Justine Musk's Blog, page 24

the life-or-death pursuit of creative-badass joy (+ why we’re all entrepreneurs now)

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When Jen Louden invited me to blog about creative joy, I couldn’t help thinking about how we have yet to put creativity — as a value, as a practice –at the center of our lives, our families, our culture.

We’re trained to be productive. We have to put food on the table. Who can afford the time and money to be creative, especially with all that daydreaming involved, that pointless wandering around? We’re coming out of an Industrial Age that trained us to be factory workers, sensible professionals, linear thinkers. Creativity had little to do with any of this. It was banished to the sidelines otherwise known as Bohemia, not exactly known for a flourishing economy.

But now, as we enter this post-consumer era where we differentiate ourselves not through our factories, but our ideas, the question has flipped upside over. As we step into The Creative Age, who can afford not to be creative?

Creativity is the ability to find new solutions to old problems, to make something new from what is. To see new patterns beyond the existing ones. To rethink one or more aspects of what is given. — from the book WELCOME TO THE CREATIVE AGE by Mark Earls

Whether the problem is personal (finding a job, juggling work and family, losing weight, getting out of debt) or global (fighting poverty, fighting human trafficking, fighting the oppression of girls and women, fighting climate change), the ability to find new solutions seems, shall we say, damn crucial.

One could even say that our survival as a species depends on it.

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I consider myself a fan — and a friend — of Silicon Valley whizkid Ben Casnocha, who just came out with a book called THE START-UP OF YOU. The book suggests that in a world like ours, laughing hysterically at the very notion of a five-year plan, we are all entrepreneurs now: of our own lives, innovating and creating and co-creating as we go.

I like the analogy.

A startup isn’t a company so much as a loose organization in search of a business model that will make it a company. It has to figure out what it does best (as opposed to what it thinks it does best), how it can solve a problem or fulfill a need in the real world (and not just in theory); it has to stay open and flexible and quick on its feet, absorbing what doesn’t work and leaning into what does. It starts out with Plan A, comes into new information (the kind that less-entrepreneurial types might perceive as ‘mistakes’ or ‘failures’), and pivots to Plan B. Or Plan M or Q or Z. It observes, tests itself against the world, learns, tests itself some more, learns more, and through a series of calculated risks — small experiments and little bets — moves toward that sweetspot where what it is and what it does intersects with what the world needs. And everyone is better off.

Successfully navigating a world of constant change, where things are one way one moment and another way the next, is a deeply creative act.

After all, the only way to stay ahead of the future is to invent it.

(Before your resources run out.)

I think about this when I look at my sons, now five and a half and eight years old. How to prepare them for a future when you don’t even know what the future is going to look like? How to prepare them for careers that could become obsolete or don’t exist yet? What if preparing them now means equipping them with the skills and tools to invent and create? To combine ideas, reframe problems and solve them in new ways?

Am I doing that? Am I cultivating their creativity, their curiosity?

Am I setting an example?

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I am no photographer by any means — my digital camera defeats me — but dude, do I love Instagram for Android. I love to compose shots, or crop and edit existing shots; I love to run them through the different filters and see what results. I started playing with Instagram while waiting for a website to load (my Internet was having a very slow night) and then, when I looked up, two hours had passed.

My initial response was to berate myself for wasting time. It’s not like those two hours had advanced my life in any obvious or clearcut way. I had done something just for the doing of it. The creative joy.

(It deepens and rounds out your day. It’s like disappearing into the moment and touching some mystical ground, then surfacing, restored. I felt a calm that I would take into the ‘real’ work of my writing or my interactions with my kids.)

And yet. I know that you don’t live your life in neat little compartments. The brain is wired to seek patterns and meaning, and what it learns in one domain it transfers to another. I am developing my eye, my aesthetic, and I am learning about the self that reflects back from the images I make. I am also learning about how you change ‘reality’ just by the angle or the light, or a shift in perspective. There’s no telling how this will influence other areas of my life, but I know that it will; how you do one thing is how you do everything.

Just because something doesn’t seem relevant now, doesn’t mean it won’t prove relevant later, as various authors point out in the book JUST START:

When you’re operating in the unknown…It is not always clear beforehand which pieces of information, or which potential assets, are worth paying attention to and which are not. This means everything is potentially important, at least initially. It is only later (or after the fact) that we know which things were critical and which were superfluous.

Steve Jobs dropped out of college so (ironically) he could just go to the classes that interested him. One involved calligraphy, an ancient art form not exactly in demand in the workaday world. But it helped Jobs develop a formidable sense for beauty and design that, ten years later, he would build into a company called Apple. (“Taste,” Jobs once said, “is trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”)

Jobs’ interest in calligraphy was a dot that connected up with other dots. It became relevant. In hindsight, the connection of those dots seems logical. Back then, people no doubt thought he was nuts, a dilettante, drifting and wasting time.

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It turns out that emotion is not divorced from reason. Emotion enables reason. Emotion acts as a kind of mental GPS, leading us toward what helps and away from what hurts. Emotion enables us to assign things their proper weight and make decisions accordingly. Without it, saving a child from a burning building would imprint itself on your brain with the same importance, or unimportance, as tripping over your shoelace. It isn’t emotional people but unemotional people who make decisions that strike others as irrational — or who can’t make them at all.

In the book HOW WE DECIDE, Jonah Lehrer points out that

…emotions are rooted in the predictions of highly flexible brain cells which are constantly adjusting their connections to reflect reality. Every time you make a mistake or encounter something new, your brain cells are busy changing themselves. Emotions are profoundly smart and constantly learning, they are not simply animal instincts that must be tamed.

Creative joy, then, is an arrow pointing us toward what helps. It evolved as part of a system of emotions that mapped out our survival. Creative joy reveals our interests and hints at our abilities. It demonstrates our strengths. It shows us who we are. As Andrew Halfacre points out, often it’s not a single overriding passion that defines you but “a patchwork of passions which you stitch together to keep you warm”: not one dot, but many.

Creative joy — if you’re willing to listen to it — is the unifying thread that leads you from one dot to the other to the other until you can connect them or “stitch together” into a greater whole. It’s not a quick process. It might take twenty years. So maybe nature instilled a more immediate reward to keep us involved and on track: the joy of the act itself. Turning our backs on that — dismissing it as a frivolous or “selfish” use of time — could mean rejecting life itself.

And wouldn’t that be tragic.

tweetable: “creative joy is an arrow that points us to meaning” click to tweet

Check out the Creative Joy Retreat led by some favorites of mine: Jennifer Louden, Marianne Elliot and Susannah Conway.

creative badass epic post: how to figure out your purpose/passion/just what the hell it is you want

Early in our relationship, when my boyfriend and I still considered ourselves frovers – a cross between friends and lovers, not boyfriend-girlfriend but more than friends with benefits (I was not a ‘Rules’ girl) – he asked me, “So what do you want to do with your life?”

I talked for a bit, and he was thoughtful.

“Is something wrong?” I said.

“I’m just impressed,” he said, “that you were able to answer the question. Most women can’t.”

I thought of this when I read this post, which asks the very reasonable question: How can you go after what you want when you have no idea what you want? You can’t know what you want if you’re not sure who you are, and since we’re all works-in-progress, I would say that even those of us who know what we want, might not always remember what we want, or find ourselves clinging to outdated notions of what we want, or wake up one morning to realize that we’ve wanted all the wrong things. So I think the question, much like the line of breath in meditation, is something you have to keep returning to: keep remembering to ask, and to listen for the answers.

GET OPEN

To get open is, as Russell Simmons puts it, “to always be as open, creative and fluid as possible, and never become rigid, old, or tight. The freedom you experience when you’re open is where all the positive change in your life will emanate from.”

Change is what happens in the space between things: the force of you meets the force of something else, whether it’s a person, place, or an experience, and your paradigm alters. Opening yourself up to that is to allow in new information about who you are and what you’re capable of.

Once, when I was a kid, I raced around the track during gym and flung myself in the grass to recover. The teacher came up to me and asked if I was going to try out for the track team. “No,” I panted. When she asked why not, I said, “Because I can’t run.”

She said, in her best I’m-going-to-pretend-you’re-not-an-idiot tone, “But I just saw you run.”

I had been walking over a mile home from school every afternoon. I’d built up stamina and gotten in shape without realizing. But I was resistant to this new information. I refused to ‘get open’. And I wasn’t some old, rigid, jaded adult: I was twelve.

If ‘getting open’ was our natural state, people like Russell Simmons wouldn’t have to instruct us to do it.

WRITE IT OUT UNTIL YOUR EYEBALLS BLEED

Steve Pavlina has a good post about how to find your purpose in life. He advises you to sit down with pad and pen and keep writing out your answers to the question, “What is my purpose in life?” until you get that magical choked-up feeling, that chill, that urge to cry, that signals you’ve found it. It won’t happen with your first answer. It won’t happen with your twentieth. Or your fifty-first. Those will be your obvious answers, your stock, superficial answers, the surface crap your brain has to clear out before it can get to the juice.

I have to admit, I tried this exercise but didn’t stick with it. Pavlina warns that at some point you will want to get up and leave, you will feel the Resistance, and you should resist it. I did not. I went for chocolate. I am weak like that. But the next day, while I was driving, an answer came into my brain that sent a shiver down my spine and made me cry out, it felt so right and real and raw.

Steve might be onto something.

ASK A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT QUESTION

Andrew Halfacre points out that you can find clues to what you want by paying attention to what you don’t want.

There are two kinds of people in the world. (People who make statements like “there are two kinds of people in the world” and…Kidding. Sort of.) Halfacre calls them “toward” people and “away” people. When you know which you are, you can figure out how best to motivate yourself.

Psychologists have discovered that we can be motivated by the pleasure of gain (what we’re moving toward) or the fear of loss or pain (what we’re moving away from). If you’re losing weight, for example, you can move towards the image of you fit, healthy, running around with your kids, confident in your jeans or on the beach. Or you can move away from the discomfort of clothes that don’t fit right, the way you huff and puff when you go up the stairs, the fear of dying from a heart attack and not being there for your kids as they grow up.

‘Toward’ people love goals. Goals give them something to aim at. They get energized by them. They’re the perky, positive, go-go-go people attending Anthony Robbins seminars.

‘Away’ people, on the other hand, need something to avoid. Their communication tends to slant negative: what will happen if you don’t do this, the unhappy consequences if you do that. They are motivated by thoughts of certain pain. Something has to hit a level of crisis to motivate them to do something about it, and that motivation lessens as the pain lessens as they move away from whatever it is that they want to avoid.

Generally we’re a mix. I, for example, move towards some things (the pleasure and satisfaction of a completed manuscript) and away from others (the pain of total disorganization and chaos). Because I’m not as motivated to organize as I am to write blog posts, I have a history of letting things fall apart and pile up before the pain is bad enough for me to need to move away. In high school I was motivated toward excelling in English and history (which resulted in high grades) and away from flunking math and science (which resulted in barely passing grades).

You can increase your motivation by using both ‘toward’ and ‘away’. I quit smoking in order to move away from cancer, death, wrinkles and bad smells, but it didn’t truly stick until I also moved toward the pleasure and freedom of being a nonsmoker. (Blogging about nonsmoking gives me an added pain to move away from: the humiliation of smoking after stating so publicly that I’m nonsmoking.) To finish my novel, I joined Stickk.com and pledged to donate a thousand dollars to a cause that I despise should I fail to meet my self-imposed deadline. This gives me a whole new level of pain to move away from.

But overall, we tend to be more one type than another. And if you recognize yourself as an ‘away’ type, the question, What do you want? is more difficult for you because you focus instead on what you don’t want. So Halfacre advises you to ask: What do you want…instead?

It’s a neat trick. I tried it on myself. (If I don’t want to feel messy, overwhelmed, and inconvenienced, what do I want…instead? I want to feel streamlined, clear, and in control of my time.) The answer to the question gives your mind a new focus, a new sense of what might make you happy.

