Justine Musk's Blog, page 17

the art of world domination. sort of.

Seek first to understand…. — Stephen Covey

1

One of my all-time favorite bloggers is Chris Guillebeau (THE ART OF NON-CONFORMITY). Chris uses the term ‘world domination’ as part of his call to arms, from his intensely popular PDF “A Brief Guide To World Domination” to the annual gathering of bright-eyed world-changers known as the World Domination Summit.

When Chris came through LA on tour for his first book, I hosted an after-booksigning-party for him at my house. I figured anybody willing to make the long and winding trek from Book Soup on Sunset into the hills of Bel Air would be a hardcore fan indeed.

Let’s just say he has a lot of hardcore fans.

“It’s mostly guys,” observed a friend of mine.

I was a bit surprised by this, since Chris’s central message – about living your own life on your own terms – is valid for both genders. My friend, who wasn’t familiar with Chris’s work at the time of the party, pointed out that his use of the term ‘world domination’ might have something to do with it: the language of force and strength, of the conquering and the conquered: the traditional language of men. (And Chris invokes the same kind of military metaphor when he refers to the “small army of remarkable people” who compose his readership.)

This actually hadn’t occurred to me. I liked to throw around the term myself, in the spirit of fun and play. I knew what he meant by it. Chris was hardly urging us to raise arms and go to war against the world (unless it was the world of conformity). Chris wants us to express ourselves honestly and joyfully through how we live and how we work, creating value for others and income for ourselves, forging a life path that activates the soul.

His stuff hammers home the message: There’s another option, no matter what they tell you.

2

Generally to dominate the world — through your art, or your products, or your teaching or your dealmaking or whatever — you need to get really really good at something. And then you need to get even better. Like, really fucking excellent.

When we think about mastery, we think about domination, the whole masters-of-the-universe thing. There’s the Master, and there’s the person or activity or discipline being bent to his or her will. Possibly dressed in chains and black leather.

Anyone who has had the experience of being emotionally or psychologically dominated might react to this concept a bit like I do: a clenching in the chest, maybe even a faint rush of nausea.

But what if this was a deep misunderstanding of what mastery actually is?

Or at the very least, what if there’s another way of talking about it?

3

“Most of the time,” points out Robert Greene in his book MASTERY, “we live in an interior world of dreams, desires and obsessive thoughts.”

But when we are in the flow of exceptional creativity, we “force ourselves to step outside our inner chamber of habitual thoughts and connect to the world, to other people, to reality. Instead of flitting here and there in a state of perpetual distraction, our minds focus and penetrate to the core of something real.”

We think of this sensation as mastery – “the feeling that we have a greater command of reality, other people, and ourselves.”

You’ll notice, though, that this definition of mastery isn’t about dominating – it’s about knowing.

(…Our minds focus and penetrate to the core of something real…)

Stephen Cope writes about this in his book THE GREAT WORK OF YOUR LIFE:

“The capacity to know a certain domain of the world in such depth appears to us ordinary mortals as a kind of supernormal power. It seems like magic. It is not magic…but simply the inevitable result of sustained concentration on an object of intense interest.”

Cope here is talking about deliberate practice – the kind of focused, challenging practice necessary to attain mastery in any field — which he describes as

“a kind of sophisticated attentional training. It bears fruit when attention begins to penetrate the object of its interest in an entirely new way….the master’s perception of the object becomes refined….

“…the master begins to see patterns that others cannot yet see.

“…When a chess master looks at a board during a game, he sees hundreds of potential individual moves (many more than the average player sees) but more important, he sees them in relationship to the outcome of the overall game. This gives the individual moves heightened meaning.”

One of the more famous American chess masters is Josh Waitzkin, the child prodigy who inspired the movie SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISHER (based on a memoir written by his father). In his (awesome) book THE ART OF LEARNING Waitzkin describes a moment of mastery from the inside:

“It is a strange feeling. First you are a person looking at a chessboard. You calculate through the various alternatives, the mind gaining speed as it pores through the complexities, until consciousness of one’s separation from the position ebbs away and what remains is the sensation of being inside the energetic chess flow. Then the mind moves with the speed of an electrical current, complex problems are breezed through with an intuitive clarity, you get deeper and deeper into the soul of the chess position, time falls away, the concept of “I” is gone, all that exists is blissful engagement, pure presence, absolute flow. I was in the zone…”

(He goes on to win the game. And the tournament. And lots of other tournaments.)

Look at the language Josh uses here. He is what we would call crushing it. He is kicking ass. But he doesn’t talk about dominating the game so much as merging with it, getting inside the “energetic chess flow” to see things from a different perspective. This allows him to ‘breeze through’ complex problems and get deeper and deeper into the ‘soul’ of the chess position…

This isn’t domination. This is an act of deep empathy, brought about by a thorough and nuanced understanding – knowing — of the game. Josh can enter the spirit of the game, confront and deal with the bare reality of it, and then guide it to victory on his own terms in his own way.

Brutal competition, yes, but Josh turns it into a profoundly creative and even a spiritual experience. And, oh yeah, stomps the competition.

Which, according to Stephen Cope, is kind of the point. Because the cultivation and mastery of your unique gifts, and their intersection with what Cope refers to as “the call of the times”, is your dharma: your truth, your path, your unique self brought to full expression in the world in a way that somehow changes it, or at least a tiny corner of it.

It’s not about dominating other people, or even yourself.

It’s about expressing who you are, the nature of your soul, through the nature of what you can do. To master your work is to become one with it, so that knowing your discipline becomes a deeper way of knowing yourself.

And knowing yourself becomes a way of knowing the world.

Everything connects.

As his mastery of chess continued to deepen and grow, Josh writes about his “powerful new private relationship to chess. I worked on the game tirelessly, but was now moved less by ambition than by a yearning for self-discovery.”

For the pleasures of mastery, according to Stephen Cope,

“…are not what we usually assume them to be. They do not center around the control of one’s particular domain…They center, rather around knowing. It is the profound pleasure in knowing the world more deeply that creates authentic fulfillment. This is what dharma is all about…[True masters are not motivated] by extrinsic factors like money and fame. There is a much, much deeper pleasure: the pleasure in knowing the world.”

To know the world is to make a profound connection to it – to move beyond our shadowy isolated interior life and become a part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s that very connection that makes up your art: how you do that special voodoo that you do, reaching out through the tools and methods of mastery to express your values and your self. To live your own life on your own terms in a way that serves the larger community.

The dancer becomes the dance.

And inside that dance, a world.

how to dominate the world. sort of.

Seek first to understand…. — Stephen Covey

1

One of my all-time favorite bloggers is Chris Guillebeau (THE ART OF NON-CONFORMITY). Chris uses the term ‘world domination’ as part of his call to arms, from his intensely popular PDF “A Brief Guide To World Domination” to the annual gathering of bright-eyed world-changers known as the World Domination Summit.

