silicon Valley; if anything, female founders and entrepreneurs have the edge, because they’re rare and exotic as unicorns and so everybody wants to write about them and have them speak at conferences and do business with them. Maybe the discrimination happens earlier, in a number of ways on a number of levels, persuading girls to steer clear of tech or socially isolating the girls in tech so that founding a company just doesn’t strike them, as Jessica Livingston put it, “as an option”.

Earlier tonight I engaged in an increasingly heated conversation with J, a well-known and outspoken tech personality who informed me, in so many words, that the life of a startup founder is difficult and competitive, that the most successful tech entrepreneurs tend to be the biggest assholes, and so women decide quite sensibly that they don’t want anything to do with any of it.”

I couldn’t help saying, “You know, I always love it when men tell women what we want and what we don’t want, when they inform us of the nature of our own experience.”

Kind of like men once telling women that women didn’t have the vote because women didn’t want the vote.

“I may not be a woman, but I have a lot of experience in tech dealing with founders and being a founder. Do you have that kind of experience, Justine?”

“I have a lot of experience,” I retorted, “in being a woman.”

My point isn’t that women should start a startup; I agree that most women aren’t cut out for it. Most men aren’t cut out for it. But if a woman has the drive and ability and nature to do it, she should be presented with the same opportunities as any guy. And if those opportunities get thwarted at different stages along her life path, we need to examine why that is instead of blaming or getting defensive or dismissing the whole mess as immaterial because women have obviously “decided” that they want to hold hands and sing songs about love and peace and fingernail polish and Pinterest instead of descending into the muck and fray of icky macho startup culture.

We create our sense of ourselves through our interaction with other people, through our interaction with the culture at large. A culture that genuinely encourages girls and women to go into tech, to start up companies, would reflect a shared reality in which girls recognize the same range of possibility for themselves as for their male counterparts. That’s why it’s so important.

Because it’s kind of ironic that Arrington told girls and women to “look in the mirror” when it’s the female half of the species traditionally charged with vanity, with looking in the mirror all the time.

There’s that saying: you have to see it to be it.

Maybe it’s not about women failing to “look in the mirror”. It’s about what girls see looking back out at them. Or if they see anything at all.

how to rock being a woman

Barack Obama is TIME’s person of the year. Again. I like Obama, but in my ever-so-humble opinion TIME got this one wrong.

It should have been Malala.

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot three times in the head and neck for speaking out for the rights of females to an education.

As Joanne Bamberger pointed out in a recent op-ed:

“…she has raised awareness about the issue of violence against girls and women all over the world — an epidemic that few seem focused on. At a time when Republicans in Congress are fighting about which women should be protected by the Violence Against Women Act here in the U.S., and in a year where many people have had their awareness raised about what women and girls around the world face, through the book and movie HALF THE SKY, TIME Magazine could have sent a powerful message that it’s time to stop turning away from all the other stories like Malala’s that we never hear about.”

I scanned the TIME masthead to try and guess how many female editors had been involved in this evaluation of Obama as being of greater symbolic importance than a fourteen year old girl shot for challenging a brutally misogynist government. I didn’t see a lot of female names – certainly not enough to equal the tipping point percentage (33) of a group required to influence and shape consensus – but then again, I didn’t expect to.

“We silence ourselves,” said Katherine Lanpher at a seminar I went to last fall called WRITE TO CHANGE THE WORLD. It’s part of something called The Op-Ed Project, which asks

“Who narrates the world?….Most of the voices and ideas that we hear in the world come from an extremely narrow echo chamber – mostly western, white, privileged, and overwhelmingly male.”

A big part of this is because women don’t participate in these conversations with anywhere near the same frequency that men do.

“At the Washington Post, for example, a five-month tracking found that roughly 90% of op-ed submissions come from men – and about 88% of Post bylines are male. If you think about it, women are actually being fairly represented, in relationship to our participation/submission radio.”

The Project aims to change that, by training and encouraging women and other minority voices to get their perspectives out into the world. To take our part in the discourse; to claim, or reclaim, our power.

I keep thinking about the time some months ago when a twentysomething woman asked me to recommend some biographies about cool ladies who, as she put it, “could rock being a woman.”

