Justine Musk's Blog, page 22

do you know the “one sentence” of your life?

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Daniel Pink, in his bestseller DRIVE, tells a story about Clare Booth Luce, who was a writer and a badass. In 1962 she had a meeting with JFK. At the time, JFK was doing a thousand things at home and abroad, and Luce wondered about the consequences of such scattered focus.

She told him: “A great man is one sentence.”

Like President Lincoln: “He preserved the union and freed the slaves.”

Like FDR: “He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.”

So the question she posed to JFK was this: What was to be his sentence?

On his blog, Pink put the question to his readers:

“The exercise asks you to distill your life — what it’s about, why you’re here — into a single sentence. It’s tough, but it’s powerful.”

It’s not a slogan or a mission statement. It’s about defining the ideas that you stand for and the impact that you have. It’s about what you want to leave behind in your wake. Your legacy.

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The exercise demands clarity and simplicity. It is not dissimilar to a writer’s attempt to distill her novel into one or two crystalline sentences that explain what it’s about. Many writers will complain about any request or demand to do this. They’ll say that their work is too nuanced, too complex, too multi-dimensional; that that kind of exercise is best left to those stupid high-concept Hollywood movie pitches.

But the truth is that it’s just hard.

Simplicity takes work. It takes focus and commitment. It takes knowledge, and something that goes beyond knowledge — insight — to bring different ideas together and transfuse them with new understanding. It takes skill, and a measure of soul, to turn three lines of information into a haiku.

“You have to work hard to get your thinking clean,” Steve Jobs has been quoted, “to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

“Simplicity,” says John Maeda, “is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.”

What is to be your meaning?

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In order to know what you’re about, you also have to know who you are.

That’s the tricky part.

It helps to know what you won’t give up. For anyone. When you find that point, that limit, that boundary, that marks off some essence of who you are. You know when someone has crossed that boundary because of how it makes you feel: violated, invaded, hurt, angry, frustrated, perhaps even endangered, like a portion of your soul is at stake. That’s when you have to get very clear and simple and tell this person, whom you might love and who loves you: This is not acceptable to me. You cannot be in a relationship with me if you continue to [fill in the blank].

An extreme case would be an emotionally or physically abusive relationship with a toxic personality. What many people don’t understand, and what some people understand all too well, is that toxic people are called that for a reason. It is not a metaphor. It is a literal term. Prolonged, intimate exposure to these people will sicken you and break you down.

As Cheryl Strayed puts it in her wonderful book TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS:

“You mustn’t live with people who wish to annihilate you. Even if you love them. Even if they are your mom and dad.”

(You wouldn’t hang around a nuclear reactor, soaking up the toxins while hoping that things might get better. You would get the hell away.)

Which makes me think that before we can unearth our true One Sentence, there’s another sentence that we must learn to rise up and say.

Cheryl Strayed puts it thusly:

This is who I am even if you’ll crucify me for it.

When you do this, you choose to speak the truth about who you are instead of living inside some small box of a lie. A lie can seem safe, but it is not. It will violate and annihilate you. It will cut you off from other people who could love or help or save you – except that box makes it impossible for them to even see you.

Some of us learn this harder than others.

The lucky ones – and I suspect they are few — never have to learn it at all.

To speak that sentence is to start living, as they say, your truth. Which is when a one-sentence life becomes possible. It won’t be easy – it’s not supposed to be – but it could be great, epic, elegant like a haiku.

Do you have your one sentence? Share it below.

the art of being weird enough (+ the success secret of the “rule of thirds”)

1

I was in France for a wedding. A famous American actor served as best man.

“I’m very honored to be here today,” he said in his speech, “even though we all know it’s because they couldn’t get Leonardo di Caprio.”

A friend and I started talking about a movie that failed to shoot the best man’s career as skyhigh as you might expect, given the talent, success and firepower involved. It was the actor in a supporting role who walked off not only with the film, but two ensuing sequels (not to mention the following trilogy, which was written around his character).

It wasn’t what the movie executives expected. The supporting actor was many years older than the best man, well-respected but yet to connect with mainstream success. Not only that, he came up with such an extreme (or what the executives thought of as extreme) interpretation of his character that the execs saw the early reels, went Huh? and wanted to fire him.

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Later, I had a conversation with a friend of mine from LA who revealed to me the woeful fate of her startup. It was an online company that depended upon my friend’s very particular aesthetic – which was the whole point, and also what differentiated her company from the other, bigger, more established players in that space. It got off to a great start, was featured in Oprah, and then my friend closed a big round of financing that resulted in a new board and a new CEO.

Who proceeded to evict my friend from her company, scrap her aesthetic, and drive the company into the ground.

It was, you see, his attempt to go mainstream.

To appeal to the masses.

So it struck me that the movie executives and the CEO made the same miscalculation (although the former happily lacked the power to shoot themselves in their collective foot). They weren’t weird enough, and they weren’t willing to let others be weird enough, to flourish. They backed off from an interesting and badass point of view that would attract some but alienate others (or at least make them go, “Huh?”).

“He’s a matinee idol,” someone once said of the actor who served as best man at my friend’s wedding, and maybe that’s hindered his career as much as it’s helped him. And not only him: I can think of a handful of young actors and actresses who were tagged as the new ‘it’ in national magazines, who were starring in big films, gorgeous and charismatic and expected to be the next Julia Roberts or Brad Pitt or Leonardo di Caprio.

Only it just didn’t happen.

(“Has there been a major movie star since Leonardo?” I asked my friend, and neither of us could think of anybody.)

Can you appeal to a mainstream audience when a mainstream audience no longer exists, at least in the old-school sense? Once upon a time, a matinee idol didn’t have anybody else to compete with (except other matinee idols). Once upon a time, there were so few alternative options to the mainstream that they could be grouped together as, you know, ‘alternative’.