When Chris came through LA on tour for his first book, I held an after-booksigning-party for him at my house. I figured anybody willing to make the long and winding trek from Book Soup on Sunset to the hills of Bel Air would be a hardcore fan indeed.

Let’s just say he has a lot of hardcore fans.

“It’s mostly guys,” observed a friend of mine.

I was a bit surprised by this, since Chris’s central message – about living your own life on your own terms – is valid for both genders. My friend, who wasn’t familiar with Chris’s work at the time of the party, pointed out that his use of the term ‘world domination’ might have something to do with it: the language of force and strength, of the conquering and the conquered: the traditional language of men. (And Chris invokes the same kind of military metaphor when he refers to the “small army of remarkable people” who compose his readership.)

This actually hadn’t occurred to me. I liked to throw around the term myself, in the spirit of fun and play. I knew what he meant by it. Chris was hardly urging us to raise arms and go to war against the world (unless it was the world of conformity). Chris wants us to express ourselves honestly and joyfully through how we live and how we work, creating value for others and income for ourselves, forging a life path that activates the soul.

His stuff hammers home the message: There’s another option, no matter what they tell you.

2

Generally to dominate the world — through your art, or your products, or your teaching or your dealmaking or whatever — you need to get really really good at something. And then you need to get even better. Like, really fucking excellent.

When we think about mastery, we think about domination, the whole masters-of-the-universe thing. There’s the Master, and there’s the person or activity or discipline being bent to his or her will. Possibly dressed in chains and black leather.

Anyone who has had the experience of being emotionally or psychologically dominated might react to this concept a bit like I do: a clenching in the chest, maybe even a faint rush of nausea.

But what if this was a deep misunderstanding of what mastery actually is?

Or at the very least, what if there’s another way of talking about it?

3

“Most of the time,” points out Robert Greene in his book MASTERY, “we live in an interior world of dreams, desires and obsessive thoughts.”

But when we are in the flow of exceptional creativity, we “force ourselves to step outside our inner chamber of habitual thoughts and connect to the world, to other people, to reality. Instead of flitting here and there in a state of perpetual distraction, our minds focus and penetrate to the core of something real.”

We think of this sensation as mastery – “the feeling that we have a greater command of reality, other people, and ourselves.”

You’ll notice, though, that this definition of mastery isn’t about dominating – it’s about knowing.

(…Our minds focus and penetrate to the core of something real…)

Stephen Cope writes about this in his book THE GREAT WORK OF YOUR LIFE:

“The capacity to know a certain domain of the world in such depth appears to us ordinary mortals as a kind of supernormal power. It seems like magic. It is not magic…but simply the inevitable result of sustained concentration on an object of intense interest.”

Cope here is talking about deliberate practice – the kind of focused, challenging practice necessary to attain mastery in any field — which he describes as

“a kind of sophisticated attentional training. It bears fruit when attention begins to penetrate the object of its interest in an entirely new way….the master’s perception of the object becomes refined….

“…the master begins to see patterns that others cannot yet see.

“…When a chess master looks at a board during a game, he sees hundreds of potential individual moves (many more than the average player sees) but more important, he sees them in relationship to the outcome of the overall game. This gives the individual moves heightened meaning.”

One of the more famous American chess masters is Josh Waitzkin, the child prodigy who inspired the movie SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISHER (based on a memoir written by his father). In his (awesome) book THE ART OF LEARNING Waitzkin describes a moment of mastery from the inside:

“It is a strange feeling. First you are a person looking at a chessboard. You calculate through the various alternatives, the mind gaining speed as it pores through the complexities, until consciousness of one’s separation from the position ebbs away and what remains is the sensation of being inside the energetic chess flow. Then the mind moves with the speed of an electrical current, complex problems are breezed through with an intuitive clarity, you get deeper and deeper into the soul of the chess position, time falls away, the concept of “I” is gone, all that exists is blissful engagement, pure presence, absolute flow. I was in the zone…”

(He goes on to win the game. And the tournament. And lots of other tournaments.)

Look at the language Josh uses here. He is what we would call crushing it. He is kicking ass. But he doesn’t talk about dominating the game so much as merging with it, getting inside the “energetic chess flow” to see things from a different perspective. This allows him to ‘breeze through’ complex problems and get deeper and deeper into the ‘soul’ of the chess position…

This isn’t domination. This is an act of deep empathy, brought about by a thorough and nuanced understanding – knowing — of the game. Josh can enter the spirit of the game, confront and deal with the bare reality of it, and then guide it to victory on his own terms in his own way.

Brutal competition, yes, but Josh turns it into a profoundly creative and even a spiritual experience. And, oh yeah, stomps the competition.

Which, according to Stephen Cope, is kind of the point. Because the cultivation and mastery of your unique gifts, and their intersection with what Cope refers to as “the call of the times”, is your dharma: your truth, your path, your unique self brought to full expression in the world in a way that somehow changes it, or at least a tiny corner of it.

It’s not about dominating other people, or even yourself.

It’s about expressing who you are, the nature of your soul, through the nature of what you can do. To master your work is to become one with it, so that knowing your discipline becomes a deeper way of knowing yourself.

And knowing yourself becomes a way of knowing the world.

Everything connects.

As his mastery of chess continued to deepen and grow, Josh writes about his “powerful new private relationship to chess. I worked on the game tirelessly, but was now moved less by ambition than by a yearning for self-discovery.”

For the pleasures of mastery, according to Stephen Cope,

“…are not what we usually assume them to be. They do not center around the control of one’s particular domain…They center, rather around knowing. It is the profound pleasure in knowing the world more deeply that creates authentic fulfillment. This is what dharma is all about…[True masters are not motivated] by extrinsic factors like money and fame. There is a much, much deeper pleasure: the pleasure in knowing the world.”

To know the world is to make a profound connection to it – to move beyond our shadowy isolated interior life and become a part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s that very connection that makes up your art: how you do that special voodoo that you do, reaching out through the tools and methods of mastery to express your values and your self. To live your own life on your own terms in a way that serves the larger community.

The dancer becomes the dance.

And inside that dance, a world.

8 compelling reasons to turn down the ego and turn up the soul

Fall down seven times, get up eight. — proverb

1

Traditional story structure has what’s often called an “all is lost” moment when the character appears to lose everything and the goal seems forever out of reach.

It’s basically a symbolic death.

The character has to die to his old way of seeing things. His world view is shattered. He’s fallen and he can’t get up.

He must undergo a fundamental shift in perspective, a change in the paradigm through which he sees the world.

When this happens, it’s a symbolic rebirth.

He becomes the phoenix rising from the ashes, a new version of himself, equipped with the insight and wisdom he was lacking before.

The story gets going again, takes an unexpected twist (otherwise known as Plot Point 2) and barrels down the home stretch toward climax and resolution. The true sign of a character’s growth and maturation is his ability to self-sacrifice. Often he gives up the very thing he thought he wanted in order to get what he needs, which puts him in service to something or someone he loves.