Now and then I fantasize about writing an ebook called How To Rock Being A Woman. It’s not because I think I know the answers. It’s an interesting question to explore. What I intuited my younger friend was really asking isn’t so much how to be a woman but how to be a powerful woman – how to be a badass – when words like power, badass and femininity don’t match up so well in this culture.

If anything, to be perceived as powerful you have to distance yourself from blatant signs of femininity (wearing pink, getting teary, raving about the cuteness of kittens) which has been synonymous with soft, with weak, with a vague sense of defection or contamination (ask the men around you if they’d rather be reborn as girls and gauge their reactions). I still remember the time a famous actress sitting next to me at a dinner party criticized Hillary Clinton for being “power-hungry”. Implication being, for a woman to even want power is a sign that she shouldn’t be trusted with any.

Power concerns the ability not just to follow your own agenda but to influence others to do the same. Yet any woman who puts her agenda first and foremost has to deal with being called selfish (and maybe crazy), which cuts against the good-girl dictate to be selfless and self-sacrificing.

When femininity has been linked with power, it’s that of the siren, the femme fatale, the bad girl, the golddigger, out to exploit men and bring them to ruin: Eve urging Adam to bite into the apple, Pandora opening the box, Helen launching a thousand warships, the latest hot young thing bringing down another politician. As Jessica Valenti points out in her book THE PURITY MYTH, a woman’s sexuality and morality are conflated; a good girl is by definition sexually modest, since female sexuality itself is suspect and even vile. (“What’s the worst thing you can call a man or a woman?” Jessica points out. “A cunt.”)

The more sexually active a woman is perceived to be – outside the container of a monogamous relationship with a man – the guiltier she is, so much so that some cultures justify stoning her to death. Even the whiff of knowing sexuality makes a woman suspect; just ask any accomplished woman accused of sleeping her way to the top (or, much more likely, the middle) or passing off her husband’s supposed artistic genius as her own work.

Yet we live in a culture that still encourages girls – possibly now more than ever – to compete in the Hotness Olympics, that judges women and compels them to judge themselves by how desirable they are to men. Shutting down that sexuality means setting yourself up to be mocked as unnatural, freakish, castrating, manly. Sure, a woman can run for President, so long as she doesn’t mind being verbally crucified in the process. Not to mention, a powerful woman risks being an unlikeable woman who might do what women grow up being trained in a million small ways not to do: intimidate men. Which means that nobody will ever ask you out and you’ll die alone with your cats. Who probably don’t like you either.

So is it any wonder that our words and actions, as women, reflect ambivalent attitudes about power?

In her book POWERING UP, Anne Doyle talks about how young women trip up their chances for success by dressing too seductively in the workplace:

“[Older professional women] in particular, who struggled so mightily to emerge from the confining box that measured women first on their ‘physical assets’ are watching in stunned amazement at the way young women are boldly playing – some would say misplaying – the sex card. Regardless of how seductively lawyers, FBI agents and surgeons are dressing for work on America’s top-rated TV series, real-life women who aspire to leadership must be highly conscious about not sending mixed signals with their clothing.”

I can’t help wondering if, in the choice we’re given between being powerful (bad, unnatural, manly) and feminine (good, desirable, loved) we take ourselves out of this impossible equation by sabotaging ourselves: by disowning our power, giving it up in a myriad of small ways, convincing ourselves we never wanted it in the first place. We even disown the words power and ambition, regarding them as vaguely distasteful; we question the former and won’t admit to the latter; we turn our ambition inward, to the private worlds of our families and our bodies, trying to be the perfect mother, the perfect beauty. We get ambitious for our kids instead of ourselves.

But if power is also, as feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun once defined it, “the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter”, then we are disowning our place in that discourse. So the conversations going on around us – in the media, the boardrooms and office suites — conversations that define policy, shape our culture, and dictate what we should care about and how we should be (including the control we’re “allowed” over our own reproductive systems) – establishes an agenda that downgrades our concerns to less-than.

So maybe we should redefine what ‘power’ and ‘ambition’ mean to us. Maybe as women we have the right and even the moral obligation to cultivate our gifts and find that place where they best intersect with the world, the times, bringing us out of isolation and into community with each other.

Otherwise known as: a voice. And the ability to amplify it.