What started in the center spread out to the edges. And if you were on the edges, you stayed on the edges. There were very few roads that could take you to the center – not to mention all the gates, fences, walls and gatekeepers who would look at you and go, “Huh?”

Now it seems to be the inverse. Something starts out on the edges – 50 SHADES OF GRAY comes to mind, originating as fan fiction online – and slowly catches fire, blazing inward to the center.

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Which means you can’t start out trying to appeal to everybody, or else your appeal is so watered down that nobody will love you. And you want people to love you, to get fired up by what you represent.

Someone once explained to me the “thirds” rule: one third of the people should love you, which means that one third of the people will despise you, and the remaining third will be indifferent.

Otherwise you have no chance of success.

(The “rule of thirds” is also used by photographers to compose their ideal photos. Draw from this what you will.)

But for most people, this feels counter-intuitive. Our instinct is to appeal to everybody: we don’t want to offend, ruffle feathers, rock the boat, or read hate notes left in the comment sections of our blogs.

We learn young to disguise our freak points, because so often it’s the things that could make us remarkable that are the very things, or the flipside of the things, we get criticized for.

Case in point: I had a conversation with a well-meaning, gregarious friend who threatened to force me to socialize more. “You’re always carrying your Kindle around,” he said, “it’s like your security blanket.” This is somewhat true. “But,” he went on, in that hallowed American tradition of the extroverted telling the introverted that they need to be more extroverted, “you shouldn’t spend so much time hiding behind it.”

“Hiding?” I said. “I’m not hiding.” At least not all of the time. Then I said, “Understand, it’s just as easy for me to turn that around and say that you should read more.”

He was silent.

Then he said, “I know. But I’m not like you. You have this ability to ingest knowledge that’s like nobody I’ve ever met.”

“And you,” I said, “have this great gift with people. That’s your strength, your talent: your ability to develop this diverse and meaningful social network.”

He could spend time reading and creating, to try and be more like me, and I could spend time socializing and connecting, to try and be more like him, and perhaps we’d be better-rounded individuals as a result. We’d be less extreme – and less open to criticism.

Or we could continue to play to our respective strengths and become world-class freaks in our own respective ways.

To be the most and best at something means to be the least and worst at something else.

Every choice to do something is a choice not to do something else.

(You can’t read and socialize at the same time.)

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There’s only one center – that’s why it’s called the ‘center’ – but so many different edges. Part of learning yourself, and being true to yourself, is knowing which edge you want to commit to (assuming you want to commit to any of them at all), and letting that shape your point of view and how you show up in the world.

Used to be that you could show up everywhere at once. (Otherwise known as: being on the TV stations that everybody watched, or in the newspapers that everybody read, or on the bookshelves that everybody perused.)

Assuming, of course, that the powers-that-be gave you permission

– odds of which were slim to none.

Now, though, the center keeps breaking up into more edges. On the edges, you can show up however you want. You don’t need to appeal to the masses, or win over the gatekeepers, or comply with someone else’s definition of ‘normal’. You don’t need to be movie-star beautiful. And the last thing you need is permission.

What you do need, perhaps, is a freak point. A badass point of view. A very particular aesthetic. And the ability to protect it from those who, for whatever reason, would deny it or fuck it up.

the art of looking for your ‘it’ factor (+ where you just might find ‘it’)

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I don’t really get Anne Hathaway. I can recognize that she’s gorgeous, talented, charming, all that, but for whatever reason she just doesn’t ring my bell.

I don’t really get Kate Middleton. I was never the biggest fan of Julia Roberts, even when I enjoyed her performances. And I didn’t take to Brad Pitt until he got a bit more lined and rugged and, in my mind, more interesting.

On the other hand, I have always had this thing for Keanu Reeves, to the great bemusement and mystery of some of my friends. (They don’t ‘get’ Keanu like I do.)

(I keep telling my people, “Bring me Keanu Reeves”, and yet it does not happen.)

It’s not like any of these people would care, nor should they; somehow their stardom flourishes with or without my stamp of approval. But in response to a recent post, a reader referred to the ‘it’ factor and commented

You either have it or you don’t.

Except recently I read a book, THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP that puts forward a theory that could, I think, be applied to charisma in general. If you define charisma as the ability to attract followers, to inspire devotion and adoration, then here’s the thing.

Either people follow you or they don’t.

Your ‘charisma’ is decided by them. But if you truly had ‘it’ – if ‘it’ was a fact of your very being, like gold-flecked hazel eyes or how your second toe is slightly longer than your big toe – then ‘it’ would belong to you, and not to other people to bestow upon you if and when and for how long they choose. What’s more, everybody would recognize and acknowledge it: “Oh yeah, that’s Jane Galligan. She is five eight, she lives in Los Angeles, she has brown eyes, big feet, one younger brother and ‘it’.”

(This, by the way, is similar to the ‘great man’ theory of leadership, in which we regard leadership as a magical trait of a few select individuals regardless of situation or context.)

But charisma, like leadership, doesn’t happen inside you. You may generate or project it, but it takes place in the space between you and other people.

Or rather, between you and some other people. Because not everybody’s going to agree. Not everybody’s going to find your brand of beauty intriguing; not everybody’s going to like what you stand for. One person’s ‘charismatic’ is another person’s ‘annoying’ is another person’s total indifference.

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Why do we follow who we follow? In NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP, the authors argue rather convincingly that we follow people who remind us in some way of ourselves, or of how we’d like to see ourselves. Leaders don’t tell us what to think so much as clarify what we don’t know we’re thinking, or must struggle to express.

They don’t tell us what to do so much as show us who we are.

A charismatic person is of us, our group, our tribe: they represent us, or some aspect of us, so well that we can wear our fandom as a badge of identity, a direct statement about who we think we are. They are also for us: they stand for some larger vision that promotes our own goals, values, worldview. They find ways to manifest that worldview and code it into reality, to move us forward, to further develop that shared understanding of who we are and what we stand for (the authors refer to leaders as “entrepreneurs of identity”).