When you catch yourself, or anybody else, grumbling or complaining, give it a shot. If you don’t want to work in a cubicle, what do you want…instead? If you don’t want to die alone in an apartment with only your twenty cats to miss you, what do you want…instead?

YOU ARE WHAT YOU’RE ATTRACTED TO

Danielle LaPorte said this, or something similar to this, and I’ve always been intrigued by it. It’s human nature to project ourselves onto the world, so that “we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are” (a quote which has been attributed to both Anais Nin and the Qur’an, so take your pick). When we bitch and complain about people, we’re really remarking on qualities we don’t like about ourselves (but we consciously won’t own up to). When we admire people, we’re really noticing qualities we like or that lie latent in ourselves (but we consciously won’t own up to).

Business coach Sinclair once asked me to name two people who fascinate me, and I spoke off the top of my head: Kate Moss and David Bowie. Why? she asked, and I spoke about style, creativity, iconoclasm, rebellion, the ability to be yourself when it cuts against conventional wisdom, to reinvent yourself, to rise from the ashes when you need to, to be at the throbbing heart of the culture, to say what you need to say (or refuse to say anything) and not give a damn, to change the game. I remember enjoying Simon Cowell for his shameless, brazen honesty, his ability to say what other people wouldn’t. Recently I’ve developed a mild fascination with Russell Simmons, the way he blends entrepreneurship, spirituality/wisdom and lifestyle. I might have to take a deeper look at what that says about me and where I want to go next.

LaPorte said at a conference last year that when she asked this question to her private clients – mostly women – the person they mentioned most was (wait for it) Angelina Jolie. “They admire her boldness,” she said. That’s an interesting thing to think about: what we, as a gender, might need to own up to.

(Of course, if you take this question very literally, you get a different sort of answer. I would appear to be a red velvet cupcake. Or Keanu Reeves.)

FOLLOW YOUR STRENGTHS

Your strengths are not necessarily the things that you’re good at. Sometimes you have to be wary about getting stuck in the things that you’re good at (you might be good at accounting, even though it makes you suicidal).

Your strengths are found in those moments when you feel most alive, fully present, revitalized: when you feel yourself being you at your best, highest self. The trick is to identity those moments and recognize what you’re doing when you experience them.

Then do more of those things.

Eventually you can figure out a way to, as Steve Jobs put it, “connect the dots”: put those strengths together in a way that is unique to you and serves the world.

We don’t recognize our own strengths because they come so naturally and easily to us. Like breathing. We take them for granted. Doesn’t everybody have the ability to breathe? (It took me thirty-six years to figure out that my ability to ingest information and put ideas together is not the norm, that there’s something called ideation. Good to know.)

Which is why it’s a good idea to

ASK A FRIEND

or a family member (preferably one who doesn’t have it in for you).

There are things about ourselves that we can see, and that others can see.

There are things about ourselves that we can see, and that others can’t see.

There are things about ourselves that we can’t see, and that others can’t see.

There are things about ourselves that we can’t see….and that others can see.

To learn who you are, to learn your purpose in life, ask those who know you (and whom you trust to have your best interests in mind), what they think your purpose in life is. And then ask again. And then keep asking. Their first answers will be stock, superficial answers: the crap their brains need to clear out before they get to the juice. But as Simon Sinek puts it in his great book START WITH WHY, eventually they’ll stop talking about you, and start talking about how they feel when they’re around you (unless they’re so annoyed that they smack you instead). You make them feel inspired. Or understood. Or more deeply connected to the world. Or more appreciative of their lives. Or organized and clear. Or spiritual. You see what I’m getting at. And when you feel that inward shiver of recognition, like someone’s put their finger directly on your soul-nerve, you’ll know that that’s the information that can help you.

LOOK TO YOUR CHILDHOOD

It’s common to advise people to look at the things they enjoyed doing as a child, and then examine why they enjoyed doing those things. When I was a kid, I enjoyed gymnastics, which wouldn’t seem to help me that much as a woman in her late thirties who is five foot nine to boot. But when I look at why I enjoyed the sport – watching it as well as doing it – I can see that I liked the grace of movement, the choreography, the levels of mastery, the performance factor. I liked competing and being on stage. That information is helpful to me.

It’s less common to advise people to look at the things that shamed and traumatized them. As children we develop incredible coping strategies in order to navigate our personal worlds, and to get the attention that isn’t an entitlement but a basic survival need. I touched on this subject in this post, in which I referenced a book called THE BIG LEAP by Gay Hendricks. Hendricks advises you to take your ‘obvious’ talent, whatever you do best, and drill down and drill down until you find your unique ability, your superpower, which is nestled deep inside the center of that talent like the tiniest of Russian dolls.

When I did this exercise, I took the obvious thing – my writing – and drilled down to find, as my therapist once put it, “the ability to resonate with other people, with the culture, with the world at large”. I was a deeply lonely kid, a social misfit, bullied and ostracized, so it makes sense that I would have developed an alternative strategy to get the sense of connection that I craved. It’s also, interestingly enough, a strategy that allows me to be intimate and distant at the same time.

FIND YOUR SOUL-HOME

If you’re a square peg in a round hole, get out of the damn hole. Go find a square one. They’re out there. Part of learning who you are is learning the environment you need to be at your best. (The “what do you want…instead?” question can be very helpful with this.) Some of us are lucky enough to, as the saying goes, bloom where we’re planted. Many of us are not. We often grow up with a sense of being defective, of something’s wrong with us, so we need to chop and trim ourselves and twist our selves inside out to fit our surrounding reality. This rarely turns out well. Better to search out the reality – or, if necessary, to bring it into being – that fits you.

This, by the way, applies to relationships. We look to other people to reflect a sense of who we are. Toxic people reflect you in ways that magnify your faults, drain your confidence and deplete your self-esteem. Healthy people reflect you in ways that celebrate your great points and coax forth your best self. The strategy here is easy to say (and often challenging to do). Run away, away, away, from the toxic people. Run toward, toward, toward the healthy people. You can recognize if someone is good for you by paying attention to how your body feels. If you get clenched, stressed, and knotted up inside just thinking about the person, then I urge you to re-evaluate that relationship and whether you want it in your life. The body doesn’t lie.

GO FOR MASTERY

We tend to enjoy doing the things that we’re good at. But we’re generally not good at anything – even the things we have natural talents for (you might have a talent for the piano, but you still need to learn how to play) – until we put in the time, sweat and deliberate practice required.

You might think passion comes first, and mastery second – but what if it’s the other way around?

You might feel drawn to something but drop it as soon as it gets difficult or tedious or boring or unpleasant. You take this as a sign that you don’t have any passion for it. But what if passion comes after you’ve closed the creative gap (or at least worked your way partway through it)?

After all, being a beginner at anything – snowboarding, blogging, learning a language, painting, building a company – really sucks. You feel awkward and fumbling and you know your work is crap. (It is supposed to be crap! You are a beginner!) We don’t bound out of bed in the morning thinking, Today I get to go be crap! Progress is long and hard, breakthrough moments so infrequent that you need to learn to love the plateau. Most people can’t. Most people quit. And most people don’t know what their so-called ‘passion’ is. I sense a connection here.

Sometimes you have to choose – and commit – based on little more than instinct and faith: instinct that somewhere deep inside you, perhaps very very deep, is the ability to be good at this, and faith that the passion will grow with your ability. When you get good at something, you enjoy it more, which means you do it more, which means you get better at it, which means you enjoy it more, which means you do it more, which means you get better at it….You see where I’m going with this.

When I look at my own life, I see that I became passionate about writing and storytelling when I was fourteen (the novel MISERY, by Stephen King, was a game-changer for me). But I had been writing stories on my own, for no reason other than the attention it got me (see earlier bit about developing childhood survival strategies) since fourth grade. It’s similar with blogging. I have a passion for it now, but it took a lot of doing before I developed it.

I would like to develop a passion for yoga. I am drawn to it. But I’ve been lazy and undisciplined and haven’t managed to develop a daily practice. I find it kind of boring. I could conclude that I lack passion – or I could perceive feeling ‘bored’ as a type of Resistance that I should push through. I know that my body, health and mind would thank me.

It’s no surprise, then, that the top indicator of success isn’t IQ or natural talent or the level of your parents’ income, but grit.

If it’s true that we don’t know who we are until we know what we can do – and I think it is – then learning who we are is about experimenting with our abilities, trying new things, pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zone, living off the edge of our limits. And if you don’t know what you want until you know who you are – and vice versa – then learning who you are/what you want is hard – damn – work – that nobody tells us about or prepares us for. Instead, we look to external things for a sense of identity, whether it’s an expensive lifestyle, or a high-status job, or a relationship. We go after the job or the relationship first, and then try to figure out who we are, when in reality it should be the other way around. Because we could lose the lifestyle, or the job, or the relationship – and no longer know who we are, or what we want, or where to go next. We’re in crisis.

When my boyfriend asked me that question – What do you want to do with your life? – I could come up with an answer. I’m still figuring it out, of course, but identity is not a static thing. The brain keeps reshaping itself according to the experiences you provide it. We contain the potential for multitudes. Still, I do believe in a core voice, a set of abilities and instincts, an inner knowing that will guide you this way instead of that way so long as you have the patience and courage to listen.

What I didn’t tell my boyfriend – at the time – was by that point I had been through several years of therapy, of emotional pain and personal crisis. I could sink or swim. I could find the beauty in the breakdown – and break through — or I could just break down. For me, the beauty was in reconnecting to that core voice. My sense of self could bloom from there. Everything else can follow.

Because what we want, in the end, is to know who we are and what our purpose is (and, maybe, who to love). If we can break ourselves open to new information, if we can look for that information not just within ourselves but in the spaces and interactions between ourselves and others, if we can find who we are in what we do, not just for ourselves, but for the world: that seems a worthy quest in itself.

Samantha Brick + the perils of pretty girl syndrome ( + Ashley Judd bitch-slaps the media)

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When I read the "women hate me because I'm beautiful" article by Samantha Brick, I rolled my eyes. I couldn't help it. Samantha seemed a victim of what I think of as Pretty Girl Syndrome, which involves a confusion of your identity with your appearance. ("People don't like me/my looks, thus they must be jealous of me/my looks.")

Samantha is also buying into one of the favorite stories that our culture likes to tell itself about women: that we're vain frivolous creatures at each others' throats as we compete for male attention.

Pretty Girl Syndrome happens partly because of the way a girl gets used to seeing herself reflected back by the people around her. If people in general find you attractive, you tend to know, because they tell you (not all of them, but enough to get the point across). What you think of your looks can be beside the point: nobody can be beautiful to anybody all of the time, particularly ourselves to ourselves.

Beauty, including your own, isn't static. It ranges along an octave or three. You have some great moments helped along by perfect lighting, and then there's the rest of the time. Beauty is relative: someone who's grown up stunning in a small, Midwestern town might barely make the grade in New York or LA. (In Los Angeles, people will distinguish between being "hot" and "LA-hot" with the tacit understanding that "LA-hot" is superior.) There's also a difference between being what Tyra Banks once termed "street-fine" and "model-fine". Someone who is drop-dead in real life might not transfer well to photographs – which demand a precise and technical kind of beauty — whereas models tend to look better in photographs than in reality (which is why meeting them in person can be kind of fascinating).

In her photographs, as has been widely and enthusiastically noted, Samantha Brick does not appear to be beautiful enough to justify her claims that women dislike her because she is beautiful. This doesn't mean that, in real life, she isn't (or wasn't) exceptionally attractive in her own right.

It just points up how ridiculous her claims are.

Samantha believes that women hate her because this is the lesson she absorbed from a culture that loves to show women catfighting, back-biting and sniping at each other. Saying "she's just jealous" is an easy fallback position – one which the culture encourages, not to mention sympathetic friends — instead of, say, a hard and brutal look at who you are and how you interact with others. And since nobody – but nobody – is liked by everybody all of the time (except for Oprah), there are enough opportunities over the years to practice the "she's just jealous" mantra until it's grooved in your brain.