In her post about Malala, Joanne Bamberger writes:

“My seventh-grade daughter told me just this week that her class had been discussing Malala’s story and she was shocked that there are girls just like her around the world who fear brutal violence and even death as a result of wanting the education she takes for granted. She asked if we could talk about doing something to help other girls like Malala, including purchasing a bracelet she could wear to show her support in a visible way. Imagine if it had been Malala’s image on TIME Magazine for all our daughters to see and the change they could help make simply because a magazine chose to put her on the cover?”

Recognition is a powerful — and very limited — resource. What you put your attention on, grows.

Imagine if this culture focused on female courage, leadership and intellect as much it does female beauty. Imagine if girls looked at a magazine cover and saw Malala, instead of Paris Hilton or some famous movie actor’s latest Brazilian model girlfriend.

Imagine if hotness was recognized as simply one option among many of how to show up in the world, how to be.

Imagine if a teenage girl didn’t have to be brutally shot in order to “raise awareness” about global violence against girls and women.

Imagine if the gang-rape of a drunken young woman at a party was an unusual event that generated town outrage – directed at the rapists, and not the woman who ‘ruined’ their good names by calling them out for abuse and misogyny (and had the audacity to be partying among them in the first place).

Imagine if we stopped turning away from the stories of violence, if we as a culture reported them and listened and bore honest witness. If we didn’t blame the victim. If we believed her. Imagine if girls and boys were taught that female sexuality is healthy, beautiful, redemptive instead of exploitative, and should always – always – be respected (and not just when withheld). Imagine if a vibrant, brilliant, badass femininity was taken as a given, and no one ever had to refer to herself or another as a ‘strong woman’ ever again.

Imagine if women could predict the future, because women had the power to invent it.

text talk: how to overcome that need for approval ( + find your swagger)

She texted me out of the blue and got straight to the point:

How do I become more assertive among people with very strong personalities? I want to be a leader but I’m such a people pleaser it gets in my way.

It’s really bad, my need for approval from others.

Sometimes I will even say I agree with something when I don’t just so the other person will approve of me. It is weak. I don’t want to be that person.

My colleagues are competitive.

I texted back:

As is the world.

Very true. Not used to it in this part of the profession. I have a colleague who is always trying to one up me. It’s so weird to me.



You probably went from an environment where people are just trying to emotionally survive – and not burn out – to one where they are trying to get ahead.



Would you rather be liked or respected?



Can’t you be both?



Do you respect yourself when you do or say something to get somebody’s approval? How does it feel?



No I don’t.



When you try to get approval from the outside world, so you can put it inside you to fill that void, that hurting place, you give your power away.

That is why it is dangerous.

It’s 630 am here, by the way! I am getting happily caffeinated. The new dog is snoring a bit.



That is true. I need to start thinking about this. The new dog sounds adorable.



Get out of your head and into your gut.

Start doing what your gut tells you to do. That is a powerful nonverbal form of intelligence constantly absorbing and processing information.



It’s hard for

When we try to please others, we disconnect from our gut, that powerful internal guidance system.

And we get lost.

Me to disagree with others

And depression follows right?



Yeah, and other people take advantage of us.

Think of Oprah! She is loved and respected but she is also tough and stands her ground.



Yes!

You don’t have to go to war with people. You have empathy sensitivity and tact. Those are your superpowers. You can learn to disagree in ways that don’t seem so confrontational…you are guiding people in a different direction

But you also need to assert boundaries and stand your ground

Or you will get eaten alive

Don’t think of it as disagreeing…think of it as serving the higher purpose of what you believe in.

What do you believe in? What do you stand for?

Ask yourself, what would Oprah do? See things through your Oprah glasses to shift your perspective a bit. And then follow that.

Thanks for the text talk.

Feeling inspired.

I am looking forward to my 40s.

I am still adjusting to being 40!

It is funny, because as a single person I have more baggage than ever…but I also feel the most powerful, confident, sexiest I’ve ever been. I got my swagger back. Which is good, because I will need it!

But it surprises me a bit

Why does it surprise you?

Because 40 is not supposed to be a swaggering age for women

But I say fuck that. ☺

Yeah. Fuck that. Enjoy and swag!

You sound really good. Healthy, happy.

Yoga and meditation have been great for me.

What should I blog about today?

I love yoga

Blog about what we just texted about. Blog for me.

I found this writer named Stephen Cope, I love. He writes about yoga. Check him out.

Can I use your texts in my post? I will keep u anonymous of course.



Yes! Of course!!

Love you.