You are charismatic, then, when you somehow represent the essence or the spirit of your group – whatever your group happens to be. The bigger the group, the bigger your tribe of followers, the greater your fame….but charisma comes in all shapes and sizes. Your ‘it’ could be small and tightly knit, with loyalties that run deep: your 1000 fans who buy everything you make.

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If you represent the group, if you become a kind of projection of identity, no wonder authenticity is so important, and so powerful.

I was thinking about this when I read Abby Kerr’s thoughtful post in which she asks the entrepreneurial blogosphere to please stop mimicking the A-listers. She was speaking of one A-lister in particular known for her fun, sexy, tongue-in-cheek approach to delivering her very solid content. This A-lister (unless I’m thinking of the wrong one, but I doubt it) has a background in dance, fitness and choreography, as well as a great and wacky sense of humor. The videos she puts into circulation make sense for her. Because she also happens to be gorgeous, it might be easy to think that she’s selling on sex appeal, and to try to mimic that; but what she’s selling is an identity, or a fantasy of identity, and you either resonate with that (and sign up for her programs) or don’t (and go elsewhere). “Not everybody gets my brand,” I remember her once saying to a room full of women. “Some people just look at what I do, and go, Huh? They don’t get it at all.” And that’s the way of it. You can’t stand for one group without alienating another group, any more than you can be all things to all people.

This A-lister didn’t try to win over everybody. She took certain elements of her personality and pushed them to the edge, until they became the hallmarks of her brand. She stood apart in a way that genuinely represented who she was. She’s putting forward a very polished and savvy presentation of self, yes, but it’s a performance that rings with the truth of who she is — and is not just her take on what she thinks worked for someone else.

When you mimic someone’s style, you are in effect hiding behind them. You are not showing us who you really are. If we can’t see the truth of you, then we can’t see ourselves in you. We don’t know what group you belong to — only that it’s probably not ours – and if we don’t think you’re of us, and for us, then we’re already moving on.

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Used to be that the culture had an ‘it’ girl, who somehow represented the spirit of the age – or rather, what some people considered to be the spirit of the age, and since they were the people running the show, their worldview was front and center. It ruled.

But those were the days when we only had a handful of television stations and no way of talking back to the media. The media gave us what they thought we wanted, or what they wanted us to want, and because there was nothing else on, we watched or listened or read it, which made them think that we must really want it, so they gave us more of the same.

But now. The media has shattered into pieces that are shattering into more pieces….So many different channels. So many different platforms. The spirit of this age can be just as multi-faceted, complex and diverse as we are. Not just one ‘it’ girl or boy who is said to stand in for us all: the soul of the culture shines out behind many faces.

We need that. A democracy isn’t a democracy unless every voice gets out there, every story told and heard.

Yes, you should, like your mama tells you, just be yourself, but we need more from you than that. We need you to know who you are and what you stand for and what unique group you can represent through being who you truly are: who you can bring together, who might see themselves in you. We need you to find your tools and master your skillset and use them to develop your art, your voice, your it, to the most compelling pitch possible and then amplify it to the rest of us. We need you to find those places where you resonate, where the truth of your inner life opens up to the truth of ours, and we can, as John Lennon once put it, come together.

Because, when all is said and done, that’s what it is all about.

a cool mental trick to help make you more creative (…and totally hot and fit and rich…)

I’m in freaking Scotland.

(Edinburgh is stunning, but Mike Myers is in my head, shouting “If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” Over and over again. Help me.)

I joined my boyfriend at TEDGlobal and he told me about something interesting he picked up in one of the presentations — I’m assuming it was by Keith Chen — about how your weight and money problems might be to blame on your grammar.

It goes something like this. Different languages have different ways of talking about the future. Some languages, like English, use a future tense (“They will have wild animal sex”) to indicate that the action hasn’t happened yet, while other languages, like Mandarin, use present tense (“They have wild animal sex”) and depend not on grammar but context (“next Wednesday at midnight while swinging from the neighbor’s trapeze”) to establish that the action hasn’t happened yet.

Chen, an economist, divides countries into those with a future tense and those without and discovers an intriguing correlation. Countries that speak a language with a future tense — like English — tend to smoke more, save less, exercise less, and be more overweight.

Language structures our way of thinking, and the future tense serves to distance us from the future — the future is happening somewhere out there — while the present tense keeps the future close to us — the future is happening here and now.

While correlation is not causation, we do think about things more abstractly when we cast them in the future. If I ask you what you’ll be doing tomorrow, chances are you’ll tell me about your kid’s playdate and the report due at work and how you need to buy a new dress for that wedding you’re forced to go to on Friday because your girlfriend ignored all your advice and is marrying the fool. If I ask you what you’ll be doing ten years from now, chances are you’ll tell me about dreams, hopes and goals.

One of the things you learn as a writer is how important it is to take what’s abstract and ground it in specific, concrete things a person can see and touch — in order to make it real for the reader.

When something is real (ie: you can see, touch, taste, feel, hear it) the reader cares. The reader feels a sense of urgency.

When something is abstract, it remains a vague intellectual notion that the reader might appreciate, but can’t embrace emotionally.

Here’s the thing: to truly move a person, to get a person to change their behavior, you have to reach them emotionally as well as intellectually. Reason alone won’t cut it. I know that smoking causes cancer. So long as cancer remains this vague abstract notion — because it exists somewhere out there in the ether of the future (“I will have lung cancer if I don’t stop smoking”) — it doesn’t seem relevant to what I need in the here and now, to ease the craving and relieve the stress and, hey, I can always quit tomorrow. If, on the other hand, a diagnosis of cancer were to push itself right in my face (“I have lung cancer”) what I need in the ‘here and now’ suddenly changes.

(This was actually one of the ways I managed to quit smoking: by imagining that I was creating cancer in my body every time I puffed on a cigarette.)