Producer and story consultant Jen Grisanti refers to this as the character’s movement “from ego to spirit”.

“In the beginning, we often want to achieve a goal for ego-related reasons; the attainment signifies validation. After hitting a number of obstacles and escalating obstacles, we are often humbled. When we are humbled, we begin to awaken to how we are approaching the goal. When we move from ego to spirit, we learn that the achievement of the goal isn’t just about us: It can affect the greater good. When we do this, we evolve. Stories illustrate the journey of our evolution.”

2

We all have our ‘all is lost’ moments. Life kicks us in the ass and throws us under the bus. We despair. We can’t see our way forward.

We have a choice: we can remain stagnant like this, stuck in a kind of death-in-life, complaining to others and feeling sorry for ourselves, the taste of ashes thick in our mouth.

Or:

We can die to our old self, and see what rises up through the broken places of our ego.

3

Ego is also known as ‘the false self’. It is everything we think we should be – the image in our heads we are always measuring ourselves against, striving to fulfill, and attempting to present to others. It is the prize we need to win, the love object we need to possess, the status we need to achieve, so that we can feel better about ourselves: we get high off that sense of euphoria before it dissolves like sugar and the race begins all over again.

Soul (what Jen Grisanti refers to as ‘spirit’) is the truth of who we actually are – right here, right now – when we start looking underneath the surface of things, when we gain (are forced to gain) the ability to see things clearly, when we can recognize the moment we are in for the profound event that it is instead of trying — and trying – and trying — to hammer it into the shape that we want (otherwise known as, and say it with me boys and girls, the power of denial).

This is why your latest crisis can be, if you use it right, a blessing in disguise; it’s why gifts and woundedness so often go together (more about that in another post). As shitty as it feels – and man, does it suck to be choking on those ashes – it is also life’s way of forcing us to do what we won’t or can’t do on our own. It cracks apart the false self so we can remember who we really are. It gives us a chance to reclaim the secret parts of our soul. To step out of the various forms of delusion and into the country of the real.

Sound like fun? Not so much. But here are some reasons why that’s a good thing:

a) Ego has you living in the future, or mulling over things from the past. Soul puts you in the here-and-now. Ego often thinks your real life is elsewhere, in the space of time after you’ve lost ten pounds or made ten million dollars or published your novel or escaped your crappy hometown. Soul knows that your real life is now.

So you wake up. You start paying attention. You start getting a sense of what’s truly going on, which allows you to reset and gain insight and come up with a new – and more effective – direction.

b) When you start living in the now, you move from the abstract realm of your head into the reality of your body. Instead of thinking how you should be feeling, or how you assume you’re feeling, you pay attention to the information that your body is actually giving you. Your head tells you that you’re in a great relationship with a man you think you want to marry; your body tells you that something is off, something is wrong, you feel oppressed and deeply uncertain. Feelings are information. When we cut ourselves off from them, we sever ourselves from information that could save us a lot of suffering in the future, or that could steer us toward the very things (and people) we don’t even know that we want.

c) Ego has you trying to live up to the idealized image that you carry around in your head, cobbled together from parents or movies or peer groups that told you how you should be and what defines a successful person, a successful life.

Soul has you learning and being who you actually are – no judgment, no attempts to censor or amputate the parts that don’t fit The Image. Because you’re living in the here-and-now, you start to do things for no other reason than you want to do them. You accept and express your idiosyncrasies, your points of uniqueness. You no longer depend on the approval of others. You discover what your interests are – and pursue them.

d) It becomes a lot easier to say No to people. Part of knowing who you are is knowing who you aren’t; part of knowing what you want is knowing what you don’t want; part of recognizing what works for you is recognizing what no longer does, or never did.

You can say No because you know what to say Yes to, and because you understand that the deepest, most important Yes is the one that you say to yourself – not to others.

e) Because you’re doing what you truly enjoy for no other reason than your enjoyment of it, you become more absorbed in the process and less focused on the end result (the prize, the trophy, the final grade).

Which means your motivation shifts from extrinsic (money, applause, other external rewards) to intrinsic (the satisfaction of the thing itself).

As Daniel Pink stresses in his book DRIVE, people who are intrinsically motivated are more creative, take more chances, stay with the activity longer and explore it more deeply, and are ultimately more successful, than someone merely chasing the carrot at the end of the stick.

f) When you are doing something you are genuinely interested in, fueled by an intrinsic sense of motivation, you are on the road to Mastery. Robert Greene just came out with a great book about this, titled, elegantly enough, MASTERY. Cal Newport also lays out a key strategy to a remarkable life: mastering a skill, or a set of skills, which not only provide you with deep satisfaction but enable you to become so good they can’t ignore you.

g) When you are out in the world as your authentic self, you allow others to connect with the truth of who you are instead of the mask of who you think you should be. Something amazing happens when you get open to the world, and allow yourself to be vulnerable: you give others permission to do and be the same (and inspire them through your example). We all hunger for authenticity and connection, we seek out the people who are ‘real’ – and I’m not talking about the so-called ‘real’ of reality TV (which panders to this hunger without ever satisfying it).

When you know who you are, you also know where you want to go. When you know where you’re going, you can see who else is going in the same direction; you can recognize whom to take with you.

h) When you stop trying to shore up the False Self, and start living from your soul, you manage to shed the scarcity complex. Which means you step off the treadmill of the wanting and craving of stuff. You know you have enough. You know you are enough.

Here’s the thing: our lives are not just made up of one story, but many. We’re destined to have many ‘all is lost’ moments: when what worked for us in the past doesn’t work for us in the present, when what was once an honest expression of soul has distorted and calcified into another false self, when we have lost touch with the real and moved back into delusion, fantasy, projection, wishful thinking.

Just when we start to think we’re the shit, life kicks us back into the ashes.

Which means we have another chance to rise.

9 compelling reasons to turn down the ego and turn up the soul

1

Traditional story structure has what’s often called an “all is lost” moment, about two thirds of the way through, when the character appears to lose everything and the goal seems forever out of reach.

It’s basically a symbolic death.

The character has to die to his old way of seeing things. His world view is shattered. He’s fallen and he can’t get up.

He must undergo a fundamental shift in perspective, a change in the paradigm through which he sees the world.

When this happens, it’s a symbolic rebirth.

He becomes the phoenix rising from the ashes, a new version of himself, equipped with the insight and wisdom he was lacking before.

The story gets going again, takes an unexpected twist (otherwise known as Plot Point 2) and barrels down the home stretch toward climax and home. The true sign of a character’s growth and maturation is his ability to self-sacrifice. Often he gives up the very thing he thought he wanted in order to get what he needed, which puts him in service to something or someone she loves.

Producer and story consultant Jen Grisanti refers to this as the character’s movement “from ego to spirit”.