Love you back.

why perfection rapes the soul

“Move into yourself. Move into your human unsuccess. Perfection rapes the soul.” — Marion Woodman

“Artists aren’t afraid to be imperfect,” pointed out Jonathan Fields in a recent blog post.

Fields used the example of a student in yoga, a beginner who came to the front of an intermediate class. She tossed down her mat like a gauntlet. She sweated and struggled and contorted herself in full view of everyone. It probably hurt to watch. But she came again the next day. And the next. Because she didn’t care about looking like an idiot, because she knew how to keep showing up, she made rapid progress. Today she’s a yoga teacher.

This example hit home with me because I am getting much more serious about my own yoga practice, and I can tell you that I do not take a spot in the front of the class. I’m in the back, baby. I do take classes that are at my ragged edge, because I like to watch the bendy people. But I struggle with my self-consciousness when my poses aren’t perfect, when I make stupid mistakes, when I drip sweat like a mofo. (That old saying about how men sweat, women perspire? Nuh-uh. I sweat.) The yoga teacher cocks his head at me and asks, “Are you all right?”

I hate that.

After reading Jonathan’s post, I made the connection between my self-conscious struggle in yoga and my equally self-conscious struggle to finish the current draft of my novel. The freaking draft isn’t perfect and oh, woe! So cry for me, Argentina.

Perfection is a bitch. And severely overrated.

Don’t get me wrong. It has its place. Bridge-building. Rocketry. Neurosurgery. Drycleaning.

But we screw ourselves when we hold ourselves to some standard of quote-unquote perfection in what is essentially an ongoing process: like yoga, like art, like life. The way to achieve excellence in anything is to focus on the moment-to-moment experience of it, to learn how to find pleasure in the actual learning of the thing — the slow deep attainment of mastery — of true knowing — instead of trying to rush ahead to the final product because of some image in our heads of what it will look like to others and how sexy it will make us.

We want perfection and we want it now.

We don’t want the tedium of repeating things we’re still too uncomfortable with to actually enjoy yet, and we don’t want to be the sweat-dripping loser at the back of the class who can’t keep her balance in Warrior 3. (Ahem.)

So we get caught up in the story going on inside our heads (I’m a loser, this is stupid, I’m no good at it, what’s for dinner, when is this class going to end, that guy with the tattoo is kind of hot, why is she wearing such an unflattering outfit) that disconnects us from the present moment and all the richness of learning, of direct contact with the world outside our heads, the moment always offers.

And when we disconnect, when we stop paying attention, sooner or later we forget why we’re doing what we’re doing in the first place. We get discouraged. We quit.

Thing is, we learn and grow through the very fact, the awkward reality, of imperfection. With each mistake the brain is forced to stop, go over what went wrong, compare it to the model and make the adjustments. The brain must slow down and pay deep attention: thus, it learns. (This is what ‘deliberate practice’ is all about.)

On an intellectual level we know that, and yet…

Being imperfect – especially in public – makes us so freaking vulnerable.

We feel so threatened and shamed by our own imperfection that we banish it to the shadows. As we grow up, we learn to craft our persona according to outside expectations: we keep the elements of ourselves that bring love, attention and pleasure, while disowning those that cause us pain.

Perfection is about being safe, secure and controlled.

Imperfection is about being messy, flawed, and out of control.

If perfection is what is good, and rewarded, then imperfection is bad and invites only scorn and punishment.

And yet it’s the willingness to be imperfect that contains the treasure chest of our own creativity.

“Out of perfection,” writes Joseph Campbell, “nothing can be made.”

“The earth must be broken

to bring forth life.

If the seed does not die,

there is no plant.

Bread results

from the death of wheat.

Life lives on lives.

Our own life

lives on the acts

of other people.

If you are lifeworthy,

you can take it.”



Perfection is finished, stagnant, and still. It has nowhere to go. Process is motion, learning and life. And every process involves breaking something up: sometimes even taking what seemed perfect and stripping it to find the new, better form. Destruction before creation.

William Chen calls this investment in loss; giving yourself over to the learning process.