In my last post I talked about how your vision for the future can act as context for your present. You can pull your future close to you in a way that influences your subconscious to guide your actions away from something (cancer, poverty) or toward something (a fit, vibrant, drop-dead body, a million dollars in the bank). You can find ways to turn the abstract into something concrete and real. Wanting to get a better body is one thing; wanting to get a better body in time for your wedding is something else. The closer that wedding gets, the more real it seems, the more motivated you are to make your workout instead of excuses.

It can work the other way, too. If you’re stuck on a problem, put some mental distance between it and you. Imagine the problem is happening ten years from now. Or in Alaska. Or China. Or Mars. The more distance you can get on it, the more abstractly — and creatively — you can think on it. When it no longer seems in your (mental) face, you can shift from the emotional to the intellectual part of your brain, you can see the forest for the trees, you can examine that forest from different angles and find new pathways in.

It’s why, by the way, a change in location can be a surprisingly effective way to blast through a creative block or solve that pesky plot problem or come to a decision about your love life. A shift in time and space (either real or imagined) can bring a shift in perspective, and sometimes that’s all we need.

a cool mental trick to make yourself more creative (…and totally hot and fit and rich…)

I’m in freaking Scotland.

(Edinburgh is stunning, but Mike Myers is in my head, shouting “If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” Over and over again. Help me.)

I joined my boyfriend at TEDGlobal and he told me about something interesting he picked up in one of the presentations — I’m assuming it was by Keith Chen — about how your weight and money problems might be to blame on your grammar.

It goes something like this. Different languages have different ways of talking about the future. Some languages, like English, use a future tense (“They will be having wild animal sex”) to indicate that the action hasn’t happened yet, while other languages, like Mandarin, use present tense (“They have wild animal sex”) and depend not on grammar but context (“next Wednesday at midnight while swinging from the neighbor’s trapeze”) to establish that the action hasn’t happened yet.

Chen, an economist, divides countries into those with a future tense and those without and discovers an intriguing correlation. Countries that speak a language with a future tense — like English — tend to smoke more, save less, exercise less, and are more likely to be overweight.

Language structures our way of thinking about the future, and the future tense serves to distance us from the future — the future is happening somewhere out there — while the present tense keeps the future close to us — the future is happening here and now.

While correlation is not causation, this falls in line with some other stuff I’ve read. We think about things in the future more abstractly. If I ask you what you’ll be doing tomorrow, chances are you’ll tell me about your kid’s playdate and the report due at work and how you need to buy a new dress for that wedding you’re forced to go to on Friday because your girlfriend ignored all your advice and is marrying the fool. If I ask you what you’ll be doing ten years from now, chances are you’ll tell me about dreams, hopes and goals.

One of the things you learn as a writer is how important it is to take what’s abstract and ground it in specific, concrete things a person can see and touch — in order to make it real for the reader.

When it’s real, the reader cares. The reader feels a sense of urgency.

When it’s abstract, it remains a vague intellectual notion that the reader might appreciate, but can’t embrace emotionally.

Here’s the thing: to truly move a person, to get a person to change their behavior, you have to reach them emotionally as well as intellectually. Reason alone won’t cut it. I know that smoking causes cancer. So long as cancer remains this vague abstract notion — because it exists somewhere out there in the ether of the future (“I will have lung cancer if I don’t stop smoking”) — it doesn’t seem relevant to what I need in the here and now, to ease the craving and relieve stress (and hey, I can always quit tomorrow). If, on the other hand, a diagnosis of cancer were to push itself right in my face (“I have lung cancer”) what I need in the ‘here and now’ suddenly changes.

(This was actually one of the ways I managed to quit smoking: by imagining that I was creating cancer in my body every time I puffed on a cigarette.)

In my last post I talked about how your vision for the future can act as context for your present. You can pull your future close to you in a way that motivates you to move away from something (cancer, poverty) or toward something (a fit, vibrant, drop-dead body, a million dollars in the bank). You find ways to turn the abstract into something concrete and real. Wanting to get a better body is one thing; wanting to get a better body in time for your wedding is something else. The closer that wedding gets, the more real it seems, the more motivated you are to make your workout instead of excuses.

It can work the other way, too. If you’re stuck on a problem, put some mental distance between it and you. Imagine the problem is happening ten years from now. Or maybe it’s happening in Alaska. Or China. Or Mars. The more distance you can get on it, the more abstractly — and creatively — you can think about it. You shift from the emotional to the intellectual part of your brain, you can see the forest for the trees, you can examine that forest from different angles and find new pathways in.

It’s why a change in location can be a surprisingly effective way to blast through a creative block or solve that pesky plot problem or come to a decision about your love life. A shift in geography can bring a shift in perspective, and sometimes that’s all we need.

the art of (re)inventing yourself

“I myself am entirely made of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.” – Augusten Burroughs.

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I dressed up as the kind of person who liked to party with Marie Antoinette. A friend loaned me the costume, which had been custom-made for a gorgeous younger woman no longer attending the event. The costume was amazing. And somewhat complicated. It came with instructions. They began with:

slip on the ruffled panties



and went from there.

When the messenger dropped it off, my girlfriend and I zipped open the garment bag and went through the different pieces and promptly assumed that something was missing. Like perhaps a bottom half. There was the

court pannier hoop which slips over the head



followed by a swath of material referred to as a “lace skirt” which

goes over the panniers and closes in the center front.



Then I was told to

put on the corset which sits over the panniers and lace skirt



and which squashed my breasts up against my chest in the way you’d expect when you’ve seen DANGEROUS LIASIONS as many times as I have. (It’s one of my favorite movies and a loose inspiration for my current novel in progress THE DECADENTS). The lace skirt was flimsy and transparent – it was lace, for god’s sake – and hiked up in front, with bows at right and left, to display legs in thigh high hose

(slip the blue and white garters to the top of the hose on the thigh)

Topping off the ensemble – literally – was an elaborate wig of real human hair, piled up in front and dropping down in back to my waist. “Look,” I said in delight to my male companion for the evening, “there’s a bird in it.” A woman appeared at the house to help me with the wig and lace me into the corset and do era-appropriate makeup (soft eyes, rosebud mouth, very natural).