But if women truly hated beautiful women, then women's magazines wouldn't be so populated with them. Beautiful women wouldn't be used in the advertising – pitched to women — that those magazines depend upon for their existence. At least some beautiful women still manage to make – and keep – close girlfriends, which has a lot more to do with your ability to be interesting, trustworthy and cool to hang out with, than whether or not you look good in leather pants.

Women don't resent beautiful women so much as the bullshit around beauty: the impossible standards fueled by retouched images of highly styled celebrities and models, the cost and effort of attaining and maintaining. Why does some loser passing you in the street have the power to "decide" if you're hotornot – or where you rate on the scale from 1 to 10 — as if you're supposed to care? And if you don't care about being 'hot' in the conventional sense, where are the freaking alternatives? Aren't there other ways, other options to choose from, when it comes to presenting yourself to the world?

What women want, in the end, isn't airbrushed perfection. They want to feel comfortable in their skin, and to know that they are loved.

Two things that this culture doesn't hand out in spades.

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To say that you're goodlooking is to set yourself up for slaughter.

Samantha Brick's real crime is not, as many would claim, that she's not as gorgeous in real life as she is in her head. It's that she had the temerity to admit she's good-looking at all.

It's a funny thing. Donald Trump can boast that he's greater than Jesus and Elvis combined and aside from some eye-rolling and a few snide comments about his hair, we accept the Trumpster as part of the pop cultural landscape. Samantha says, I'm dreamy and blokes fancy me and you would think, from the vitriol this inspired, that she had gone all Hannibal Lector and made a meal out of somebody…with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

I don't think this is just about seeming arrogant or conceited. Overall, Samantha doesn't strike me as a particularly confident woman (I could get all armchair-psychologist on her ass and suggest that the insecurity she senses in other women is her own, projected.)

You could argue that, well, Trump is obnoxious but he can back up his claims, more or less, while Samantha…?

But physical charisma is more complicated than what you might or might not see within the frozen moment of a photograph that might or might not be particularly flattering. Beauty and sex appeal are not synonymous with one another; you can have one without the other. And then there's the eye-of-the-beholder thing. Nobody is beautiful to everybody; show me a supermodel and I'll show you a forum in which her face and body are found decidedly lacking.

As in everything else, tastes vary.

One of my closest male friends had a longterm crush on the actress Helen Hunt. Hunt is charming, no question, but not necessarily the obvious choice for a twentysomething male to salivate over. My ex-husband has a taste for tall, thin, expensively attired blondes – but then (to my surprise and delight) developed a mild fascination with Rachael Ray, who is not these things.

Attraction comes in all shapes and sizes. Even when you think you have a 'type', someone can come along and surprise you. Sexual appeal is disruptive and subversive: it's not confined to a particular class or group, it can't be legislated, it's not known for a considerate sense of timing, it has no respect for boundaries, it refuses to be as narrowly defined as the culture would have you think. It would have its wanton way with you and push you in any number of unexpected directions. It would hang you on the hook of your own longing.

I once saw an interview with Cher where she remarked that 'sexy' is a quality you have – or you don't. If you have it, you know it. Charisma – that sense of presence that captures attention, intrigues, makes people want to come closer – requires a sense of confidence. A swagger. A coy look and an inviting grin. Sexy is a way of being in your skin: a body language, an attitude. It's something you can turn up or turn down – or shut off.

There's a well-known anecdote about Marilyn Monroe, in Norma Jean Baker mode, walking down a crowded street with a reporter. Nobody was paying attention to either of them. She turned to the reporter and said, "Do you want to see her…? Do you want to see Marilyn?" She walked ahead a few steps and her whole demeanor changed. She got into character. People immediately saw her, recognized her, and started flocking around her.

Marilyn was famous for being both sensual and childlike, as if she required the innocence of the latter to temper the carnal knowledge of the former. The idea that sexual appeal can be a conscious, deliberate performance cuts against the idea of the ingénue, who, as Peeta says about Katniss in the movie THE HUNGER GAMES, "has no idea of the effect she has."

To be worldly, and aware of your seductive power, is to edge into the dangerous territory of the temptress. The femme fatale. The siren. These are characters who use their beauty and sex to exploit men and lure them to their doom, whether it's Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden or Matty and Ned in the movie BODY HEAT (good movie). Female sexuality and morality have a history of being conflated: purity of body equals purity of mind, and to lose that purity is to risk being referred to quite literally as trash. Abstinence educators inform their students that

Your body is a wrapped lollipop. When you have sex with a man, he unwraps your lollipop and sucks on it.

It may feel great at the time, but, unfortunately, when he's done with you, all you have left for your next partner is a poorly wrapped, saliva-fouled sucker.

You're one step away from being a slut, or possibly a slut with ambition (ie: a golddigger). Which means you're not even a person, just a "poorly wrapped, saliva-fouled sucker': garbage. Is there any group of people quite so openly despised and dismissed in this culture, as that of the so-called trophy wife? When a woman pairs up with a wealthy man, the default assumption is that it's a transaction: her beauty for his wealth. Ergo, she's a whore. If he's not careful, she'll take him for everything he's worth. (The idea that he might be exploiting her somehow rarely comes up, even if he discards her. Boys will be boys.) The cultural belief running underneath this set of assumptions is that sexually confident women must be predatory and dangerous.

So women, particularly young women, find themselves in a tricky position in a hypersexualized, Girls Gone Wild culture that teaches them to lead with their sexuality — only to turn around and condemn them for it. The compromise seems to be that you can be sexy and goodlooking if you don't really know that you're sexy and goodlooking; if it's a "who, me?" kind of accident, and you talk about how ugly you were as a child and/or how much you hate your thighs. What results is a failure to own your sexuality, to see it as an aspect of your identity that you can play up or play down as the situation warrants. You can't control what you don't admit to having in the first place.

In her book POWERING UP, Anne Doyle remarks on how women of the Millennial generation continue to shock their female elders by their failure to "dress for success":

If I've heard that complaint once, I've heard it at least 100 times from mystified professional women who are astonished at the inappropriate ways legions of young women are dressing for work…[Young women] with leadership ambitions are underestimating the confusing signals they are sending, particularly to men, when they wear sexy clothing at work. [Older women] in particular, who struggled so mightily to emerge from the confining box that measured women first on their "physical assets", are watching in stunned amazed at the way young women are boldly playing – some would say misplaying – the sex card….Women who aspire to leadership must be highly conscious about not sending mixed signals with their clothing.

If you don't own your sexuality, the question becomes: who does? And to what end?

In a recent article in The Daily Beast, actress Ashley Judd writes:

The Conversation about women's bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at (and marketed to) us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.



She uses herself as an example:

When I have gained weight, going from my usual size two/four to a six/eight after a lazy six months of not exercising, and that weight gain shows in my face and arms, I am a "cow" and a "pig" and I "better watch out" because my husband "is looking for his second wife." (Did you catch how this one engenders competition and fear between women? How it also suggests that my husband values me based only on my physical appearance? Classic sexism. We won't even address how extraordinary it is that a size eight would be heckled as "fat.")

But her conversation about The Conversation, how female bodies are regarded as public property to be criticized and ridiculed can just as easily apply these days to Kelly Clarkson or Jessica Simpson. The message being sent to these women is very clear. You don't get to decide what looks good or feels good when it comes to your appearance. We do. Beauty isn't something you generate within you; beauty has nothing to do with who you are as a person; your potential and accomplishments mean nothing. We dictate the standards. We give you beauty, and we can take it away.

Any attitude that openly conflicts with this – like, say, a profound sense of confidence in your own appeal, the declaration that "I am attractive whether or not you actually think so" – has to be shot down: not just to put the woman in her place, to "control and define" her, but as an example and a warning to others.

In her article, Ashley Judd is sharply aware of the fact that it's often women doing this to other women:

Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women's faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.

Whenever a woman participates in this Conversation that denigrates someone like Ashley Judd, or Jessica Simpson – or, for that matter, Samantha Brick – she is only strengthening the patriarchal frame that sets the terms for this dialogue and controls it. It doesn't just frame the way women are discussed, but the way they are thought about and perceived, and the criteria by which all girls and women are judged. Are you hotornot. What are you on a scale of 1 to 10. You're old, you're a pig, watch out or you won't keep your husband.

I, for one, would like to change the conversation.

Raise your hand or honk your horn if you agree.

why the world needs more ambitious women ( + ambition is not a dirty word)

1

In January 2009, there was an article in the Harvard Business Review called "Women and the Vision Thing" comparing male and female leaders.

To the researchers' admitted surprise, "as a group, women outshone men in most of the leadership dimensions measured. There was one exception, however, and it was a big one…."

Vision.

Women scored lower on developing and communicating a vision.

A couple of years later, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg kicked up controversy when she called upon women to close "the ambition gap" between women and men. Women need to be – and stay – more ambitious, she said, if they're to belly up to the table of power.

You could argue: Why would women even want to? Why should the world care? And what do overpaid CEOs have to do with the rest of us?

You could argue: What does it mean to have 'ambition', anyway?

But it does the world no good when over half its citizens are wildly underrepresented in the rooms and boardrooms and corridors of power and have, as Anne Doyle puts it, "the influence of a special interest group"; when the female perspective carries such little weight that discussions about events that directly affect women don't include women (witness the recent GOP all-male gathering to debate women's access to birth control), or don't include enough women to make a difference.

As Doyle reports in her book POWERING UP:

Don't kid yourself: size matters…..[sustainable] cultural change requires collective power. An abundance of research shows that few lone women, no matter how exceptional they are, have little impact on the conversation of a nearly all-male group, let alone its decisions. It takes critical mass to shift group dynamics. It isn't until minority voices reach "a tipping point" of one-third representation in groups that they begin to significantly influence outcomes.

…..Whether it's an executive leadership team or scriptwriters for Jon Stewart's THE DAILY SHOW, lone, diverse voices – with a different perspective than the dominant majority – have little power.

A different perspective equals different priorities, a different approach.

Companies are actually more profitable when three of the ten board members – are women. (One wonders if the financial meltdown would have happened any differently if there had been enough women – who are generally more cautious than men, and hence better investors — to temper the testosterone.)

And — as Nicholas Kristov has observed in his great book HALF THE SKY — when women in the developing world hold assets or gain incomes, they invest in their home and their community: family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing. Consequently children are healthier.

And security experts have observed that the countries that nurture terrorists are disproportionately those that marginalize women: countries like Yemen, Somalia, the "Af-Pak" region of Afghanistan-Pakistan:

But I think that if you look at this century and you look at the instability, the conflicts that we have in so many places in the world, there's a direct relationship between the subjugation and oppression of women and extremism. It is therefore in our interest to stand up for the rights of women. Because by doing so, we enhance our own security.

- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton

When I was at TEDxWomen, Barbara Streisand made a surprise appearance to introduce C. Noel Bairey Merz, MD, who is doing pioneering research into gender differences in heart disease. Heart disease kills more women than all the cancers combined. (Did you know this? I didn't.) But heart attacks present much differently in women than in men – which means that women have died from heart attacks that they didn't even know they were having. (Do you know the symptoms of a female heart attack? I didn't.) Nor did their doctors. Since medical research focuses on men, the male norm is taken as the norm for males and females both. As a result, heart disease in women has gone undetected and untreated.

It took a woman to figure this out.

In short: when women have power and influence, women are better off.

So is the world.

2

Vision and ambition are connected. To have ambition is to have a sense of how things could be but aren't yet. It's to nurture a radical sense of possibility – and strive to make that possibility a reality.

I was struck by a recent post by Tara Gentile in which she asked women how they felt when someone called them 'ambitious':

I think this response from Annching Wang…sums it up:



"I've been called that several times, and it has always seemed strange to me…like I'm overreaching for something."

I think, at the heart of it, we want to be ambitious. We want to stretch ourselves. We want to push our capacity for greatness.