Josh Waitzkin, a chess champion and Tai Chi Push Hands champion, writes in his book THE ART OF LEARNING

“Periodically, I have had to take apart my game and go through a rough patch. In all disciplines, there are times when a performer is ready for action, and times when he or she is soft, in flux, broken-down or in a period of growth. Learners in this phase are inevitably vulnerable. It is important to have perspective on this and allow yourself protected periods for growth. [For example a} gifted boxer with a fabulous right and no left will get beat up while he tries to learn the jab…”



It’s a battle, I think, between ego and what I think of as soul. The ego wants to be the best. The soul wants to get better.

Being the best depends on who else is in the room; you can be the very big fish in a very small pond.

Getting better is about humbling yourself, stepping outside your concern for your image and opening yourself up to learn from your superiors…even when you have to actively seek those people out.

The ego only plays when it knows that it can win.

The soul may lose at times, but it plays with heart. And as the heart gets bigger through use and practice, so does the game.

In her book SPIRITUAL DIVORCE, Debbie Ford describes a children’s story about a crab named Grasper, who discovers one day that he has outgrown his shell.

“…Grasper comes face to face with a giant crab….The crab explains to Grasper that the same thing will happen to him if he continues to grow and molt. But Grasper can’t believe this explanation because all the crabs he knows are as small as himself. The giant crab explains to Grasper that a crab grows only as large as the world he lives in, and as big as the heart inside him. He says, ‘You must have a big heart to live in a big world.’”

Your ego has hardened around you. It keeps you in your comfort zone. It keeps you smaller than you want to be. Splitting open that shell — putting ourselves in new situations that make us feel vulnerable — can be painful. But pain, as Debbie Ford points out, “is a spiritual wake-up call showing you that there are oceans you have not yet explored. Step beyond the world you know…Go to places you have deemed off limits.”

I began this post with a quote about artists, and I’ll end with another one by Seth Godin defining who and what an artist is

(I love this quote):

“Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

What makes someone an artist? I don’t think it has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren’t artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.

An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.

That’s why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That’s why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artist, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.

Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artist, even though his readers are businesspeople. He’s an artist because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn’t care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it’s important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.

Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does.

Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.”

Artists aren’t afraid to be imperfect. They’re not afraid to work and live with heart, to be vulnerable, to get open, to fuck up at times, to outgrow shell after shell. The bigger they grow, the more impact they have, and they accept that; they’re willing not to play small. They put themselves out there.

Because there’s a big world out there, and it’s waiting.

You are lifeworthy. You can take it.

why perfection “rapes the soul”

“Move into yourself. Move into your human unsuccess. Perfection rapes the soul.” — Marion Woodman

“Artists aren’t afraid to be imperfect,” pointed out Jonathan Fields in a recent blog post.

Fields used the example of a student in yoga, a beginner who came to the front of an intermediate class. She tossed down her mat like a gauntlet. She sweated and struggled and contorted herself in full view of everyone. It probably hurt to watch. But she came again the next day. And the next. Because she didn’t care about looking like an idiot, because she knew how to keep showing up, she made rapid progress. Today she’s a yoga teacher.

This example hit home with me because I am getting much more serious about my own yoga practice, and I can tell you that I do not take a spot in the front of the class. I’m in the back, baby. I do take classes that are at my ragged edge, because I like to watch the bendy people. But I struggle with my self-consciousness when my poses aren’t perfect, when I make stupid mistakes, when I drip sweat like a mofo. (That old saying about how men sweat, women perspire? Nuh-uh. I sweat.) The yoga teacher cocks his head at me and asks, “Are you all right?”

I hate that.

After reading Jonathan’s post, I made the connection between my self-conscious struggle in yoga and my equally self-conscious struggle to finish the current draft of my novel. The freaking draft isn’t perfect and oh, woe is me! So cry for me, Argentina.

Perfection is a bitch. And severely overrated.

Don’t get me wrong. It has its place. Bridge-building. Rocketry. Neurosurgery. Drycleaning.

But we screw ourselves when we hold ourselves to some stupid standard of perfection in what is essentially an ongoing process: like yoga, like art, like life. The way to achieve excellence in anything is to focus on the moment-to-moment experience of it, to learn how to find pleasure in the actual learning of the thing — the slow deep attainment of mastery — of true knowing — instead of trying to rush ahead to the final product because of some image in our heads of what it will look like to others and how sexy it will make us.

We want perfection and we want it now.

We want the final product and the image and the rewards, and we don’t want the tedium of repeating things we’re still too uncomfortable with to actually enjoy yet, and we don’t want to be the sweat-dripping loser at the back of the class who can’t keep her balance in Warrior 3. (Ahem.)