My hair is high, I texted my girlfriend, and I am ready.



Bundling myself (and my hair) into the car was a challenge. I spent the first bit of the evening learning how to navigate space (the hoops made doorways difficult), move my head (I was warned against any sudden, bending motions that might disrupt the wig) and breathe without passing out.

Then something happened.

I began to get the hang of it. Because of the corset and the pannier the most comfortable thing was to put my hands on my hips. The hoops made it awkward to walk but easy to flounce and sashay. I resigned myself to the fact that I was the least-clothed person at the event, adopting a fuck it air of aristocratic (or so I hoped) insouciance.

“The thing with my costume,” remarked my companion, undergoing a sartorial adventure of his own, “is that I can feel myself becoming this character.”

Which is exactly what I was starting to think: the costume made me move a certain way, which made me feel a certain way, which made me behave a certain way. I was myself, but I was this flouncing, saucy, flirtatious, confident version of myself: I strutted, rolled my shoulders, took up space (which the costume demanded I take up anyway).

I was not the kind of person you might assume to be a nuclear physicist.

Maybe sometimes the clothes really do make the man.

And the woman.

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Which got me thinking about how you can invent, or re-invent, yourself from the outside in. Although we tend to think that we feel first, and then act in a way that reflects that, it also works in reverse: what you do affects how you think and feel. If you bite down on a pencil, you can trick your brain into thinking you’re smiling. If you throw back your shoulders, lift your head, and walk with your hands on your hips, you might start to feel confident, even cocky and authoritative. If you consistently make eye contact with strangers and smile at them (in a non-stalker manner), you’ll probably start to see yourself as more connected and outgoing (Michael Ellsberg has an entire book dedicated to THE POWER OF EYE CONTACT).

There’s a term for this: embodied cognition. At Northwestern University, two psychologists kick it up another level with the idea of enclothed cognition. Hajo Adam and Adam Galinksy ran an experiment in which participants completed tasks such as identifying the differences between two similar pictures. Sometimes the participants wore a lab coat. Sometimes they just looked at the lab coat. And sometimes they did neither.

Performance improved significantly when the participants wore the lab coat –

– unless (and this is interesting) they were told that it was a painter’s coat.

The psychologists theorize that both the symbolic meaning of clothes as well as the physical experience of wearing them come into play. Of course, in some ways we know this already: hence the advice to fake it til you make it and dress for the position that you want instead of the position that you have. We so strongly link who we are to what we wear that young people out of college can be notorious for underdressing at the office with an I just gotta be me, take it or leave it kind of air. They overlook the fact that identity is fluid, and we create, or co-create, ourselves as we go along.

How we engage with externals and respond to the world affects how the world responds to us, which creates the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

We find ways to signal that story to others, which affects how they respond to us, which affects how we feel about ourselves, which affects how we act, which affects how the world responds to us, which affects the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and so on and so forth.

Identity is a constant feedback loop.

“Great walk,” a man said to me, passingly, as I sashayed in my costume. Which of course only served to encourage my behavior.

3

This is something I’ve been thinking about partly because I’ve got one of those big, rounded birthdays coming up: I turn 40 in September. When I was younger I swore to myself that I would never lie about my age. This was my way of telling myself (I realize now) that I would define the age for myself instead of accepting this idea that it shamed and devalued me (fuck that) and should be kept secret. Living in Los Angeles tends to shade this resolve in some interesting ways. I still remember, a few years ago, an individual in the tech community commenting with surprise that a woman we both knew had suddenly turned “hot! I mean, she’s old, but she’s hot!” She was, of course, 40 (just a couple of years older than he was).

My point isn’t the absurdity of this, or the underlying double standard about aging (men improve, women don’t). In this supposedly postfeminist age, we are reinventing middle age (a process the boomers started before us). Which adds to this sense of entering uncharted territory. When you’re no longer defined at least partly by youth and the beauty of rampant fertility, when you have to subtract those things from your sense of self, it opens up this question of how will you define yourself? Who will you become? Who do you want to become?

4

“We human beings delude ourselves most of the time when we tell ourselves that we continuously invent our behavior according to deliberate choices we make. In fact, we usually don’t. Usually, we react unconsciously to the many cues of the context….and on rare occasions do we consciously think about how to react.” — Karl Albrecht, SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE

Context creates meaning. Whether it’s the clothes we wear or the spaces we design, the people we surround ourselves with, and the things we choose to focus on, it’s worth thinking about the meaning we’re creating for ourselves and others. (Style and beauty have long been dismissed as ‘feminine’ values – and thus frivolous, shallow, unimportant, vain – but the influence of behavior and the shaping of identity, and the actions that result, seem anything but.)

Something interesting happens when you achieve clarity on who you want to be. It becomes an expression of who you already are. It starts to shape the very present that shapes the future, as if you’ve pulled the future into the present.

The future creates a context for the present; imbues it with energy, direction and meaning. It becomes a lens that filters your vision and shapes your perspective, directing you to the things that fulfill your vision (since what you focus on, expands) and ignoring what doesn’t. When you stock your context with the proper cues, you don’t have to consciously decide how to react; your subconscious will take care of that for you.

5

It’s about what you throw out, and what you keep.

When my ex-husband hired a stylist, the first thing the stylist did was to go through both our closets and throw out a lot of stuff. “I see you’re doing this bohemian thing,” he sniffed, surveying the tunics I belted over my jeans. He wanted to take me in a direction that was more “edgy European”. That sounded good to me. It resonated with who I wanted to be.