But that rubs against the status quo. When you allow your ambition to show, it's like you've taken a little step off the straight & narrow path. Especially if you're a woman.

Ambition has long been a man's territory. Men dream big dreams and are expected to fulfill them. A woman's ambition is, how shall we say, more demure? "Ambitious" has been a derisive term when applied to women. Exactly as Annching suggests: overreaching. Out of her league.

Overreaching. Out of her league.

But isn't that what ambition is supposed to be about? When a goal is within your reach, can it even qualify as ambitious?

I was married to a man who wants to colonize Mars. Some might consider that 'overreaching' and yet I doubt he cares. In the pursuit of this goal he's built his own rocket company and gone down in history with the first privately funded rocket to reach orbit. He's also obscenely, ridiculously wealthy. By overreaching, by following his vision, he's done very well for himself — and has contributed to and impacted the culture.

You could even say that women overreach all the time, as they juggle a bewildering array of responsibilities everyday, as they shift between working in the workplace and working at home, as they try to have it all and make it come out right, as they try to make sure that everybody is happy, as they cater to the needs of others at the expense of their own, as they clean up the messes, as they strive for this rather mythical thing known as balance, as they navigate the guilt when this doesn't happen. Having babies and raising children – especially as a single mother – requires an ambition all its own, especially in a culture that pays lip service to motherhood without awarding it any real status or economic value.

It's when a woman steps out of her league – and out of her place – and into domains where, as Anna Fels puts it, "recognition is based on a talent or skill or hard work – rather than on appearance, sexual availability, pure social skills, or subservience" – domains that have traditionally belonged to men – that things get complicated.

3

In her book NECESSARY DREAMS: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives, Fels writes about the relationship between ambition and recognition. Recognition

is one of the two most powerful and vitalizing elements required for the pursuit of long-term goals

yet

The daily texture of women's lives from childhood on is infiltrated with microencounters in which quiet withdrawal, the ceding of available attention to others, is expected, particularly in the presence of men.

The traditional ideal of femininity includes being 'selfless' – as in, lacking any kind of self that takes up space, that has requirements of its own, that looks out for its own best interests. To make a claim on attention (that isn't sexual in nature) — to compete with men for the limited resource of recognition — is to call your very femininity into question (witness the media treatment of basically any female politician).

TEDxWomen came into being for this reason. One of the organizers explained to me that they were having trouble getting women speakers at the regular TED conferences because the women kept turning them down and selflessly referring them to male colleagues instead. If they made a conference that was all women, the organizers reasoned, this would stop happening.

(It also meant that men, in general, wouldn't take the conference as seriously. I certainly didn't see a lot of men in the audience. At least two high-ranking female executives chose not to tell their male superiors that they were taking the day off to attend an all-female event, out of concern that it would seem a frivolous use of their time.)

Yet it is precisely recognition that fuels your quest to improve, master and achieve.

The Hawthorne experiments in the 1920s took an unexpected turn when investigators attempted to determine the working conditions that would best optimize productivity. A group of women factory workers were selected as guinea pigs. The investigators soon discovered that every change in work conditions – from the hours worked to the lighting to the number of rest breaks – seemed to increase the women's output. Eventually they realized that physical conditions were not responsible at all. Morale soared among the women workers when they believed themselves to have been singled out for special attention, when the investigators expressed genuine interest in their opinions and productivity.

Recognition, it turns out, changes the brain.

It increases the production of neurotransmitters: they energize you, enhance your confidence and enable you to focus.

This, Anna Fels points out:

…explains why recognition promotes learning. It explains [why] recognition increases productivity. We sustain effort on projects that maximize present or future affirmation….

…In terms of the economy of recognition, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Those who have received recognition can sustain the effort required to pursue their interests successfully; this in turn leads to more recognition and increases their feelings of self-worth and capability. Furthermore they are motivated by the realistic expectation, based on prior experience, that future efforts will indeed produce additional recognition.

…if you are perceived as talented and bright and motivated, you actually become more talented and bright and motivated.

It also explains why ambition is not static. It grows and shrinks throughout your lifetime, according to what you can see and believe about your own abilities – and how they're reflected back to you by the people around you.

I'm reminded of that quote by Albert Einstein:

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

It's often noted that men will overestimate their abilities and intellect while women underestimate theirs. This is usually explained (as so many gender differences are nowadays) as innate traits with evolutionary advantages – men had to cockily go forth and kill the tiger or battle the enemy, women had to cautiously hunker down to protect themselves and their offspring.

And yet I keep thinking of something Jen Siebold Newsom, director of the documentary MISS REPRESENTATION, said about how her two children were welcomed into the world. Her daughter was showered with gifts involving princesses and the color pink. Her son was showered with gifts that suggested he would grow up to be the President of the United States. Both her son and daughter have the same father – Gavin Newsom, the Mayer of San Francisco – and yet received wildly different forms of recognition from the moment they were born.



So if you become what you are perceived to be, and you're perceived from day one to be a major contender, then you become….?

And if you're not….? If the major attention you receive – or see others of your gender receiving – has to do with being pretty and hot and thin and sexually available, if modestly shrugging off recognition is baked into your very notion of what it means to be a girl (and then a woman), what do you become?

3

I am ambitious.

There. I admitted it.

I'm also a mother, and so my ambition has lived uneasily inside me even as I refuse to sacrifice it. I can't. To stop writing and reading would be to stop breathing, or at least to stop thinking and feeling like myself. When I lost myself – for a while in my early and mid-thirties, after the death of my baby son and the cancerous dissolution of my marriage – it was my writing that brought me back to a healthy sense of center: Oh yeah. This voice. This voice is mine, this is who I am, and nobody, but nobody, can tell me any different. (Certain people tried.)

But it's only recently that I've started to take my ambition seriously. I lived in a very spacious house in Bel Air, and yet I wrote two of my published novels sitting cross-legged on my bed because I didn't have a desk of my own, much less a room of my own, and it didn't occur to me to press the point. The novels themselves, I was ambivalent about. They were written in a genre I had loved growing up, but as my life deepened around me in unexpected ways, my sense of myself as a writer started to change. Or rather, it went into crisis. I didn't know if I had the chops to write the book I truly wanted to write, but I didn't want to write anything else (except blog posts).

Now, as a milestone birthday starts to edge round the seasons and come into view, I can say: Fuck it. There is so little time on this earth, and if I'm going to take time away from my kids it had better be the right dream I'm chasing. It's a bit like that Nike commercial I remember from when I was a teenager: Go big or stay home ("I hate that commercial!" my sister said savagely).

Why not go for whatever greatness I have in me? Why not overreach? Why not attempt to model for my sons a life of passion and accomplishment (that exists independently of any man)?

But to think this way – much less to admit it in public – still feels wrong. Contaminated. Shameful. And it's possible that the only reason I can think this way is because I'm incapable of anything else, for that's how embedded my ambition is within me.

Imagine if someone said this to you:

If you are a woman for whom career greatness and passion for your work matter, then your professional goals ought to be sacrosanct. Actualizing the talents you were born with must always hold equal importance in your life, including family, romantic relationships, children, and community. The world deserves to hear from you.

Does this sound odd to you? Is it the first time anyone has said this to you?…Now count how many times you have been advised to value and protect your ambition as you would any other virtue. You can probably count all of this on one hand.

And yet, if you were to put your ambition first, it would make you a better person in every other aspect of your life…a happier individual, a better partner, a more present parent, a more compassionate friend, and a more engaged community member. You would, in fact, be more alive and grounded in every realm of your life.

(from the book AMBITION IS NOT A DIRTY WORD by Debra Condren).

Yes. Imagine that.

4

To form a vision – much less communicate it to others – is to admit to ambition.

Maybe even the crazy, colonize-Mars level of ambition.

It's to admit that you are deliberately overreaching. That you dare to go for greatness.

No wonder women are hesitant.

Tara Gentile writes about "ambition with purpose" and I like that. It seems a good definition for what vision is: something bigger than you, that attracts and compels others, that makes the world better for you being in it.

Chris Guillebeau writes about creating a legacy project. I always liked the sound of that – and, now, can't help wondering how many women openly discuss their own 'legacy project' or even admit that they want to leave something behind (other than their wondrous children, should they have any), something lasting, something born from the unique mix of talent, need and opportunity that only they can provide and fulfill.

(Are you working on a legacy project? If you aren't, do you want to?)

To value your ambition means to value yourself. Your self. Your identity, your soul, your birthright.

There's a quote from Madonna, who would know:

Power is being told you are not loved and not being destroyed by it.

When you have work that you love, you don't live vicariously through others, and you don't look to others to give your life meaning – which means that no one can take it away from you. You raise your unique voice, and inspire others to raise theirs.

Marianne Williamson has said: Your playing small does not serve the world.

I believe it.

the art of getting creatively unstuck (+ why you sometimes have to kill off your inner nice girl)

"When a woman tells the truth, she is creating the possibility for more truth around her." — Adrienne Rich

1

Sometimes you have to surrender.

We all get stuck from time to time. If we could just lighten up a little, and stop speaking so harshly to ourselves, we might realize there's no shame in it. Getting stuck – hitting an impasse – is part of the process of growth. It's like some cosmic entity knocking on your skull and saying, Hey, you. The usual stuff isn't working anymore. Time to try something new.

2

An act of surrender is an act of letting go. It's an admission that the old model

(the one we've been clinging to so stubbornly, since some ancient part of our brain is always figuring Hey, if nothing's killed us yet, then it ain't broke so why fix it)

is no longer working.

In my case, it was my original outline for my novel-in-progress THE DECADENTS. Somewhere in my reading I'd gotten this idea that to have a needed breakthrough, I had to just give up. So I said to myself, as an experiment: "I quit."

And in the next few days, something interesting happened. Instead of chasing the usual ideas down the familiar mental grooves, my mind started surfacing a new vision for the novel. Since I had surrendered/quit/given up/thrown my hands in the air in utter despair, I was no longer controlled by the usual ways of thinking about the story and its characters. This liberated all of the things that the old model, the outline, had been suppressing. Now they were free to float up to me at odd moments – while I was driving down Wilshire, or swearing at the overly complicated espresso machine, or explaining to my small male child that no, he can't play Minecraft until his eyeballs fall out.

I started to get interested in the novel again.

We're afraid to let go of what's familiar; we're afraid of being left with nothing. We forget that the act of letting go is a creation of space for something better.

3

In order to get some fresh eyes – and some outsider thinking – on my novel, I signed up for a session with Martha Alderson, a.k.a. 'The Plot Whisperer'.

This proved helpful for several reasons. As I talked through my story, I realized I wasn't as lost as I thought. Martha helped me clarify some key scenes that brought the story into focus. Just as importantly, she helped me see what I'd been resisting: the identity and nature of my novel's antagonist. Once I recognized that, it was like the novel itself rose up to meet me. It had been there all along.

This wasn't my only point of resistance. I got into trouble before, when I tried to make my character Gabe the protagonist. For some reason that I still don't fully understand, I hadn't wanted to admit that the protagonist is actually the younger woman that Gabe gets obsessed with: the gorgeous troubled dancer, Cat. It's not that I don't like Cat. I think she's highly intelligent, spirited, and awesome. But it's as if the novel needs to bend one way, and I keep bruising and exhausting myself trying to push it in the other, less-threatening direction.

The question is why.

Alan Watts, in The 90-Day Novel, writes:

…the desire to write is the desire to evolve, to resolve something we seek to understand.

We create our own model of reality – the outlines for our lives, if you will – and our brain chooses to notice whatever supports that reality. It ignores and suppresses everything else. When we get stuck – when that model doesn't work anymore – we're forced to let it go, break it apart, allowing new information to finally reach us, and change us.

It could be that, when we write something that challenges us, we're seeking what lives beyond the edges of our personal reality-model; we're fighting to punch holes in that model until new, much-needed knowledge can get in. These are the scenes that we shy away from: the points of resistance, the problem areas, the reasons we procrastinate. We need to write them but don't want to write them. We put them off.