We get caught up in the story going on inside our heads (I’m a loser, this is stupid, I’m no good at it, what’s for dinner, when is this class going to end, he is cute, why is she wearing such an unflattering outfit) that disconnects us from the present moment and all the richness of learning, of direct contact with the world outside our heads, the moment always offers.

And when we get disconnected, when we stop paying attention, sooner or later we forget why we’re doing what we’re doing in the first place. We get discouraged. We quit.

Thing is, we learn and grow through the very fact, the awkward reality, of imperfection. With each mistake, the brain is forced to stop, go over what went wrong, compare it to the model and make the adjustments. The brain is forced to slow down and pay deep attention: thus, it learns. (This is what deliberate practice is all about.)

On an intellectual level we know that, and yet…

Being imperfect – especially in public – makes us so freaking vulnerable.

We feel so threatened and shamed by our own imperfection that we banish it to the shadows. As we grow up, we learn to craft our persona according to outside expectations: we keep the elements of ourselves that bring love, attention and pleasure, and disown those that cause us pain.

Perfection is about being safe, secure and controlled.

Imperfection is about being messy, flawed, and out of control.

If perfection is what is good, and rewarded, then imperfection is bad and invites only scorn and punishment.

And yet it’s the willingness to be imperfect that contains the treasure chest of our own creativity.

“Out of perfection,” writes Joseph Campbell, “nothing can be made.”

“The earth must be broken

to bring forth life.

If the seed does not die,

there is no plant.

Bread results

from the death of wheat.

Life lives on lives.

Our own life

lives on the acts

of other people.

If you are lifeworthy,

you can take it.”



Perfection is finished, stagnant, and still. It has nowhere to go. Process is motion, learning and life. And every process involves breaking something up: sometimes even taking what seemed perfect and destroying it to find the new, better form.

William Chen calls this investment in loss; giving yourself over to the learning process.

Josh Waitzkin, a chess prodigy, world champion and Tai Chi Push Hands champion, writes in his book THE ART OF LEARNING

“Periodically, I have had to take apart my game and go through a rough patch. In all disciplines, there are times when a performer is ready for action, and times when he or she is soft, in flux, broken-down or in a period of growth. Learners in this phase are inevitably vulnerable. It is important to have perspective on this and allow yourself protected periods for growth. [For example a} gifted boxer with a fabulous right and no left will get beat up while he tries to learn the jab…”



It’s a battle, I think, between ego and what I think of as soul. The ego wants to be the best. The soul wants to get better.

Being the best depends on who else is in the room; you can be the very big fish in a very small pond.

Getting better is about humbling yourself, stepping outside your concern for your image and opening yourself up to learn from your superiors…even when you have to actively seek those people out.

The ego only plays when it knows that it can win.

The soul may lose at times, but it plays with heart. And as the heart gets bigger through use and practice, so does the game.

In her book SPIRITUAL DIVORCE, Debbie Ford describes a children’s story about a crab named Grasper:

“…Grasper comes face to face with a giant crab….The crab explains to Grasper that the same thing will happen to him if he continues to grow and molt. But Grasper can’t believe this explanation because all the crabs he knows are as small as himself. The giant crab explains to Grasper that a crab grows only as large as the world he lives in, and as big as the heart inside him. He says, ‘You must have a big heart to live in a big world.’”

Being our imperfect self, putting ourselves in new situations that make us feel vulnerable, can be painful. But pain, as Debbie Ford points out, “is a spiritual wake-up call showing you that there are oceans you have not yet explored. Step beyond the world you know…Go to places you have deemed off limits.”

I began this post talking about artists and art, and I’ll end with a quote by Seth Godin defining both those terms

(I love this quote):

“Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

What makes someone an artist? I don’t think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren’t artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.

An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.

That’s why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That’s why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.

Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He’s an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn’t care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it’s important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.

Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn’t matter. The intent does.

Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.”

Artists aren’t afraid to be imperfect. They’re not afraid to work and live with heart, to be vulnerable, to get open, to fuck up at times, to outgrow shell after shell. The bigger they grow, the more impact they have, and they’re willing to accept that; they’re willing not to play small. They put themselves out there.

Because there’s a big world out there, and it’s waiting.

You are lifeworthy. You can take it.