But first you have to create the space for whatever is waiting to enter. Creation starts in silence and emptiness, whether it’s the blank page, the blank canvas, the calmed mind – or the uncluttered closet. You need that zone for dreaming. You need to sense what’s on the other side, waiting for you to bring it on through.

It’s about where you live and who you spend your time with, since we’re wired to adapt to the group.

Tim Ferriss likes to say that we are the sum of the five people we spend the most time with.

And we are influenced by our friends, our friends’ friends, and our friends’ friends’ friends, their actions vibrating down through the invisible lines that connect us.

Part of finding – or creating – yourself is about declaring your tribe. When you know who you want to be, you can choose your community accordingly and let yourself soak up all that influence. When my friend Jena La Flame decided that she wanted to be a belly dancer, she sought out the company of belly dancers (and now she incorporates belly dancing into her weight-loss coaching). When I decided that I wanted to become more “entrepreneurial” – which so contradicted the way I saw myself I could hear wild peals of laughter in my head – I put myself in online and offline communities of established and aspiring female entrepreneurs. There’s that saying – you have to see it to be it – and once you start seeing it over and over again, it no longer seems so impossible.

A large part of choosing your tribe – putting yourself where you can see what you want to be – is choosing where to live. What I saw in my small Canadian hometown was very different from what I saw in Silicon Valley which was different from what I see now in Los Angeles. (Growing up in my hometown, I “saw” my future largely through the books I read.) What I see in Europe is different from what I see in America (particularly when it comes to notions about growing older as a woman in a vibrant and sensual way).

After I’d lived in LA for a couple of years, a friend from the Bay Area, who had known the Bay Area version of myself, came to visit. “You’ve upped the style factor,” he said to me (I was still in my boho phase, wearing a fur vest, bracelets). The comment surprised me. Whatever changes I’d undergone as I adapted to my new environment were so gradual and subtle that I hadn’t noticed. But he did.

It’s how you structure your space.

In the book INGENIUS: A Crash Course in Creativity, Tina Seelig (the director of entrepreneurship programs at Stanford) talks about how work space can shape team dynamics. When teams of students were given a puzzle, there was a distinct difference in how the teams operated: teams with only chairs collaborated immediately, while those with only tables didn’t collaborate at all.

It also turns out that standing up at your desk is ideal for creative work – it energizes, engages you. (I have yet to try this.)

Meanwhile self-help and motivational books and blogs such as this one will emphasize the importance of seeding your environment with visual cues to encourage success:

“Your brain needs a method of filtering through the clutter and locking onto what’s important. This is where the science comes in. The “reticular activation system” (RAS) sorts through those millions of bits of data, making sure that you’re only aware of certain things. It calls your attention only to the details that you don’t want to miss, such as hearing your name in a crowd.

….Once you write something down or see a picture of your goal, your brain starts to work on that goal without you even realizing it. ”

What you focus on – expands.

6

None of this is meant to suggest that inventing, or reinventing, yourself is easy. Fake it ‘til you make it! Dress for success! Defining yourself is about knowing yourself: what your core values are and how you want to express those values through your work, your art, your relationships, your life narrative, your life. When you can articulate your purpose – which, god knows, is no easy task in itself – you can experiment with ways to best express that purpose. You can develop the habits to cultivate the skills to help you achieve what you want to achieve. You can grow and evolve in order to become more fully who you already are.

The more we change, the more we stay the same; no matter how many times Madonna reinvents herself, she can never stop being Madonna. Call it your soul, your essence, your creative DNA, your intuition, your north star, your core self, or just an illusion of self, it lives in your body as well as your mind, it sends up warnings when you’re headed in the wrong direction and positive feelings when you’re following your destiny.

The problem is when we get too discouraged to listen. We fail too many times, we make too many mistakes, we self-talk in all the worst ways. We learn the hard way that we’re not in charge of our lives quite in the way that we think. Maybe we are deluded when it comes to our ability to make the conscious and deliberate day-to-day decisions that will weave us the life that we want. Maybe what’s required, sometimes, is a shift in focus. Instead of trying to change yourself, change the personal culture that you create for yourself. When you deliberately open up a gap between who you are on the inside, and who you are on the outside, your brain is forced to restore a sense of cohesiveness,come up with a new story about who you think you are.

As someone who started out in one place, and ended up in another place – hell, another planet – and has lived long enough to see her own character arc, I can say that in many ways I am not who I thought I was. I am certainly not who some people told me I was, and I count myself lucky that I figured this out now instead of ten or twenty or fifty years from now. But I think in many ways that the self is a lot like the sun: stare at it direct, and you’ll go blind. You have to look off to the side a little. You have to let it happen while you’re doing other things. You think up the outline, choose the genre, the setting, and the characters, and let the story write itself.

You don’t let anybody else write it for you.

it’s about who you are at core

It’s about who you are at core + what you’re meant to do + how to live the creative life with purpose, impact and a little bit of swagger.

It’s about meaning, self-expression and mastery. It’s about writing your own life story and following your own agenda (and figuring out what that agenda even is in the first place). It’s about rejecting the good girl/bad girl dichotomy bullshit and choosing, instead, to be a badass. It’s about deepening your relationship to yourself, others, the world. It’s about following your intuition and keeping your head. It’s about clarity. It’s about letting go of what you need to let go of so the cool new stuff can enter. It’s about making epic shit. It’s about scaring yourself and doing it anyway.

It’s about your X factor, your joie de vivre, your je ne sais quoi, your animal magnetism. It’s about being as ambitious as you want to be with no apology and honoring your right to dream, be bold, take up space, and declare to the world just who you think you are — and why we should care. It’s about pushing past your ragged edge. It’s about dancing in the streets. It’s about being an introvert, because introverts are awesome. It’s about having crushes on the wrong people. It’s about connecting to your right people. It’s about loving deep and playing hard and knowing when to renew and refresh. It’s about taking the high road even though it drives you nuts. It’s about working your ass off.