“In the beginning, we often want to achieve a goal for ego-related reasons; the attainment signifies validation. After hitting a number of obstacles and escalating obstacles, we are often humbled. When we are humbled, we begin to awaken to how we are approaching the goal. When we move from ego to spirit, we learn that the achievement of the goal isn’t just about us: It can affect the greater good. When we do this, we evolve. Stories illustrate the journey of our evolution.”

2

We all have our ‘all is lost’ moments. Life kicks us in the ass and throws us under the bus. We despair. We can’t see our way forward.

We have a choice: we can remain stagnant like this, stuck in a kind of death-in-life, complaining to others and feeling sorry for ourselves, the taste of ashes thick in our mouth.

Or:

We can rise.

We can die to our old self, and see what rises up through the broken places of our ego.

3

Ego is also known as ‘the false self’. It is everything we think we should be – the image in our heads we are always measuring ourselves against, striving to fulfill, and attempting to present to others. It is the prize we need to win, the love object we need to possess, the status we need to achieve, so that we can feel better about ourselves: we can get high off that sense of euphoria before it dissolves like sugar and the race begins all over again.

Soul (what Jen Grisanti refers to as ‘spirit’) is the truth of who we actually are – right here, right now – when we start looking underneath the surface of things, when we gain (are forced to gain) the ability to see things clearly, when we can recognize the moment we are in for the profound event that it is instead of trying — and trying – and trying — to hammer it into the shape that we want (otherwise known as, and say it with me boys and girls, the power of denial).

This is why your latest crisis can be, if you use it right, a blessing in disguise; it’s why gifts and woundedness so often go together (more about that in another post). As shitty as it feels – and man, does it suck to be choking on those ashes – it is also life’s way of forcing us to do what we won’t or can’t do on our own. It cracks apart the false self so we can remember who we really are. It gives us a chance to reclaim the secret parts of our soul. To step out of the various forms of delusion and into the country of the real.

Sound like fun? Not so much. But here are some reasons why that’s a good thing:

1. Ego has you living in the future, or mulling over things from the past. Soul puts you in the here-and-now. Ego often thinks your real life is elsewhere, in the space of time after you’ve lost ten pounds or made ten million dollars or published your novel or escaped your crappy hometown. Soul knows that your real life is now.

So you wake up. You start paying attention. You start getting a sense of what’s truly going on, which allows you to reset and gain insight and come up with a new – and more effective – direction.

2. When you start living in the now, you move from the abstract realm of your head into the reality of your body. Instead of thinking how you should be feeling, or how you assume you’re feeling, you pay attention to the information that your body is actually giving you. Your head tells you that you’re in a great relationship with a man you think you want to marry; your body tells you that something is off, something is wrong, you feel oppressed and deeply uncertain. Feelings are information. When we cut ourselves off from what we’re currently feeling, we sever ourselves from information that could save us a lot of suffering in the future, or that could steer us toward the very things (and people) we don’t even know that we want.

3. Ego has you trying to live up to the idealized image that you carry around in your head, cobbled together from parents or movies or peer groups that told you how you should be and what makes up a successful person, a successful life.

Soul has you learning and being who you actually are – no judgment, no attempts to censor or amputate the parts that don’t fit The Image. Because you’re living in the here-and-now, you start to do things for no other reason than you want to do them. You accept and express your idiosyncrasies, your points of uniqueness. You no longer depend so heavily on the approval of others. You discover what your interests are – and pursue them.

4. It becomes a lot easier to say No to people. Part of knowing who you are is knowing who you aren’t; part of knowing what you want is knowing what you don’t want; part of recognizing what works for you is recognizing what no longer does, or never did.

You can say No because you know what to say Yes to, and because you understand that the deepest, most important Yes is the one that you say to yourself – not to others.

6. Because you’re doing what you truly enjoy for no other reason than your enjoyment of it, you become more absorbed in the process and less focused on the end result (the prize, the trophy, the final grade).

Which means your motivation shifts from extrinsic (money, applause, other external rewards) to intrinsic (the satisfaction of the thing itself).

As Daniel Pink stresses in his book DRIVE, people who are intrinsically motivated are more creative, take more chances, stay with the activity longer and explore it more deeply, and are ultimately more successful, than someone who is chasing the carrot at the end of the stick.

7. When you are doing something you are genuinely interested in, fueled by an intrinsic sense of motivation, you are on the road to Mastery. Robert Greene just came out with a great book about this, titled, elegantly enough, MASTERY. Cal Newport also came out with a book that lays out a key strategy to a remarkable life: mastering a skill, or a set of skills, which not only provides you with deep satisfaction and meaning but makes you so good they can’t ignore you.

8. When you are out in the world as your authentic self, you allow others to connect with the truth of you are instead of the mask of who you think you should be. Something amazing happens when you get open to the world, and allow yourself to be vulnerable: you give others permission to do and be the same (and inspire them through your example). We all hunger for authenticity and connection, we seek out the people who are ‘real’ – and I’m not talking about the so-called ‘real’ of reality TV (which panders to this hunger without ever satisfying it).

When you know who you are, you also know where you want to go. When you know where you’re going, you can see who else is going in the same direction; you can recognize whom to take with you.

9. When you stop trying to shore up the False Self, and start living from your soul, you manage to shed the scarcity complex. Which means you step off the treadmill of the wanting and craving of stuff. You know you have enough. You know you are enough.

Here’s the thing: our lives are not just made up of one story, but many. We’re destined to have many ‘all is lost’ moments: when what worked for us in the past no longer works for us in the present, when what was once an honest expression of soul has distorted and calcified into another false self, when we have lost touch with the real and moveed back into delusion, fantasy, projection, wishful thinking.

Just when we start to think we’re the shit, life kicks us back into the ashes.

Which just means we have another chance to rise.

how to start creating your blog community

1

A friend of mine was asking what she should do with her email list. Since I’m still learning about that myself, I’m not exactly the authority on this topic.

But from the gist of her conversation, and my own experience as a blogger, I could sense one change that she immediately needed to make.

“You have to stop thinking in terms of what you can get from them,” I said, “how you can get them to serve you and your business. You have to think about what you can give them, the value you can create. Think of your email list as another way of helping them get what they want.”

I could practically hear the click of the lightbulb inside her head as she reframed. We started talking about how she could use an email newsletter to help her subscribers in their quest for health and wellness.

2

An important milestone in the evolution of a blogger: when she stops asking How can I get more traffic? and starts asking something like, How can I create the kind of value that will serve the right audience and maybe inspire a community to form around my stuff?



(In his book THE IMPACT EQUATION, Chris Brogan distinguishes between an audience — “Some number of people who have opted in to receiving information from you”– and a community — “those people who work to maintain an ongoing interaction with you”.

He adds, “Never mistake an audience for a community.”)

It’s a simple mindshift, but a big one. As Sarah Robinson puts it in her book FIERCE LOYALTY, it eliminates the idea of “us and them” and “creates a culture of ‘we’.”