The mind is a sneaky thing. We can talk about how we should write towards the fear, how we should, as Pema Chodron puts it, "lean into the sharp points": that's where the juice is, the truth is, the growth for our characters and our readers and ourselves. Instead of flinching away, we should flinch forward. But the mind has a lot of defense mechanisms, including the ability to distort, minimize, and deny, deny, deny. Sometimes those points of resistance aren't sharp and scary – like a neon sign yelling Over here! Write your way here here here! – but more like dimly lit corners that your mind instinctively swerves around, or even winks out of existence.

4

I emailed a writer friend:

Curious if you have experienced points of resistance in your own writing…those blind spots you might be, at best, vaguely aware of but keep yourself enough in denial that you don't have to look on them direct, much less work + write your way through them…

….I feel I'm at my best when I write from a deeply womanly (tho muscular) viewpoint, but it's that very 'womaninity' as a friend calls it that I seem to unconsciously pull away from.



He responded:

I feel similarly about masculinity. To write about it honestly would scare a lot of people off. Ditto femininity. Reading Canadian novels, you'd think that all women do here is stare po-faced out of windows at flowers they know the names and scents of…I find that writing about men, warts and all, from nobility and strength to puerility and priapics, can be tough. To write sex–and sexuality–is tough without sounding merely pornographic. But even if you do it well, it's the one thing in your book that reviewers and lots of readers will focus on. You'll be called frank or racy or daring. Too much of sex and sexuality happens offstage in fiction. I would like to see you and other women writers really write from the totality of their beings, top to bottom, sex to spirit, shit to shinola.

I'd like to see all of us do that.

Around the same time, I had a sunlit Malibu brunch with my writing coach Rachel who mentioned that I have yet to truly write the dark sexuality in my novel: "You know that at some point you have to do it."

Yes, I replied, I have to go there, which is the term we use for that deep dive into the raw and vulnerable places inside us. I have to kill off the nice girl in me who doesn't want to be impolite, who doesn't want her characters to suffer, who doesn't want to enter the psyche of a sociopath or examine his legacy of continuing damage. This is hardly a memoir, but any real art-making has to draw from the multiple levels of your creative intelligence, your personality and your past: the totality of your being.

The shadow as well as the light.

I'm fascinated with the Jungian concept of the Shadow: those elements of ourselves that we learned young to perceive as absolutely unacceptable. So we split them off and send them away, out past the edges of the model we learn to form our personality around. As artists, though, we need to call them back. Just as a so-called strength can be flipped into a weakness, a so-called weakness can be flipped into a strength. We don't do ourselves or the world any favors by shutting down these parts of ourselves or sending them into exile.

To learn more about my own shadow, I'm becoming more aware of what I project onto others. If we are what we are attracted to (the qualities in others that lie latent in ourselves) – then we are also what we are repelled by (the qualities in others that we don't want to admit as qualities in ourselves).

Every now and then when I'm with a group of people I run into a particular kind of woman – it's always a woman – who gets on my nerves. She is strong-willed and charismatic and dominates the conversation; she doesn't just command attention, she expects it, she feels entitled to it, she was born to be the star of the show; as my boyfriend puts it, she is an "alpha female". In one case, I was getting tired of watching people in some way or another pay homage to her.

Finally another woman in my group – a psychologist – pointed out the similarities between my "rival" and myself, including the fact that we were both tall and blonde, and mentioned that the rival was having similar issues with me.

The kneejerk assumption would be that we were in competition with each other (aren't women, in this culture, always supposed to be fighting and competing?) but hearing her criticize me for the very same traits I was criticizing in her gave me pause. I do not see myself that way. And I realized that my rival didn't see herself that way either. As a woman – as a nice girl – you're supposed to be selfless and low-key and gentle and self-effacing. You're not supposed to compete for attention (especially with men) , and if by some freak chance you do get it you're supposed to give it away to someone more deserving (usually male). We weren't competing so much as mirroring each other in ways that didn't please either of us.

When I could look on her more clearly, I saw the insecurity and vulnerability in her. They had always been there, evident to others. My brain had chosen not to see them because they didn't fit the way I wanted to perceive her. Thinking harshly about her had been a way of thinking harshly about myself. But what if I extended an olive branch? What if I practiced a spirit of loving-kindness toward her/myself, a spirit of generosity and acceptance?

What if I leaned into the sharp points and stepped into those dimly-lit corners?

What would happen?

5

If we could be gentle with ourselves.

If we could simply accept whatever comes up in our lives — and our work — as neither good nor bad, but awakened forms of energy with important things to teach us. If we could recognize that being 'stuck' is the latest opportunity to expand our vision of ourselves, to change the old model so that it can let in all kinds of light.

If we could look on the fullness of our lives with a spirit of loving-kindness, so that nothing is condemned, split off or banished.

Pema Chodron writes:

We're trying to learn not to split ourselves between our "good side" and our "bad side", between our "pure side" and our "impure side". The elemental struggle is with our feeling of being wrong, with our guilt and shame at what we are. That's what we have to befriend. The point is that we can dissolve the sense of dualism between us and them, between this and that, between here and there, by moving toward what we find difficult and wish to push away.

She talks about the charnal grounds in Tibet. Charnal grounds are graveyards, sort of. Because the ground was too frozen for burial, people would chop up the dead bodies and leave them out on the grounds for the vultures to eat.

Pema writes:

I'm sure the charnel grounds didn't smell very good and were alarming to see. There were eyeballs and hair and bones and other body parts all over the place….[That image] is grounded in some honesty about how the human realm functions. It smells, it bleeds, it is full of unpredictability, but at the same time, it is self-radiant wisdom, good food, that which nourishes us, that which is beneficial and pure. …

…This charnel ground called life is the manifestation of wisdom.

Getting unstuck involves a shift in understanding – and, since we are what we think, a shift in ourselves. We absorb new information and we incorporate it into our model, our outline, our paradigm. We bring something out of the darkness. It has gifts to give.

To stop resisting – to surrender – is to let ourselves relax.

We soften.

We lighten up.

And when we are no longer running away from the charnel grounds, we can move closer and see them for what they are: neither good nor bad, not shameful, just there. The sharp points lose their power.

So I want to relax my way into the rest of my novel, knowing that there are parts coming up that are difficult and dark, that no 'nice girl' should write.

Knowing that those places of resistance are my ragged edge: where I'm forced to grow in my understanding of myself by reclaiming parts of my identity that have been waiting all this time. Those parts might not seem, on the surface, to be very nice, but they provide strength and nourishment and the ability to tell a greater truth. And when one person tells her truth, it gives others permission to do the same.

I'd like to see all of us do that.

the art of outsider thinking (+ why it makes you more creative)

1

So I agreed to write a blog post for a company I respect on a topic that fascinates me. While fitting ideas together and outlining the post, I started thinking

Who the hell am I to be writing on this?

Why should anybody care about what I think?

I wasn't considering the post so much as the bio that might accompany the post. What were my credentials? Where was my real-life experience? How could whatever expertise I might have accrued in another, very different domain possibly apply to this one?

Why should anybody listen to me?

I felt like a total outsider.

I am a total outsider.

So could my perspective possibly be valid?

2

Jonah Lehrer's new book IMAGINE: How Creativity Works would seem to indicate: Yes it can.

In fact, the outsider perspective might sometimes be the superior perspective.

Lerner refers to a man named Alpheus Bingham, a vice president at Eli Lilly (one of the biggest drug companies on the globe). He was in charge of research strategy, managing countless scientists working on countless technical problems, and he was increasingly concerned.

For all the money the company was throwing at these problems, hoping and expecting to come up with the next Prozac, they were getting crappy results.

"And that's when I started to wonder if all these supposedly impossible technical issues were really impossible. Maybe we just had the wrong people working on them?….I always assumed that you hire the best resume and give the problem to the guy with the most technical experience. But maybe that was a big mistake?"

What Bingham did next was pretty radical.

Although companies like Lilly believed in deep secrecy – guarding against the possibility that competitors might steal their ideas – Bingham decided (and I am paraphrasing here): Fuck it.

He launched a website called Innocentive. He took the company's hardest scientific problems and threw them out to the public. He posted them on the site and offered a financial reward to anyone who came up with a solution.

He didn't expect many of them to get solved.

He was wrong.

"The answers just started pouring in," he says. "We got these great ideas from researchers we'd never heard of, pursuing angles that had never occurred to us. The creativity was simply astonishing."

The secret to this success, says Lerner, is outsider thinking.

The people deep inside a domain – the chemists trying to solve a chemistry problem – suffered from a kind of intellectual handicap. They were working with the same sets of ideas within the same categories and boundaries. They were living in the same intellectual grooves. As a result, the impossible problems stayed impossible.

The actual solutions to these problems came from people who were working at the very edges of their fields.

Chemists were solving molecular biology problems; molecular biologists were solving chemistry problems.

When solvers "rated the problem as outside their own domain", they were more likely to stumble upon solutions. They were "bridging knowledge fields" – taking ideas from one domain and introducing them into a different domain.

They reframed problems, combined and recombined ideas, and opened up new lines of thinking.

3

This is why, Lerner continues, young people can be so innovative and disruptive in their fields.

They are "natural outsiders".

A study done by Adolphe Quetelet in the 19th century shows that creativity doesn't increase with experience. By studying the bodies of work of various playwrights, he found the so-called "inverted U curve" of creative output: creativity appears to peak, then level out, then start to fall as the individual moves into middle age.

Dean Simonton, a psychologist at UC-Davis, expanded on this, demonstrating that physicists usually make their most important discoveries before the age of thirty. (The only field that peaks before physics seems to be poetry.) Simonton argues that the innocence and ignorance of these young whippersnappers "makes them more willing to embrace radical new ideas".

Meanwhile, the more experienced creators "start to repeat themselves, so that it becomes more of the same-old same-old."

The move from outsider to insider status, then, seems to equal creative death.

Our thoughts get trapped by the familiar. The brain is a lazy beast. It's constantly tracking patterns and looking for shortcuts. It's constantly learning what it can get away with: what it doesn't have to bother to notice. The more expert you become, the more settled in routine thinking-grooves, the more the brain blocks out all the stuff that's not relevant.

The problem is, creativity happens when the brain is forced to make connections and find relationships between things that, on the surface anyway, don't appear to have any relevance to each other.

Which means that creativity gets exchanged for efficiency.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

By removing ourselves from what we know – by turning ourselves into outsiders – we force the brain to wake up and look at new things, or at old things from new angles.

Lerner points to mathematician Paul Erdos, one of the most productive scientists of all time who was

"famous for hopscotching around his discipline, working with new people on new problems. He embraced a multiplicity of subjects…As a result, his creative output never declined; there was no U curve for his career, just a sharp rise followed by a flat line….

….The moral is that outsider creativity isn't a phase of life – it's a state of mind."

4

In his book EVERY BOOK IS A STARTUP, Todd Sattersten makes a rather neat distinction between ideas and insights. He compares it to the difference between a node (a single point in a network) and the network itself.

Ideas are nodes.

They are a dime a dozen.

Insights are much rarer: that intuitive grasp of sudden understanding that bends your thinking in a new way.

They are a constellation of nodes — ideas — that link up with each other to provide a greater meaning.

In the words of one Phil Dusenberry – "A strong insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand reasons to act and make something happen."

Sattersten explains:

"Buckle up" is a node; it's an idea that pushes you to act. "Friends don't let friends drive drunk" is a network, an insight that evokes a whole host of connected nodes around responsibility, camaraderie, and consequences….

…If an idea is a node, a single lightbulb that has been turned on [over your head], an insight is the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in New York City…our choice is what strings of lights we plug in to give our [creation] meaning."



5

As individuals, we form our unique social networks. The average individual has 4 to 7 close relationships (there are only so many hours in a day, so many days in a life).

Those relationships link out to their own respective social networks, which link out to their respective networks, and so on.