It’s about casual chic. It’s about dressing to kill. It’s about falling in love with something bigger than yourself. It’s about shifting the paradigm. It’s about your inner freak, your brand of crazy, your secrets, wounds and Shadow. It’s about seduction. It’s about being seduced. It’s about learning who you are, where to go, and who to take with you. It’s about passing it forward. It’s about saving the world. It’s about saving yourself.

It’s about having some goddamn fun. Thigh-high boots. A fabulous soundtrack. Shaken, not stirred.

Visionaries, misfits, rebels, mavericks, scandalous women + passionate men are the people who transform themselves, others + sometimes the world.

You don’t have to go it alone.

We’re all in it together.

(So may the Force be with us.)

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” — Mae West

why goals can be overrated

1

I wonder if sometimes we get so hung up on a goal that we disconnect from the dream.

Human beings are remarkably lousy when it comes to predicting the things that will make them happy. Which is ironic, given how many of us state that our main goal in life is to Be Happy. But when happiness is your goal, it becomes just like any other goal. You’re busy chasing it down — it belongs in the future. What about now? Has your ‘real life’ started yet?

2

There’s happiness, and there’s hedonism. Hedonism is awesome in its own right – if anyone tells you different, they’re lying – although, as with any force of nature, you must treat it with respect or pay a heavy price.

It’s a high and a buzz and a thrill, and arrives in fabulous outfits, but it is not deep joy.

Joy is harder.

It’s in our nature to pursue meaning, to find and make meaning, and deep joy is an indirect benefit of that. Which means it’s often bittersweet. It comes shaded with loss and pain.

Meaning seems to come out of struggle. Something happens to us, our life takes a zig when we planned for it to zag, and we’re forced to figure out what to make of it all. We have to decide how to tell the story, even as it’s still unfolding. How you explain your past shapes the present and creates the future. The beginning of any story contains the seeds of that story’s end.

The phoenix will rise from the ashes, but first it has to burn (that part sucks) and be in the ashes (that part also sucks). But even in the ashes, it knows that it’s a phoenix.

If it tells itself that it’s a sparrow, the story turns out differently.

3

The danger of a goal is that we get so focused on the end result, the destination, that we ignore what the journey is trying to tell us. So we get the goal, only to discover that it’s meaningless – and we’re not happy. Or we get so afraid we won’t achieve it — so paralyzed by fear, disappointment and potential humiliation — that we stop. We get stuck. We give up on the wrong things. We go after things we don’t care about. We get comfortable and complacent and find ways to justify our choices – and we’re not happy.

What if you made the journey a goal in itself? Or what if you knew that wherever you are, is exactly where you’re supposed to be, in order to go after whatever it is you think you want? Or what if the journey is trying to tell you that what you really want – is something else? Maybe it would free you up to relax, to play, to pay more attention to the moment, to take more enjoyment in the process and less investment in the outcome (which actually makes the desired outcome more likely. Go figure.)

The journey is real life.

The destination is a pausing place.

4

The meaning of any story develops through conflict. There is a beginning, a middle, an end. A set-up, a complication, a resolution. A separation, an initiation, a return. The hero is called to action, but can’t achieve what she wants to achieve until obstacles, problems, confrontations and bad guys force her to change in some way, to restore a missing quality to her character. That’s the adventure.

It’s this same lost-and-found quality that makes her success inevitable, even if it doesn’t arrive in the form she expected. You go after one thing, but win something else.

It’s the lesson, the shift in paradigm, the transformation. It gives your experience

meaning and makes it sacred. It makes your life a story worth telling in the first place.

And then you rise.

the badass art of saying No (+ creating what you want)

Once upon a time, someone asked Michelangelo about his creative process. Dude replied:

“In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”

When it comes to creating the life that you want – as opposed to living a life that others create for you – the ability to say No is like the chisel you use to “hew away the rough walls” that would imprison the “lovely apparition” of both your self and your vision for your life.

‘No’ is a power word, and a lot of us tend to be ambivalent about power. We see it as a threat to relationship: you can have one or the other, power or love, but not both.

You’re afraid that if you say No you will damage the relationship and create conflict and hurt feelings. So you sacrifice your power and give a weakly puling ‘yes’ that undermines you and leaves you resentful (and, possibly, passive-aggressive).

It might help to do what William Ury suggests in his book THE POWER OF A POSITIVE NO: to “root your no in a higher yes”.

When you say No to anything, you’re saying Yes to something else.

It pays to get very clear on what that “something else” is.

Like your values.

If you want to say No, why do you want to say No? What do you want instead? What is your intention?

When I was living in Japan in my early twenties, I taught ESL for nine hours a day and spent another hour on the train. I was also trying to finish my PGTLNA (post-graduate transgressive literary novel attempt). My intention was to become a published writer. There wasn’t a lot of time left outside work, so I was constantly having to choose: say No to a social life and Yes to the novel, or Yes to the novel and No to a social life. Since I had so much wrapped up in my writing – hopes and dreams and a sense of identity – I said No to a lot of social invitations and missed out on some potential friendships (as well as opportunities to tour various temples

…although I still saw a lot of temples. I got so templed out that when I was on a plane flying into LA I looked down at the city and thought: where are all the damn temples? But I digress.)

I did, however, manage to finish my Post Graduate Transgressive Literary Novel Attempt, which landed me my first literary agent.

When it comes to telling people ‘no’, I can be just as avoidant and cowardly as anybody. At the same time, I’ve learned the importance of blocking out time for creative work and creating a strong living boundary around those hours. That boundary is the word No, whether it’s to my personal assistant who needs me to sign a zillion things, a friend who wants to catch a matinee, or even the Internet (I use a program called Freedom to take me offline for ninety minutes at a time).

I also use the word ‘No’ to protect my time with my kids, my other highest priority. ‘No’ is my shield. It protects what I care about. It gives me the space to create what I want: a novel, this blog, a deeper relationship with my family. I can shake up my own personal status quo — or refine it.