When this happens, you stop referring to “my fans” or “my community”, as if you’re a lord and they’re your fiefdom. It becomes our community, and a matter of how you can serve it.

3

This forces you to think about the meaning of what you’re trying to accomplish, to move beyond “buy my stuff” and reach for something higher. You’re all in this together, but what are you in it for?

Sarah Robinson writes:

“I see lots of business try to create a community for this sole purpose: a free marketing department, if you will….I’ve never seen this strategy end well.”

The more successful strategy, she points out, is to create a singular focus for people to rally around your organization or blog.

I like to think of it as the question you put out there for the community to investigate. The quest that you’ve embarked on together. What does it mean to be a ‘good man’ in today’s society? (GOOD MEN PROJECT). How can creative people stop being so flaky and actually get shit done? (99u, although they probably don’t phrase it like that). How can you live life on your own terms, a non-conformist in a conformist world? (THE ART OF NON-CONFORMITY). How can you merge spiritual principles with business principles? (DANIELLE LAPORTE).

Keep in mind, this purpose of yours needs to be authentic. It needs to tap into some deep, driving need of your own; it needs to come from your core.

You don’t just walk your talk, you embody it.

You have to represent.

Or people will sniff you out as a fake and click themselves away.

4

“But you’re still trying to sell something,” a woman pointed out to me in a workshop, “you’re just pretending not to be selling it in order to sell it.”

Which is why you have to go beyond pretend and find the real. One way to do this is to ask yourself why you do what you do in the first place: what compelled you to start up this business, write this novel, paint these paintings. Since the community you want to invoke needs to have some relevance to your work – in order to attract the people who will take an interest in your work – it’s worth the struggle to get clear on the meaning, the themes, behind your work.

After all, it’s your Why that fuels you.

It’s also your Why that connects with people on an emotional level, stirs and inspires them, creates loyalty to your business, your art, your brand. You.

So find your Why.

And then, as Simon Sinek advises, start with Why.

Create a question around your Why that genuinely intrigues you. As you explore the different aspects of it, you put out content that (hopefully) entertains and enlightens your right readers, draws them in, invites them along on the journey with you. You teach to reach, but teaching goes both ways. The community learns from you, and you learn from the community.

The best way to learn something is to teach it. Or as a friend of mine likes to point out, “We teach what we most need to learn.”

So what is it that you want – or need — to learn?

you were born to be a badass

I’m gonna raise, raise hell

There’s a story no one tells

You gotta raise, raise hell

Go on and ring that bell

— Brandi Carlile

1

You.

You were born to be a badass.

It is your right as a man.

It is your right as a woman.

You were born to raise your own brand of hell, to be who you are and say what you need to say.

You were born to pursue greatness, to unlock the code of your soul and discover your life’s work.

2

In his new book MASTERY, Robert Greene talks about intensity of attention and how it allowed our ancestors to survive and thrive on the savannahs.

“The longer and harder they looked, the more they could distinguish between an opportunity and a danger.”

Our visual system is built for depth of focus. By looking long and hard enough, by refusing all distractions, our ancestors could detach themselves from their immediate surroundings, notice patterns, generalize, and think ahead.

They could access reality in a way that animals can’t.

They could understand it, come to know it – and in this way, master it.

They became better hunters. They built better tools. The body might decay, but the mind could continue to learn and adapt and pass on that knowledge to others.

3

Discovering your life’s work is about the depth of focus, the process of mastery that can only happen over time: through apprenticeship and experimentation, trial and error. Your life’s work is you bringing all your skill and concentration to bear in the world: you, connecting and having impact.

But the first step, as Greene points out, is inward: a turning away from the voices that urge conformity, toward the truth of who you are at core.

And by truth, I mean your own genetic uniqueness.

You have talents for some things and not for others; you are pulled toward certain activities and repelled by others.

Greene refers to this as an “inner force” that “seeks to guide you toward…what you are meant to accomplish in the time that you have to live.”

Napoleon called it his “star” that guided him to make the right move.

Socrates called it a daemon, as did Goethe: a kind of spirit that dwells within and compels you toward your destiny.

You can think of it as your own personal unique value proposition, but instead of a statement on paper or catchy tagline on your blog it’s a living, guiding thing that speaks from your bones. It may not know exactly what you should be doing – since that depends on information yet to reveal itself, on skills yet to be acquired – but it knows the direction to head in, step by baby step.

In childhood this force was more freely expressed. It ran deep and primal. As you grow up, it gets lost in the clamor of voices and expectations coming at you from the outside world: those voices you learn to internalize as your own, about what you can and can’t, should and shouldn’t do.

The first thing you need to do is to clear away those damn voices.

To search the past for signs of that inner voice or force or daimon or muse – however you want to think about it – expressing itself.

Those times you felt most absorbed and alive. Those activities you gravitated to as a child.

If you were very lucky, there was an adult in your life who recognized what made your eyes light up, and lose all sense of time. That adult saw those first hints of talent as the early signs of your life’s work, and encouraged you to pursue them.

More likely, though, you will have to close your eyes and time-travel back, to visit the child that you were as the adult you are now. And to identify — on your own — those first manifestations of a calling.

4

The word ‘vocation’ descends from the Latin meaning to call or be called. In those early years of Christianity, people were ‘called’ – by God, no less — to a life in the church: this was their vocation. Now the word has been secularized, to mean any type of work to which a person seems naturally suited.

Greene thinks:

“It is time, however, that we return to the original meaning of the word, for it comes much closer to the idea of a Life’s Task and mastery.

“The voice in this case that is calling you is not necessarily coming from God, but from deep within. It emanates from your individuality. It tells you which activities suit your character. And at a certain point, it calls you to a particular form of work or career. Your work then is something connected deeply to who you are, not a separate compartment in your life.”

Finding your life’s work is your big creative quest. It isn’t selfish or antisocial. It is, as Greene observes, “connected to something much larger than our individual lives. Our evolution as a species has depended on the creation of a tremendous diversity of skills and ways of thinking.”

Without that diversity, we die.

After all, what good is a mediocre career as a lawyer if what you were really meant to do was find a cure for cancer? Or write the novel that would inspire someone else to find a cure for cancer?

You were born to be a badass.

The world requires it. Needs it.

Is waiting.

Oprah + the nature of influence

I’m fascinated by Oprah. I was also fascinated by the response to her book club – more specifically, the snark, which culminated in Jonathan Franzen’s infamous conflicted reaction to his novel THE CORRECTIONS being an Oprah pick, for fear that the fabled O sticker slapped on the cover would turn off serious readers.

Because the implicit understanding was that Oprah’s audience translated to worshipful Midwestern housewives who would drink poison if she told them to, follow her off a cliff.