So I'm thinking that, as individuals, we also form our own intellectual, creative networks. Just as I have my unique mix of friends, I have my own mix of interests and obsessions. These, in turn, link out to other interests and obsessions — some in obvious ways, some in not-so-obvious ways, and some in ways that are maybe only visible to me — and I can track them along those lines for as far as I care to.

Always, I am picking up scattered nuggets of ideas along the way.

If I stay deep inside one particular domain, dealing with other people who are also deep within that domain, those ideas are likely to be fairly similar.

But if I travel out along the lines of my creative/intellectual network until I find myself at the edges – where one domain starts blending into another domain — chances are I might find myself alone out there. The ideas that I have gathered will start connecting or colliding off each other, until they break open and flash out a creative insight that, down in the centers of those various domains, no one has really seen before.

It's a bit like being a shaman. You go out to the edges of yourself, that strange eccentric country, and bring back the gifts you find in order to share them with your people.

Or maybe you just keep traveling on, taking your ideas to places where they haven't quite seen the likes of you before.

The great thing about the Internet is that it allows us to do this.

6

In his book RETURN ON INFLUENCE, Mark W. Schaefer writes

Because of the Internet's vast ability to grant social proof and our increasing willingness to accept that evidence as truth, the talent to create and distribute meaningful content can be a legitimate source of online influence even apart from an individual's actual experience, capability, or personal accomplishments…

…Disconnecting our personal traits from the ability to influence can be dangerous, but it can also be liberating. Influence built on content – our own hard work, our own voice – can free us from the shackles of traditional trappings of influence associated with going to an Ivy League school, living in the right part of town, having movie star looks, or driving an expensive car.

Today anybody anywhere can have influence, and that is a great thing.

Bingham – the guy who created InnoCentive – would, I think, agree with that. He has witnessed the benefits. His company has paid out awards to outsiders who have solved the very problems that perplexed the company's insider scientists.

These outsiders include:

"A person who studies carboydrates in Sweden, a small agribusiness company, a retired aerospace engineer, a vet, and a transdermal-drug-delivery-systems specialist. I guarantee that they would have found none of these people within their own company. They would have found none of those people if they had done a literature search in the field of interest. They would have found none of them by soliciting input from their consultants. And they probably wouldn't have hired any of these people anyway, because none of them were qualified."

It's enough to make you think that expertise is, at least in some cases, slightly overrated.

It's enough to make you think that maybe we shouldn't judge, define or limit ourselves by what we are "qualified" to write or speak or think about.

We should pursue our fascinations, our obsessions, out to the very edges, and trust that somehow, at some point, the dots will connect in a way unique to us — that still creates meaning for others.

If we could practice and embrace outsider thinking – if we could throw open the doors to people who have never before had access to the golden inner sanctums – if we could introduce a rich diversity of creative badasses into the highest circles of power, who knows what global problems we might solve?

But it also means that we as outsiders have to step up. We have to take those half-baked ideas living inside us and flesh them out through the spirit of inquiry and learning, learning, learning. We have to develop our own unique, informed perspectives and put them out there.

We have to have faith that our perspectives are worth putting out there.

Like I said before, I am totally unqualified to write the blog post that I should be working on right now.

So if you'll excuse me, I'm off to finally go write it.

the art of being an outsider (+ why it makes you more creative)

1

So I agreed to write a blog post for a company I respect on a topic that fascinates me. While fitting ideas together and outlining the post, I started thinking

Who the hell am I to be writing on this?

Why should anybody care about what I think?

I wasn't considering the post so much as the bio that might accompany the post. What were my credentials? Where was my real-life experience? How could whatever expertise I might have accrued in another, very different domain possibly apply to this one?

Why should anybody listen to me?

I felt like a total outsider.

I am a total outsider.

So could my perspective possibly be valid?

2

Jonah Lehrer's new book IMAGINE: How Creativity Works would seem to indicate: Yes it can.

In fact, the outsider perspective might sometimes be the superior perspective.

Lerner refers to a man named Alpheus Bingham, a vice president at Eli Lilly (one of the biggest drug companies on the globe). He was in charge of research strategy, managing countless scientists working on countless technical problems, and he was increasingly concerned.

For all the money the company was throwing at these problems, hoping and expecting to come up with the next Prozac, they were getting crappy results.

"And that's when I started to wonder if all these supposedly impossible technical issues were really impossible. Maybe we just had the wrong people working on them?….I always assumed that you hire the best resume and give the problem to the guy with the most technical experience. But maybe that was a big mistake?"

What Bingham did next was pretty radical.

Although companies like Lilly believed in deep secrecy – guarding against the possibility that competitors might steal their ideas – Bingham decided (and I am paraphrasing here): Fuck it.

He launched a website called Innocentive. He took the company's hardest scientific problems and threw them out to the public. He posted them on the site and offered a financial reward to anyone who came up with a solution.

He didn't expect many of them to get solved.

He was wrong.

"The answers just started pouring in," he says. "We got these great ideas from researchers we'd never heard of, pursuing angles that had never occurred to us. The creativity was simply astonishing."

The secret to this success, says Lerner, is outsider thinking.

The people deep inside a domain – the chemists trying to solve a chemistry problem – suffered from a kind of intellectual handicap. They were working with the same sets of ideas within the same categories and boundaries. They were living in the same intellectual grooves. As a result, the impossible problems stayed impossible.

The actual solutions to these problems came from people who were working at the very edges of their fields.

Chemists were solving molecular biology problems; molecular biologists were solving chemistry problems.

When solvers "rated the problem as outside their own domain", they were more likely to stumble upon solutions. They were "bridging knowledge fields" – taking ideas from one domain and introducing them into a different domain.

They reframed problems, combined and recombined ideas, and opened up new lines of thinking.

3

This is why, Lerner continues, young people can be so innovative and disruptive in their fields.

They are "natural outsiders".

A study done by Adolphe Quetelet in the 19th century shows that creativity doesn't increase with experience. By studying the bodies of work of various playwrights, he found the so-called "inverted U curve" of creative output: creativity appears to peak, then level out, then start to fall as the individual moves into middle age.

Dean Simonton, a psychologist at UC-Davis, expanded on this, demonstrating that physicists usually make their most important discoveries before the age of thirty. (The only field that peaks before physics seems to be poetry.) Simonton argues that the innocence and ignorance of these young whippersnappers "makes them more willing to embrace radical new ideas".

Meanwhile, the more experienced creators "start to repeat themselves, so that it becomes more of the same-old same-old."

The move from outsider to insider status, then, seems to equal creative death.

Our thoughts get trapped by the familiar. The brain is a lazy beast. It's constantly tracking patterns and looking for shortcuts. It's constantly learning what it can get away with: what it doesn't have to bother to notice. The more expert you become, the more settled in routine thinking-grooves, the more the brain blocks out all the stuff that's not relevant.

The problem is, creativity happens when the brain is forced to make connections and find relationships between things that, on the surface anyway, don't appear to have any relevance to each other.

Which means that creativity gets exchanged for efficiency.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

By removing ourselves from what we know – by turning ourselves into outsiders – we force the brain to wake up and look at new things, or at old things from new angles.

Lerner points to mathematician Paul Erdos, one of the most productive scientists of all time who was

"famous for hopscotching around his discipline, working with new people on new problems. He embraced a multiplicity of subjects…As a result, his creative output never declined; there was no U curve for his career, just a sharp rise followed by a flat line….

….The moral is that outsider creativity isn't a phase of life – it's a state of mind."

4

In his book EVERY BOOK IS A STARTUP, Todd Sattersten makes a rather neat distinction between ideas and insights. He compares it to the difference between a node (a single point in a network) and the network itself.

Ideas are nodes.

They are a dime a dozen.

Insights are much rarer: that intuitive grasp of sudden understanding that bends your thinking in a new way.

They are a series of nodes that link up with each other to provide a greater meaning.

In the words of one Phil Dusenberry – "A strong insight can fuel a thousand ideas, a thousand reasons to act and make something happen."

Sattersten explains:

"Buckle up" is a node; it's an idea that pushes you to act. "Friends don't let friends drive drunk" is a network, an insight that evokes a whole host of connected nodes around responsibility, camaraderie, and consequences….

…If an idea is a node, a single lightbulb that has been turned on [over your head], an insight is the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in New York City…our choice is what strings of lights we plug in to give our [creation] meaning."



5

As individuals, we form our unique social networks. The average individual has 4 to 7 close relationships (there are only so many hours in a day, so many days in a life).

Each of those relationships link out to their own respective social networks, which link out to their respective networks, and so on.

So I'm thinking that, as individuals, we also form our own intellectual, creative networks. Just as I have my unique mix of friends (all of whom link out to their own networks), I have my own mix of interests and obsessions. These, in turn, link out to other interests and obsessions — some in obvious ways, some in not-so-obvious ways, and some in ways that are maybe only visible to me — and I can follow them along those lines for as far as I care to.

Always, I am picking up scattered nuggets of ideas along the way.

If I stay deep inside one particular domain, dealing with other people who are also deep within that domain, those ideas are likely to be fairly similar.

But if I travel out along the lines of my creative/intellectual network until I find myself at the edges – where one domain starts blending into another domain — chances are I might find myself alone out there. The ideas that I have gathered will start connecting or colliding off each other, until they break open and flash out a creative insight that, down in the centers of those various domains, no one has really seen before.

It's a bit like being a shaman. You go out to the edges of yourself, that strange eccentric country, and bring back the gifts you find in order to share them with your people.

Or maybe you just keep traveling on, taking your ideas to places where they haven't quite seen the likes of you before.

The great thing about the Internet is that it allows us to do this.

6

In his book RETURN ON INFLUENCE, Mark W. Schaefer writes

Because of the Internet's vast ability to grant social proof and our increasing willingness to accept that evidence as truth, the talent to create and distribute meaningful content can be a legitimate source of online influence even apart from an individual's actual experience, capability, or personal accomplishments…

…Disconnecting our personal traits from the ability to influence can be dangerous, but it can also be liberating. Influence built on content – our own hard work, our own voice – can free us from the shackles of traditional trappings of influence associated with going to an Ivy League school, living in the right part of town, having movie star looks, or driving an expensive car.

Today anybody anywhere can have influence, and that is a great thing.

Bingham – the guy who created InnoCentive – would, I think, agree with that. He has witnessed the benefits. His company has paid out awards to outsiders who have solved the very problems that perplexed the company's insider scientists.

These outsiders include:

"A person who studies carboydrates in Sweden, a small agribusiness company, a retired aerospace engineer, a vet, and a transdermal-drug-delivery-systems specialist. I guarantee that they would have found none of these people within their own company. They would have found none of those people if they had done a literature search in the field of interest. They would have found none of them by soliciting input from their consultants. And they probably wouldn't have hired any of these people anyway, because none of them were qualified."

It's enough to make you think that expertise is, at least in some cases, slightly overrated.

It's enough to make you think that maybe we shouldn't judge, define or limit ourselves by what we are "qualified" to write or speak or think about.

We should pursue our fascinations, our obsessions, out to the very edges, and trust that somehow, at some point, the dots will connect in a way unique to us — that still creates meaning for others.

If we could practice and embrace outsider thinking – if we could throw open the doors to people who have never before had access to the golden inner sanctums – if we could introduce a rich diversity of creative badasses into the highest circles of power, who knows what global problems we might solve?

But it also means that we as outsiders have to step up. We have to take those half-baked ideas living inside us and flesh them out through the spirit of inquiry and learning, learning, learning. We have to develop our own unique, informed perspectives and put them out there.

We have to have faith that our perspectives are worth putting out there.

Like I said before, I am totally unqualified to write the blog post that I should be working on right now.

So if you'll excuse me, I'm off to finally go write it.

the problem with slut-bashing (+ why we are all bad girls)

1

Many moons ago, I was having a drink with a male friend in New York when I told him this idea I still like to kick around. It's for a nonfiction book. It would be a personal investigation of the 'golddigger' myth: where the stereotype comes from, how it evolved, how it gets institutionalized and plays out in the culture.