It’s a lot easier to say No when you know you’re saying Yes to yourself and what’s important to you.

Grounding your ‘No’ in the sense of a deeper ‘Yes’ creates energy, clarity and determination.

It also clears the way for a better ‘Yes’. Ury tells of a conversation he had with Warren Buffett:

“Over breakfast one day, he confided in me that the secret to creating his fortune lay in his ability to say No. ‘I sit there all day and look at investment proposals. I say, No, No, No, No, No, No – until I see one that is exactly what I am looking for. And then I say Yes. All I have to do is say Yes a few times in my life and I’ve made my fortune.’”

Ury emphasizes: Every important Yes requires a thousand Nos.



Your ‘No’ can also be a movement toward a reconstructed ‘Yes’.

You can redefine the terms. You’re not willing to do [whatever’s been proposed]…but you are willing to do [insert acceptable alternative here]. You can identify and state your needs while respecting the other person’s needs and crafting an alternative that honors both. That way, you can hold to your ‘No’ while still remaining connected to the other person: you keep both your power and the relationship.

And if an alternative isn’t found, or possible, or accepted….what you can still offer the other person is respect. ‘No’ does not have to be an attack word, nor does it have to be a rejection. It can be put forth in a warm and courteous manner (no matter how pissed off you might be feeling) while making it clear to the other person that it’s not them, it’s you.

A funny thing happens when you offer respect; you tend to get it in return.

But you can’t respect others if you don’t respect yourself. It’s through your own self-respect that you can see people for who they are, and make them feel heard, acknowledged and understood. When you say a ‘Yes’ that you don’t mean — that makes you kick yourself afterward — you kill your power and contaminate your relationship because of a lack of integrity.

A real ‘Yes’ is only a real ‘Yes’ when you have the ability to say a real ‘No’.

the art of turning minimalist: carving out creativity in a hamster-wheel consumer culture

1

In his book HOW WILL YOU MEASURE YOUR LIFE? Clayton Christensen explores the decisions people make that result in happy or unhappy lives (and possibly jail time).

One way to doom yourself to unhappiness is to choose a job based on compensation alone.

Christensen distinguishes between hygiene factors and motivation factors.

Hygiene factors are the things that can’t make you love your job (or, presumably, your life) – but can cause you all sorts of problems.

Bad hygiene must get fixed, or you’ll get miserable.

Compensation, it turns out, is a hygiene factor. You have to feel that your compensation is fair. If it isn’t, you’ll be pissed. But if it improves, you’re not going to suddenly be happy (if you aren’t already). As Christensen points out:

“The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. They’re not the same thing at all. It is important to address hygiene factors such as a safe and comfortable working environment, relationship with managers and colleagues, enough money to look after your family – if you don’t have these things, you’ll experience dissatisfaction with your work. But these alone won’t do anything to make you love your job – they will just stop you from hating it.”

2

The things that offer true satisfaction, that create within us a sense of well-being, are the motivation factors. They include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.

“Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.”

A person would be wise, if happiness is his or her main consideration, to choose a career based on motivation factors. Work that is meaningful to you, that is interesting and challenging and allows you to grow, that provides opportunities to increase your responsibility. Stuff like that.

Instead, so many of us tend to make hygiene factors, like status and income, the main criteria.

We tell ourselves we’ll work that job just long enough to pay off our student loans, and then pursue something that feeds the soul, that saves the world.

Problem is, as the income expands, the lifestyle expands. And it’s not easy, or fun, to cut back. Researchers have discovered that the brain registers a blow to your social status in the same area that registers physical pain. (This makes sense, from an evolutionary perspective – we needed each other to survive, and social exile often meant death.)

Not to mention that human beings have an uncanny ability to get used to material comforts.

Yesterday’s privilege becomes tomorrow’s necessity: we didn’t know we wanted it, but how could we give it up?

3

I used to go shopping a lot: because I could, and because I was miserable. There’s a New Yorker cartoon where a well-heeled woman asks a salesperson: “But what would you suggest to fill the dark, empty places in my soul?” As it turns out, footwear won’t do it.

And what struck me, even then, was the crazed spinning hamster wheel of consumerism. There is no enough. There is always another event, another dress, another season, another clutch, another stylish woman to envy, another expectation to meet, another reason to feel insecure, another glossy fashion magazine, another beautiful item hovering just outside your price range.

No matter what you can afford – and I could afford a lot – you will crave what you can’t. There’s always another level. It doesn’t end.

Unless you step off the wheel – or, better yet, avoid getting on in the first place.

Unless you learn to say: Enough.

3

What I crave now – is minimalism.

And I don’t mean deprivation. (Frankly, I’m not that type of girl.) As Leo Babauta puts it:

“Minimalism hasn’t been about living with as little as possible….It’s been about removing the extraneous, so that the essential things have space to live.”



But first, you have to decide what those essential things even are. Perhaps one of the benefits (I use the word loosely) of consumerism is the distraction it offers, the fantasy it holds out of who we will become if only we buy this and this and this.

Minimalism, on the other hand, forces us to consider the truth of who we are. You can disappear into your clutter. But when you live a well-edited life, you have to sift and sort and prioritize. What you keep makes a statement about your identity…simply because it is there.

Everything you have tells a story. The story of you.

That kind of story demands clarity.

And with clarity, comes focus.

And with focus, comes the freedom to do what you love.

4

In art, ‘negative space’ is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image that defines the image itself.

Stepping away from the churn of consumerism is, I think, an embrace of negative space. It’s the kind of space that offers possibility. It gives you room to grow. It is the blank canvas, the fresh page, the spot of solitude where you can hear yourself think. It is a release of energy, unblocked, unhindered.

To carve it out of a consumerist culture –

– is an ongoing challenge. But in that space, you can find out what’s inside of you. You can create your self, your relationships, your life.

And maybe even some happiness.