Yet when you read the Amazon reviews of Oprah’s book club picks, you couldn’t help but notice a lot of dissent. Members of her audience might buy a book based on her recommendation, but that didn’t mean they would like it, or agree with the ideas expressed within it, or approve of the characters. Even within Oprah’s magical aura it was clear that there was independent thinking going on.

I think that was my first inkling of the nature of influence. When I started this blog, there was a lot of online conversation about influence, a lot of talk about why writers and other creatives needed to build platforms so they could amass influence – so they could wave a wand, say “Buy my book!” and people would. Because they said so.

After all, it’s not about the number of fans and followers you have, it’s about your ability to get some or all or any of them to take a specific action (like buy your book) when you ask. And if you were really smart and savvy and hardworking and lucky, you could become an Influencer, one of those special few who control the forces of the universe.

What I’ve learned since is that people with genuine influence don’t have some special brand of mind control over their victi – their audience. What they have – what they have earned over time – is the trust of a community that has formed around their content because it is in sync with whatever vision the content happens to express. The influencer didn’t make people like it – persuade or convince or manipulate them – so much as give voice to something that already existed within them, that resonated, that called them home.

What’s more, the influencer somehow embodies these ideas, is a walking talking representation of them, and so the members of the community see themselves reflected back in a way that inspires. Not just who they are, but who they want to be.

People didn’t watch Oprah’s show because it left them feeling bad about themselves — or even satisfied yet vaguely ill, like after a big meal at McDonald’s. The show gave them hope that they could indeed live their best life, and they trusted that Oprah knew what she was talking about because she was one of them, a woman with her own struggles, who had a history of staring down adversity — and winning.

And Oprah understood. She ‘got’ them, which means she knew how to serve them. She gave them content that they could connect with – not all of them all of the time, but enough. What some people liked to scoff at as brainwashing or mind control — or the bovine stupidity of housewives, and the misogyny behind that is worth a post of its own – turns out to be a deep, intelligent empathy, and an intuitive feel for what her audience would respond to, based on years and years of feedback and interaction.

My sense of influence now is that of a conduit — channeling the right content for the right community – so maybe influence, in the end, is a fancy way of talking about curation, whether it’s art or stories or information about a specific subject or ideas. It’s about tapping something in your own personal core – something authentic – that connects to a larger whole through the way you express, amplify it. It’s about uncovering an emotional truth, and holding it up for others to see, and doing it again and again. It’s about a private, unspoken contract you have with each member of the community about what you represent and how you serve.

Change those ideas – like Meg Ryan morphing from cute fusspot girl-next-door to brooding dramatic actress – or violate them in any way, and your community just might disappear.

Influence is a two-way street. Just when you think you’re creating a community, the community is creating you.

on Oprah and her (apparently) supernatural powers of influence

I’m fascinated by Oprah. I was also fascinated by the response to her book club – more specifically, the snark, which culminated in Jonathan Franzen’s infamous withdrawal of his novel THE CORRECTIONS for fear that the fabled O sticker slapped on the cover would turn off serious readers, male readers.

Because the implicit understanding was that Oprah’s audience translated to worshipful Midwestern housewives who would drink poison if she told them to, follow her off a cliff.

Yet when you read the Amazon reviews of Oprah’s book club picks, you couldn’t help but notice a lot of dissent. Members of her audience might buy a book based on her recommendation, but that didn’t mean they would like it, or agree with the ideas expressed within it, or approve of the characters.

When Oprah’s name came up in conversation, you could usually count on someone (who never watched the show, except, possibly, in secret) to accuse her audience of being a bunch of lemmings, but even within Oprah’s magical aura it was clear that there was independent thinking going on.

I think that was my first inkling of the nature of influence. When I started this blog, there was a lot of online conversation about influence, a lot of talk about why writers and other creatives needed to build platforms so they could amass influence – so they could wave a wand, say “Buy my book!” and people would. Because they said so.

After all, it’s not about the number of fans and followers you have, it’s about your ability to get some or all or any of them to take a specific action (like buy your book) when you ask. And if you were really smart and savvy and hardworking and lucky, you could become an Influencer, one of those special few who control the forces of the universe.

What I’ve learned since is that people with genuine influence don’t have some special brand of mind control over their victi – their audience. What they have – what they have earned over time – is the trust of a community that has formed around their content because it is in sync with whatever vision the content happens to express. The influencer didn’t make people like it – persuade or convince or manipulate them – so much as give voice to something that already existed within them, that resonated, that called them home.

What’s more, the influencer somehow embodies these ideas, is a walking talking representation of them, and so the members of the community see themselves reflected back in a way that inspires. Not just who they are, but who they want to be.

People didn’t watch Oprah’s show because it left them feeling bad about themselves — or even satisfied yet vaguely ill, like after a big meal at McDonald’s. The show gave them hope that they could indeed live their best life, and they trusted that Oprah knew what she was talking about because she was one of them, a woman with her own struggles, who had a history of staring down adversity — and winning.

And Oprah understood. She ‘got’ them, which means she knew how to serve them. She gave them content that they could connect with – not all of them all of the time, but enough. What some people liked to scoff at as brainwashing or mind control — or the bovine stupidity of housewives, and the misogyny behind that is worth a post of its own – turns out to be a deep, intelligent empathy, and an intuitive feel for what her audience would respond to, based on years and years of feedback and interaction.

My sense of influence now is that of a conduit — channeling the right content for the right community – so maybe influence, in the end, is a fancy way of talking about curation, whether it’s art or stories or information about a specific subject or ideas. It’s about tapping something in your own personal core – something authentic – that connects to a larger whole through the way you express, amplify it. It’s about uncovering an emotional truth, and holding it up for others to see, and doing it again and again. It’s about a private, unspoken contract you have with each member of the community about what you represent and how you serve.

Change those ideas – like Meg Ryan morphing from cute fusspot girl-next-door to brooding dramatic actress – or violate them in any way, and your community just might disappear.

Influence is a two-way street. Just when you think you’re creating a community, the community is creating you.

the perils of pink

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass. — Maya Angelou

1

I bought a girl pen.

I was curious. I was on a pen-buying binge, on Amazon, when I came across this purple thing with Swarovski crystals that purported to be just for me, because I’m a wo-wo-woman, which I guess means that all the other pens, including the pens I’ve been using all this time, are for men. Good to know.

The pen arrived two days later. I had forgotten I’d ordered it – I forget, it’s what I do — so my first thought upon opening it: What the hell is this?

My second thought: If you saw someone using a pen like this – whipping it out, say, at a boardroom meeting, or a book signing, or a conference – could you take her seriously? Perhaps she keeps it by her Barbies, her unicorn posters, her pastel pink notebooks decorated with fairy stickers.

It’s a girly pen. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with girly – except I happen to be a 40 year old woman who would appreciate some other options. The pen’s price tag (34.00) and the description (“The feminine slender body is filled with 160 sparkling crystals, creating magnificent light reflections as you write. It is delivered in a stylish velvet pouch…”) would seem to indicate that the pen is not being marketed to my (non-existent) teenage daughter, but to me.