My friend then introduced me to the term 'dinner whore'.

Urbandictionary defines it thusly: "A girl who is exclusively after a free meal or an expensive gift. She actively seeks out dates with well-off men who will wine and dine her at upscale restaurants. She is usually physically attractive enough to make the man fall for her feminine wiles. She will rarely have sex with these men, until they spend a certain number of dollars on her. Nobody knows exactly what that number is, so the man keeps spending and spending, while the dinner whore keeps living it up."

Let me get this straight. A man, who might or might not be exclusively after sex, takes an attractive woman to dinner hoping but not knowing if he'll get to have sex with her, which might or might not actually happen.

I think we used to call that a date.

(Although if she invited him, she should probably pick up the check.)

2

I myself have never known a woman to say, "Gosh, I'd like to eat at Spago tonight. Time to put on those five-inch glitter platforms and cruise Rodeo Drive."

If a man can say, "It was just a one night stand,"

it seems a woman can say, "It was only penne a la vodka and a nice chardonnay. It didn't mean anything."

Note that a dinner whore is called a whore because she doesn't sleep with the man immediately (or at all). She has the audacity to think that she is not required to exchange her body for food, even if Thomas Keller serves it up personally; she considers the pleasure of her company, the value of her time and attention, to be reward enough.

How uppity.

But it shows how the word 'whore' gets used to diminish a woman when she doesn't go along according to plan. Or when she has her own plan.

And if she speaks out against the plan, who knows what hell might break loose. Some well-known personality might call her a slut and order her to make sex tapes and upload them to the Internet for public viewing.

Not like that happens or anything.

3

I understand that men get frustrated when they feel judged solely on the basis of wealth and status, or lack thereof; I understand that women get frustrated when they feel overlooked for some sweet busty soul who considers anything predating MTV to be of the prehistoric era. My point is not that one gender is morally superior to the other.

I believe that men and women are equally capable of love, greatness, and compassion, and the world works best when we can bring that out in each other.

But the double standard sucks. It implies that one gender has worth, and the other does not. Men can exploit women, and discard them, and that's acceptable (especially if there's a prenup) and even expected.

It's acceptable because we still believe, even if we're not fully aware that we believe it, that women are out to exploit men, to lure them over to the dark side with their "feminine wiles" so they can drain them of life energy/material wealth.

And then go shopping.

The only safe woman is a naïve and sexually inexperienced woman, a pure woman, a virgin. As Jessica Valenti points out in her excellent book THE PURITY MYTH, a woman's moral character isn't judged by what she does, but what she doesn't do (have sex).

In short, a woman's worth is located between her legs.

This is a brand of misogyny embedded in our cultural DNA, tracing all the way back to an origin story about a girl and a boy and a rosy red apple.

Stories shape the soul of a culture. They transmit the values and beliefs of a culture. As Michael Margolis put it: if you want to change a culture, change the stories.

But that story isn't changing anytime soon.

When you call a woman a slut, it's not because you necessarily believe that she's slept her way through the entire NBA. You do it because there's nothing more base than female sexuality. You want to cut her down to size, to put her in her place, for whatever transgression she's committed that took her outside the box of 'proper' feminine behavior and made her such a pain in the ass.

The worst thing you can call someone in this culture, man or woman, is a cunt. Call someone a 'dick', and you're implying that he's an idiot; call him a cunt, and you're implying that he's trash, he's contaminated, she's vile. Throw her away.

As women, we understand this all the way down through our bones.

It's not that we're being oversensitive. It's not that we care overmuch what other people think. It's the visceral meaning the word carries, how it attacks and degrades the very essence of who we are, and where it locates us in the culture.

If we let it.

4

And we let it.

We use the word against each other.

We do it in a kind of self-defense: by calling you a slut, I am implying that I myself am not. We do it out of jealousy, competitiveness and scorn. We do it to exclude: we define ourselves as insiders by declaring others as outsiders. Letty Cottin Pogrebin refers to slut-shaming as "the survival tactic of a second-class human being. Lacking confidence, bereft of self-esteem, we play the only game in town that seems to offer a payoff."

"Slut bashing," adds Leora Tanenbaum

is a sad attempt to wield power by those who feel they don't have any. Women and girls lash out at other women and girls when they recognize that no matter how hard they work, and no matter what sacrifices they make, they will always have more to prove than men and boys do."

And because they generally haven't been exposed to feminism, Leora adds, it doesn't occur to them to turn against anything except each other.

5

In her book THE ART OF WAR FOR WOMEN, Chin-ning Chu writes:

Women seem to have fallen prey to something I call the crabs-in-the-pot syndrome. When you cook crabs, you don't have to place the lid on the boiling pot because the crabs keep one another from getting out. As one crab gets near the top and attempts to climb over the edge, another crab will naturally put it down in its own attempt to escape. As a result, all the crabs go to their collective doom.

This is the problem whenever a woman defends herself by saying I am not a slut.

By declaring that you are not a slut, you are saying that some women are sluts; you are drawing a line between yourself and them. Except it's a line that can't exist, because all it does is reinforce the stereotype that you're trying to deny. As soon as you buy into a reality that brands any woman a 'slut', you buy into a belief system that attacks femalehood itself. This includes you. You sacrifice someone else in your effort to escape the boiling water, but you can't get out of the pot.

Says Chu:

But it doesn't have to be that way. There are countless examples through history of women who have risen to the top because they've helped other women excel.

We can transcend. We can act like the pot doesn't exist. We can refuse to use the word against another woman, or to acknowledge the word if and when it's applied to us. We don't need to explain or defend; we know that as soon as we do — as soon as we buy into that particular framework of beliefs – we end up perpetuating the slut game, and we lose.

Better to create – to force into being – a new reality, one in which we are all sluts and whores and dinner whores –

– or none of us are.

We can commit to each other.

We can lift each other up.

the problem with slut-bashing (or: I was a teenage dinner whore. kidding.)

1

Many moons ago, I was having a drink with a male friend in New York when I told him this idea I still like to kick around. It's for a nonfiction book. It would be a personal investigation of the 'golddigger' myth: where the stereotype comes from, how it evolved, how it gets institutionalized and plays out in the culture.

My friend then introduced me to the term 'dinner whore'.

Urbandictionary defines it thusly: "A girl who is exclusively after a free meal or an expensive gift. She actively seeks out dates with well-off men who will wine and dine her at upscale restaurants. She is usually physically attractive enough to make the man fall for her feminine wiles. She will rarely have sex with these men, until they spend a certain number of dollars on her. Nobody knows exactly what that number is, so the man keeps spending and spending, while the dinner whore keeps living it up."

Let me get this straight. A man, who might or might not be exclusively after sex, takes an attractive woman to dinner hoping but not knowing if he'll get to have sex with her, which might or might not actually happen.

I think we used to call that a date.

(Although if she invited him, she should probably pick up the check.)

2

I myself have never known a woman to say, "Gosh, I'd like to eat at Spago's tonight. Time to put on those five-inch glitter platforms and cruise Rodeo Drive."

If a man can say, "It was just a one night stand,"

it seems a woman can say, "It was only penne a la vodka and a nice chardonnay. It didn't mean anything."

Note that a dinner whore is called a whore because she doesn't sleep with the man immediately (or at all). She has the audacity to think that she is not required to exchange her body for food, even if Thomas Keller serves it up personally; she considers the pleasure of her company, the value of her time and attention, to be reward enough.

How uppity.

But it shows how the word 'whore' gets used to diminish a woman when she doesn't go along according to plan. Or when she has her own plan.

And if she actually speaks out against the plan, who knows what hell might break loose. Some well-known personality might call her a slut and order her to make sex tapes and upload them to the Internet for public viewing.

Not like that actually happens or anything.

3

I understand that men get frustrated when they feel judged solely on the basis of wealth and status, or lack thereof; I understand that women get frustrated when they feel overlooked for some sweet busty thing who considers anything predating MTV to be from the prehistoric era. My point is not that one gender is morally superior to the other.

I believe that men and women are equally capable of love, greatness, and compassion, and the world works best when we can bring that out in each other.

But the double standard sucks. It implies that one gender has worth, and the other does not. Men can exploit women, and discard them, and that's acceptable (especially if there's a prenup) and even expected.

It's acceptable because we still believe, even if we're not fully aware that we believe it, that women are out to exploit men, to lure them over to the dark side with their "feminine wiles" so they can drain them of life energy/material wealth.

And then go shopping.

The only safe woman is a naïve and sexually inexperienced woman, a pure woman, a virgin. As Jessica Valenti points out in her excellent book THE PURITY MYTH, a woman's moral character isn't judged by what she does, but what she doesn't do (have sex).

In short, a woman's worth is located between her legs.

This is a brand of misogyny embedded in our cultural DNA, tracing all the way back to an origin story about a girl and a boy and a rosy red apple.

Stories shape the soul of a culture. They transmit the values and beliefs of a culture. As Michael Margolis put it: if you want to change a culture, change the stories.

But that story isn't changing anytime soon.

When you call a woman a slut, it's not because you necessarily believe that she's slept her way through the entire NBA. You do it because there's nothing more base than female sexuality. You want to cut her down to size, to put her in her place, for whatever transgression she's committed that took her outside the box of 'proper' feminine behavior and made her such a pain in the ass.

The worst thing you can call someone in this culture, man or woman, is a cunt. Call someone a 'dick', and you're implying that he's an idiot; call him a cunt, and you're implying that he's trash, he's contaminated, she's vile. Throw her away.

As women, we understand this all the way down through our bones.

It's not that we're being oversensitive. It's not that we care overmuch what other people think. It's the visceral meaning the word carries, how it attacks and degrades the very essence of who we are, and where it locates us in the culture.

If we let it.

4

And we let it.

We use the word against each other.

We do it in a kind of self-defense: by calling you a slut, I am implying that I myself am not. We do it out of jealousy, competitiveness and scorn. We do it to exclude: we define ourselves as insiders by declaring others as outsiders. Letty Cottin Pogrebin refers to slut-shaming as "the survival tactic of a second-class human being. Lacking confidence, bereft of self-esteem, we play the only game in town that seems to offer a payoff."

"Slut bashing," adds Leora Tanenbaum,

is a sad attempt to weird power by those who feel they don't have any. Women and girls lash out at other women and girls when they recognize that no matter how hard they work, and no matter what sacrifices they make, they will always have more to prove than men and boys do."

And because they generally haven't been exposed to feminism, Leora adds, it doesn't occur to them to turn against anything except each other.

5

In her book THE ART OF WAR FOR WOMEN, Chin-ning Chu writes:

Women seem to have fallen prey to something I call the crabs-in-the-pot syndrome. When you cook crabs, you don't have to place the lid on the boiling pot because the crabs keep one another from getting out. As one crab gets near the top and attempts to climb over the edge, another crab will naturally put it down in its own attempt to escape. As a result, all the crabs go to their collective doom.

This is the problem whenever a woman defends herself by saying I am not a slut.

By declaring that you are not a slut, you are saying that some women are sluts; you are drawing a line between yourself and them. Except it's a line that can't actually exist, because all it does is reinforce the very idea that you're trying to fight.

As soon as you buy into a reality that brands any woman a 'slut', you buy into a belief system that attacks femalehood itself. This includes you. You sacrifice someone else in your effort to escape the boiling water, but you can't get out of the pot.

Says Chu:

But it doesn't have to be that way. There are countless examples for history of women who have risen to the top because they've helped other women excel.

We can transcend. We can act like the pot doesn't exist. We can refuse to use the word against another woman, or to acknowledge the word if and when it's applied to us. We don't need to explain or defend; we know that as soon as we do — as soon as we buy into that particular framework of beliefs – we end up perpetuating it, and we lose.

Better to create – to force into being – a new reality, one in which we are all sluts and whores and dinner whores –

– or none of us are.

We can commit to each other.