Someone somewhere thought that this pen would resonate with my sense of who I am as a female.

More than that. Marketers don’t try to appeal to who you are, but who you want to be (or who they think you want to be). The product is a promise: by purchasing it, you close the gap between the real and the ideal, the norm and the aspiration.

This pen strikes me as an attempt to take ‘girly’ and upgrade it.

Because apparently that’s what a woman is: a girl with more money to spend on a more sophisticated version of a glitter pen.

Because the symbols we seem to have for femininity – butterflies, fairies, princesses, unicorns, glitter, pink – those symbols for marketers to try and use in their attempt to turn unisex products into something just ‘for her’ — isn’t for femininity so much as for girlhood.

What kind of symbols does this culture have to suggest an adult femininity? A womanliness?

An apron? A Porsche? A bikini? A briefcase? Animal prints? A baby stroller?

A stripper pole?

2

And many of us never really identified with girl culture in the first place.

I never did. I grew up thinking I had a strong masculine streak – even though I wasn’t a tomboy, even though I was very comfortable in my girlskin, even though, as I got older, I developed a rich, deep, sensual sense of being female that happened to be steeped in books instead of Barbies, black instead of pink, jeans and boots and leather jackets instead of dresses, writing fiction instead of socializing, ambition instead of caretaking, wanderlust instead of baby hunger (the baby hunger came later), hard dance music instead of sensitive singer-songwriters, thrillers instead of chick flicks.

I learned to take a certain pride in this. I learned to distance myself from anything that smacked of the girly-girl, to speak mockingly of mani-pedis and gossip magazines and Lifetime movies and butterfly tattoos and, yes, pink, because these things were weak. To be disdainful of them was to be not weak.

Only when I woke up to what I was doing – buying into a misogynistic contempt for the feminine that remains at the heart of our culture – did I start to look at things differently.

There are so many different ways to express the feminine; the struggle is to not get locked into the limited range of options with which we’re presented. There are so many different shades of pink – including hot pink, which I like to think of as a bold, in-your-face, rebel pink — the kind of pink that works for me.

There are so many different shades of meaning. When my website guy presented me with a butterfly (….a butterfly!…) design as my logo, I tamped down my initial resistance and went online to research the symbolism.

Instead of being fluffy, flighty, weak, the butterfly turns out to represent profound changes of the soul. Transformation, metamorphosis, resurrection. A butterfly is fragile yet fierce – Monarchs migrate thousands of miles through all kinds of weather, including ferocious electrical storms, every year. I also started noticing how freaking beautiful they are, how fascinating in their variations. I went from scorning butterfly tattoos to thinking about getting one of my own, tribal and edgy.

And I realized that by turning certain symbols into symbols of girlhood, these butterflies and fairies and unicorns, we’ve drained them of their original mythological power, we’ve made them cute and cuddly, as harmless (and about as interesting) as a watery pastel. We’ve turned them into things you can’t take seriously, because we have a history of refusing to take girls and women seriously. Less than a hundred years ago, women were taken so unseriously that they were not allowed – allowed – to vote. Femininity was regarded as inherently childish.

But beneath that flighty, fluffy, pastel-pink version of ‘femininity’, there’s something much deeper, richer, complex, bold, fierce. I’ll take my femininity from the goddess Athena, who stood for justice and wisdom and achievement. Or from Persephone, who overcame the trauma of rape to become the freaking Queen of the Underworld and a guide to lost souls. Or – skipping over to another culture – from Kali, who represents life and death, truth and transcendence, an ability to cut through the bull.

Here’s a little bit about Kali:

“Kali’s fierce form is strewed with awesome symbols. Her black complexion symbolizes her all-embracing and transcendental nature. Says the Mahanirvana Tantra: “Just as all colors disappear in black, so all names and forms disappear in her”. Her nudity is primeval, fundamental, and transparent like Nature — the earth, sea, and sky. Kali is free from the illusory covering, for she is beyond the all maya or “false consciousness.” Kali’s garland of fifty human heads that stands for the fifty letters in the Sanskrit alphabet, symbolizes infinite knowledge.

Her girdle of severed human hands signifies work and liberation from the cycle of karma. Her white teeth show her inner purity, and her red lolling tongue indicates her omnivorous nature — “her indiscriminate enjoyment of all the world’s ‘flavors’.” Her sword is the destroyer of false consciousness and the eight bonds that bind us.

Her three eyes represent past, present, and future, — the three modes of time — an attribute that lies in the very name Kali (‘Kala’ in Sanskrit means time)….

Kali’s proximity to cremation grounds where the five elements or “Pancha Mahabhuta” come together, and all worldly attachments are absolved, again point to the cycle of birth and death. The reclined Shiva lying prostrate under the feet of Kali suggests that without the power of Kali (Shakti), Shiva is inert.”

Destroyer of false consciousness.

Without the power of Kali/Shakti, the great god Shiva is inert.

Uh-huh.

Slap some pink on that.

3

This reminds me of something my therapist once told me, which I didn’t really understand at the time. I was about to turn 40. She told me that I was someone who was going to “be a woman”; she meant this as a high compliment.

“In this culture,” she said, “every female gets to be a girl. But not every girl gets to become a woman.”

This might be because, according to the bulk of pop culture, most of the female species seems to disappear around this time, whisked off to the faraway land of wrinkle cream and mom jeans. When it comes to a woman’s aesthetic sensibility, a woman’s sense of who she can be or still wants to become (other than a good wife and mother) the culture shows a distinct lack of imagination.

So the powers-that-be take a pen, or a car, and turn it pink, and offer it to us as some essential sign of who we are. That’s how they see us, regardless of how we see ourselves.

My own brand of femininity includes pink – hot pink – but also black and midnight blue and rock’n'roll purple. It includes tigers and disco balls and snake rings (which I collect), tribal butterfly tattoos, empathy and wisdom and the power to inspire. It includes lots and lots of books. It recognizes the strength and stamina inherent in all women, the ability to, as Liz Taylor once put it, “pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.”

So I would say to those marketers who think they know me, who think I want to spend thirty five dollars for a glitter pen with a “feminine, slender body”:

You know who I want to be? A fucking badass. A very…womanly…badass.

Market to that.

the perils of pink (or: “i am woman, i am badass, hear me roar”)

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass. — Maya Angelou

1

I bought a girl pen.

I was curious. I was on a pen-buying binge, on Amazon, when I came across this purple thing with Swarovski crystals that purported to be just for me, because I’m a wo-wo-woman, which I guess means that all the other pens, including the pens I’ve been using all this time, are for men. Good to know.

The pen arrived two days later. I had forgotten I’d ordered it – I forget, it’s what I do — so my first thought upon opening it: What the hell is this?

My second thought: If you saw someone using a pen like this – whipping it out, say, at a boardroom meeting, or a book signing, or a conference – how could you take her seriously? Perhaps she keeps it by her Barbies, her unicorn posters, her pastel pink notebooks decorated with fairy stickers.

It’s a girly pen. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with girly – except I happen to be a 40 year old woman who would appreciate some other options. The pen’s price tag (34.00) and the description (“The feminine slender body is filled with 160 sparkling crystals, creating magnificent light reflections as you write. It is delivered in a stylish velvet pouch…”) would seem to indicate that the pen is not being marketed to my (non-existent) teenage daughter, but to me.

And as far as girl pens go, there doesn’t appear to be a range of alternatives.

Someone somewhere thought that this pen would resonate with my sense of who I am as a female.

More than that. Marketers don’t try to appeal to who you are, but who you want to be (or who they think you want to be). The product is a promise: by purchasing it, you close the gap between the real and the ideal, the norm and the aspiration.

(…feminine slender body….creating magnificent light reflections…a stylish velvet pouch….)

This pen strikes me as an attempt to take ‘girly’ and upgrade it.

Because apparently that’s what a woman is: a girl with more money to spend on a more sophisticated version of a glitter pen.

Because the symbols we seem to have for femininity – butterflies, fairies, princesses, unicorns, glitter, pink – those symbols for marketers to try and use in their attempt to turn unisex products into something just ‘for her’ — isn’t for femininity so much as for girlhood.

What kind of symbols does this culture have to suggest an adult femininity? A womanliness?

An apron? A Porsche? A bikini? A briefcase? Animal prints? A baby stroller?

A stripper pole?

2

And many of us never really identified with girl culture in the first place.

I never did. I grew up thinking I had a strong masculine streak – even though I wasn’t a tomboy, even though I was very comfortable in my girlskin, even though, as I got older, I developed a rich, deep, sensual sense of being female that happened to be steeped in books instead of Barbies, black instead of pink, jeans and boots and leather jackets instead of dresses, writing fiction instead of socializing, ambition instead of caretaking, wanderlust instead of baby hunger (the baby hunger came later), hard dance music instead of sensitive singer-songwriters, thrillers instead of chick flicks.

I learned to take a certain pride in this. I learned to distance myself from anything that smacked of the girly-girl, to speak mockingly of mani-pedis and gossip magazines and Lifetime movies and butterfly tattoos and, yes, pink, because these things were weak. To be disdainful of them was to be not weak.

Only when I woke up to what I was doing – buying into a misogynistic contempt for the feminine that remains at the heart of our culture – did I start to look at things differently.

There are so many different ways to express the feminine; the struggle is to not get locked into the limited range of options with which we’re presented. There are so many different shades of pink – including hot pink, which I like to think of as a bold, in-your-face, rebel pink — the kind of pink that works for me.

There are so many different shades of meaning. When my website guy presented me with a butterfly (….a butterfly!…) design as my logo, I tamped down my initial resistance and went online to research the symbolism.

Instead of being fluffy, flighty, weak, the butterfly turns out to represent profound changes of the soul. Transformation, metamorphosis, resurrection. A butterfly is fragile yet fierce – Monarchs migrate thousands of miles through all kinds of weather, including ferocious electrical storms, every year. I also started noticing how freaking beautiful they are, how fascinating in their variations. I went from scorning butterfly tattoos to thinking about getting one of my own, tribal and edgy.

And I realized that by turning certain symbols into symbols of girlhood, these butterflies and fairies and unicorns, we’ve drained them of their original mythological power, we’ve made them cute and cuddly, as harmless (and about as interesting) as a watery pastel. We’ve turned them into things you can’t take seriously, because we have a history of refusing to take girls and women seriously. Less than a hundred years ago, women were taken so unseriously that they were not allowed – allowed – to vote. Femininity was regarded as inherently childish.

But beneath that flighty, fluffy, pastel-pink version of ‘femininity’, there’s something much deeper, richer, complex, bold, fierce. I’ll take my shades of meaning from the femininity of the goddess Athena, who stood for justice and wisdom and achievement. Or from Persephone, who overcame the trauma of rape to become the freaking Queen of the Underworld and a guide of lost souls. Or – skipping over to another culture – from Kali, who represents life and death, truth and transcendence, an ability to cut through the bull.

Here’s a little bit about Kali:

“Kali’s fierce form is strewed with awesome symbols. Her black complexion symbolizes her all-embracing and transcendental nature. Says the Mahanirvana Tantra: “Just as all colors disappear in black, so all names and forms disappear in her”. Her nudity is primeval, fundamental, and transparent like Nature — the earth, sea, and sky. Kali is free from the illusory covering, for she is beyond the all maya or “false consciousness.” Kali’s garland of fifty human heads that stands for the fifty letters in the Sanskrit alphabet, symbolizes infinite knowledge.

Her girdle of severed human hands signifies work and liberation from the cycle of karma. Her white teeth show her inner purity, and her red lolling tongue indicates her omnivorous nature — “her indiscriminate enjoyment of all the world’s ‘flavors’.” Her sword is the destroyer of false consciousness and the eight bonds that bind us.

Her three eyes represent past, present, and future, — the three modes of time — an attribute that lies in the very name Kali (‘Kala’ in Sanskrit means time)….

Kali’s proximity to cremation grounds where the five elements or “Pancha Mahabhuta” come together, and all worldly attachments are absolved, again point to the cycle of birth and death. The reclined Shiva lying prostrate under the feet of Kali suggests that without the power of Kali (Shakti), Shiva is inert.”

Destroyer of false consciousness.

Without the power of Kali/Shakti, the great god Shiva is inert.

Uh-huh.

Slap some pink on that.

3

This reminds me of something my therapist once told me, which I didn’t really understand at the time. I was about to turn 40. She told me that I was someone who was going to “be a woman”; she meant this as a high compliment.

“In this culture,” she said, “every female gets to be a girl. But not every girl gets to become a woman.”

This might be because, according to the bulk of pop culture, most of the female species seems to disappear around this time, whisked off to the faraway land of wrinkle cream and mom jeans. When it comes to a woman’s aesthetic sensibility, a woman’s sense of who she can be or still wants to become (other than a good wife and mother) the culture shows a distinct lack of imagination.

So the powers-that-be take a pen, or a car, and turn it pink, and offer it to us as some essential sign of who we are. That’s how they see us, regardless of how we see ourselves.

My own brand of femininity includes pink – hot pink – but also black and midnight blue and rock’n'roll purple. It includes tigers and disco balls and snake rings (which I collect), tribal butterfly tattoos, empathy and wisdom and the power to inspire. It includes lots and lots of books. It recognizes the strength and stamina inherent in all women, the ability to, as Liz Taylor once put it, “pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.”

So I would say to those marketers who think they know me, who think I want to spend thirty five dollars for a glitter pen with a “feminine, slender body”:

You know who I want to be? A fucking badass. A very…womanly…badass.

Market to that.