We can lift each other up.

how to be an original*

1

I met President Clinton last week, at a cocktail party in the presidential suite in an ex-pat hotel in Haiti. Later, I was part of a group that had dinner with him, and the next day toured the Academy of Peace + Justice. (The Academy is a free school sponsored by Artists for Peace + Justice for kids from especially poor and troubled parts of Haiti. They get three meals a day along with an education. You can't nourish the mind if the body is suffering. The body is the mind and vice versa. But I digress.)

"Nice bracelet you're wearing," Clinton said to me at one point, referring to a Haitian-made bracelet I'd bought for ten dollars at the hotel gift shop.

"Thank you. It's made out of safety pins."

"I know!"

What strikes me about Prez Clinton is his singular voice. We were at a table with extremely accomplished and high-powered men (they were mostly men), but as soon as that throaty, smoky voice rose through the conversation, people were instantly attentive. You could be blindfolded and not even know that Clinton was in the room and recognize that voice. You'd wrap your sense of Clinton's personality around it, as well as the history and associations the name 'Bill Clinton' has for you and whether those associations resonate or piss you off. Chances are, you would not have an indifferent reaction. That voice gets under your skin. Love him or hate him, you wouldn't – or couldn't – ignore him.

The power of voice.

2

Around the same time, entrepreneur and brand editor Abby Kerr posted this piece on her blog analyzing the online voices of Danielle Laporte, Marie Forleo, Chris Guillebeau, Havi Brooks, Charlie Gilkey, Laura Roeder – and me. (And how delighted am I to be included in such company? Thank you, Abby, you rock. Plus you have wondrous taste.)

Glancing down that list of names, of people whose online work I am familiar with and in a few cases know extremely well, I was struck by how singular and distinctive their voices are. Unlike the above example with Clinton, they convey those voices through writing rather than talking – but as Abby notes, there's often

a direct and very cozy link-up between how people write and how they speak. Google 'video' plus the name of any person I profile below and you'll see what I mean.

So I started thinking (again) about voice. So many creatives are turned off by the concept of 'brand' – and its old-school corporate bullshit associations – that I don't think they understand that, at least online, your voice is your brand.

(You may not believe in your brand – but darlin', your brand believes in you.)

The reason why Danielle LaPorte could charge $150 for her self-produced digital program called The Firestarter Sessions – basically an ebook, some downloads and short videos – and experience the kind of success she could then channel into a quarter million dollar deal with a major publisher, has everything to do with her voice. Her voice is the artistry that sets her apart from some anonymous online marketer packaging similar information. (I bought Danielle's program [and liked it very much] so I can speak directly to this.)

People who were already fans of Danielle through her blog eagerly purchased this because they wanted the information, yes – but they also wanted to hang out with the sense of personality and identity they have constructed around Danielle's unique writing style. They have an emotional connection with Danielle's brand. (I use the word 'brand' very deliberately here, to stress the difference between connecting with the idea of Danielle vs actually connecting with Danielle herself. I am talking about fans, not stalkers.)

When people fall in love with your voice, they will follow you anywhere.

The above is paraphrasing something Dean Koontz said in an interview in Writer's Digest that I read a loooooong time ago. After twenty years of writing fiction in several different genres, he noticed how his fans would follow him from genre to genre once they learned to recognize him through the multiple pseudonyms his publisher(s) advised him to use. Which is what led him to say – and I am definitely paraphrasing here – that that advice about using pseudonyms was actually pretty stupid.

But for people to follow your voice – or even want to follow – it has to be the kind of voice that they can immediately recognize through the great din of online conversation, including the constant online static as well as the ongoing signals that other powerful voices are sending out to their people.

Your voice has to be singular. An original.

3

I would say – I mean, I am saying – that a compelling, original voice has four things.

(I would list the four of them here…except I want to keep you in suspense.)

4

A compelling online voice has relevance.

You talk about things that your audience cares about: that helps improve their lives in some way or connects to their interests, goals and passions.

You serve your audience through your content.

This is why I don't think it's (usually) very effective to post excerpts of your fiction on your blog (except in certain cases, which I won't go into here). It's not just because blogging is a different form than novel-writing, with its own learning curve and set of expectations from an audience.

But it's actually rather difficult to get strangers to read your work. You may not be asking for money, but you are asking for valuable time and attention with no real guarantee that there's anything in it for them (how do they know that they'll find the experience worthwhile, other than your unproven untested word for it?). Your creative work doesn't yet have any relevance for them, at least as they perceive it.

But when you know your audience – and you will learn them more deeply as you go – you learn what they care about, and where that overlaps with what you care about. That place of overlap is your place of service.

I gave a workshop in which I had the attendees do the "I am…" exercise in which they pretend to be their own Ideal Reader. They write a first-person stream-of-consciousness description of Ideal Reader that includes her hopes and dreams and tastes and routines and hobbies and fears that keep her awake at night…as well as anything else that comes up.

One guy said, "Is it normal for your Ideal Reader to end up sounding a lot like yourself?"

I think it is. I think that choice between 'writing for an audience' and 'writing for yourself' is often a false one. There's power in writing the kind of book – or blog – that you yourself want to read but can't find because it doesn't exist yet.

It's your job — your destiny, if you will — to bring the damn thing into being.

As individuals, we have a heightened sense of our own differences (which we are consciously aware of) rather than our underlying commonality (which acts as an unconscious frame of reference for those differences).

We're more alike than we are different.

The bad news is: you're probably not as unique as you think.

The good news is: you're probably not as unique as you think.

You can find a way to serve yourself as well as your audience; you can find the point where you and your audience are one and the same.

Which is why you can't form a deep understanding of your audience without also forming a deep understanding of yourself.

5

A compelling online voice has power and authority.

This comes from having a strong, informed, and highly personal point of view.

To stand apart from everybody else, you have to take a stand on whatever it is that you're passionate about.

In his book RETURN ON INFLUENCE, social media guru Mark W Schaefer notes the "rise of the citizen influencer". The rules of influence have changed. Content creates value not necessarily when it's based on real-life performance, but gives people "access to insights they didn't have before."

(Otherwise known as thought leadership.)

Mark writes:

[Content] can create influence even in the absence of experience and true authority….

"There is often a disconnect," explained Mitch Joel, president of the Montreal-based digital agency Twist Image. "…just because somebody has a knack for writing or can put some great ideas together, it doesn't mean they have a knack for taking those ideas to market and delivering a return on investment."

Although it's probably an excellent idea to look to your life story, your personal history, for areas of natural authority, what matters online isn't necessarily your real-life experience so much as the quality of your insights and your ability to back them up.

In other words: know your shit.

I can't stress this enough.

Substance matters, especially when it's in short supply.

Read. Talk to people. Get informed. Think on it. Think on it again. Let different ideas come together.

If you're truly passionate about whatever it is that you're writing about, you want to do this anyway (and already are).

Another option is to use a kind of curated authority: point the reader to other voices, other sources, to build a sense of expertise that stems from other people as well as your ability to put the pieces together.

You don't have to be the guru figure who knows it all. You can decide to specialize in whatever subject you want to know more about. Your blog becomes a quest for knowledge, for you as well as for others. The best way to learn anything – is to to teach it to others. You can say, in effect, Let me show you this cool thing I just learned. You can figure it out as you go, just so long as you bring the kind of passion to your material that gives it credibility (and charisma).

6

A compelling voice has Big Meaning.

And by this, I mean it's telling a larger, overarching story. It gives a sense of purpose, a thrust of narrative, to your online presence. It's the plotline that runs through all your posts, the philosophy that ties everything together, the prism through which you filter your material to find what's relevant for you and your audience.

It doesn't have to be complicated.

It probably shouldn't be complicated.

It could be as simple as, ahem, you are a creative badass.

And when you know your Big Meaning, you know what to edit out as well as what to put in. As Austin Neon expresses in his book STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST, creativity involves subtraction:

In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what's really important to them. Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities.

…It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom.

In my observation the most successful and/or engaging bloggers may have started out by choosing a specific niche –- the standard beginner-blogger advice – but over time, they carve their own niche. They write out to the edges of their original topic into other, related topics…but they do it in a way that's organic, that emerges naturally from the progression of their writing. They grow and evolve. They start out intending to write about one thing, and end up writing about something else.

This is how blogging becomes a process of self-discovery: you write your way through your mind until you begin to realize just what it is you believe in the first place: those deep things you hold sacred and, slowly, become self-aware and courageous enough to bring to light. And show to others.

This is what it means to be authentic.

7

A compelling voice has fascination.

There's a freshness to it, a sense that here is something we haven't quite seen before. Something accessible, yet unique. Something beyond the mundane, yet we can still identify with it, relate to it, recognize ourselves in it.

Sally Hogshead has a book called FASCINATE dedicated to the seven psychological triggers that we are biologically hardwired to respond to: trust, passion, alarm, rebellion, power, prestige, mystique. We are naturally inclined to use one or two of these triggers in the way we communicate with other people.

(You can go here to find out more about Sally's work, as well as which triggers you use. I've taken the test more than once over the months and my own triggers appear to be, if you're curious, a combination of mystique, rebellion and prestige.)

Hogshead encourages you to find ways to amplify your natural triggers and develop a greater awareness of how to work them to your advantage (as well as learning how to adopt other triggers when it serves you).

This reminds me of Marcus Buckingham's books about figuring out what your strengths are – your 'strengths' being the activities that make you feel revitalized, alive, and at your bestest, mostest 'you' – and steadily leaning into them, eventually organizing your life around them.

David J Rendall, in his book THE FREAK FACTOR, takes a similar approach: encouraging you to develop formidable distinction in the world by doing even more of what you already do too much of.

I like that. I think of it as leaning into your freak points. You can bring this to your online life as well: do more of what you love (maybe you think video is awesome) and less of what depletes you (maybe you think long-form blogging kind of sucks). You can become aware of how your communication naturally plays to the seven fascination triggers – and do more of that, or do it better (or both).

Austin Kleon advises you to start out by imitating your online heroes (we all do that in the beginning, at least to some extent) – and then identifying those areas where you can't do whatever your hero is doing, because you're doing your own thing. Then do more of your own thing.



8

I like how Donald Maass defines originality in his book THE BREAK OUT NOVELIST. Originality, he says, doesn't come from any

element on which we can work. It cannot. It isn't possible. Originality can only come from what you bring of yourself to your [work]….It is not a function of your [work]; it is a quality in you.

Where so many manuscripts go wrong, he says,

Is that if they do not outright imitate, they at least do not go far enough in mining the author's experience for what is distinctive and personal. So many manuscripts feel safe. They do not force readers to see the world through a different lens…Novelists by and large do not trust themselves. They do not believe that their perspective is important.

We are not raised to be originals, even those of the self-esteem generation who were wildly applauded for something as basic as crossing the street without getting squashed by a truck. We are raised to tuck in the excessive parts of ourselves, to curb our eccentricities. We're told to never let them see us sweat. Or cry. Or show vulnerability, which in the mind of this culture translates to weakness and pathos.

An online voice should not simply be "a persona". An online voice should be a natural and authentic expression of who you are; you write yourself online as easily as you talk to others offline. The problem isn't that branding, at least in this context, is awful, fake and bad; the problem is that showing who you are, especially online, feels difficult and risky, exposing and vulnerable. You have to be willing to go there, to unearth the deeper parts of yourself, to say things that maybe no one else is saying. To put your own, true thoughts on the line.

Most people won't do that.

Most people can't do that.

It takes skill and a certain level of artistry to translate your inner life to the outer world in a way that engages people. Like anything else, you get better with practice. But you need to master your tools and devote yourself to the process.

The reward – and it is great – is that when you can show the reality of who you are, you pull in people through the truth of your message rather than the sleekness of your persona (which people don't trust anymore anyway). Instead of editing yourself to fit your tribe, you can curate your tribe to bring out the best in you. This frees you up to stop worrying about what other people think. You can focus, instead, on learning yourself and others, developing your gifts, and finding that special spot in the world where you can stand tall, sing loud, and have impact.

Because your perspective is important.

* with thanks to Matt Petersen, because he is awesome.