Justine Musk's Blog, page 27

how to flunk social media + lose me as a potential True Fan (but you know I love you)

The other day I finished reading the kind of novel you develop a relationship with: the characters move off the page to take up residence in your head. Their reality runs like a shadowy river alongside your own, waiting for you to step back into it.

When it was over, I leaped online to check out the author. For the most part, at least in my experience, literary writers tend to eye the social media platforms as if they're instruments of sexual bondage: I'm supposed to do what, exactly? Surely you're joking. What exactly is that, anyway?

gratuitious sexual bondage photo

Still, I was hoping for a blog. I wanted to prolong the experience of the novel by remaining in contact with the author's voice. At the same time, I was curious about the author. More than curious: I felt a respect and readerly affection for her.

I had touched her mind.

I had walked through her imagination.

I wanted to show up at her virtual doorstep with the equivalent of a bouquet of flowers to say thank you and let her know how much her novel meant to me. I was ready to evangelize her to the world – or at least my small corner of it.

reading is awesome

The website was static, uninteresting: I didn't care about any of the promotional stuff, I was looking for a blog, which there wasn't. The Facebook page and tweetstream were also broadcasting and promotional. I was invited to leave a message – a "polite" message, as if I was in danger of being rude – but the flush of my enthusiasm had faded and I no longer saw the point. So I clicked away.

I think about this now, because it reflects the changing nature of the artist-audience relationship. I bring different expectations to that relationship than I would have, say, five years ago, when of course the author would have remained this remote, mysterious figure in the distance, giving me a well-meaning wave through her book readings and interviews.

Now, here I was, ready to be not just a reader or an admirer but a True Fan, ready to spread the word.

And feeling denied.

What had I been expecting, exactly?

Interactivity. Engagement.

Not with me, since she had no idea who I was, and although I have many flaws I am not, at least to my knowledge, psychotic; but with others, as if she was holding court in the center of a café and I had wandered in to join the crowd. It was like she had spurned the café entirely – I'm supposed to do that? — and so I ordered my mocha latte and took my Android tablet from my bag and started on another book, another author, hoping to fall in love again, knowing that, sooner or later, I would.

As a reader of literary fiction, I'm probably not the norm: although I do indeed love the smell of a physical book, the flick of the pages, the creak of the spine, the heft of the thing in my hands, I do most of my reading on my devices (pick one: my smartphone, my tablet, my Kindle Fire). I'm a social media enthusiast, live on the edge of the tech industry and spend a lot of time online, which might be why I consider this to be a good and exciting time to be a writer. (Since I became a Kindle convert a couple of years ago, I buy and read even more books, not less – and, judging from the data, this is typical.)

But – dare I say – the future of reading looks like me (as William Gibson so succinctly put it, the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed). And as my reading habits adjusted to the new technology, as I absorbed the values and customs of social media culture (transparency, authenticity, connectedness), I became one of those people formerly known as your audience.

It's no longer enough to seduce me with a good book.

My world is crowded, noisy, and moves at lightning speed.

In order to keep me as a longterm reader, you need to engage me, or in the time between your last work and your next work some other charismatic wave will have borne me away. It's the difference between checking out your next book and seeing if it appeals to me – and buying it immediately, no matter what the content, and talking about you to my friends, and on my blog and Facebook and Google+ and whatever else I happen to be using at the time.

Let me be clear: I don't expect or demand one-on-one communication. I am happy to remain faceless and nameless to you. But the online world is exactly that – a world — full-bodied and dazzling and multi-dimensional — and it's transformed my relationship to you (or any writer) into a place that I would like to find cool and interesting enough to visit. Often.

In his book SMART WORLD: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas, Richard Ogle talks about "idea-spaces" and "the extended mind". Basically, in order to navigate a complex and sophisticated world with as a little mental effort as possible, we offload our intelligence into the spaces around us through our myths, customs, technology, business models, codes of behavior. Our knowledge, our sets of ideas, live outside us (and breakthrough creativity happens when you can look across different idea-spaces, recognize emerging patterns and find new ways to fit them together).

What I wanted to find wasn't standard self-promotion….but the author's own personal idea-space, where she had offloaded enough of her mind and voice and personality (through blog posts and ongoing conversations) to invite me in relationship with her brand.

And yes, this requires extra, unpaid work on the part of any writer. Then again, writers always had to promote their stuff in one way or another. We also have to remember the definition of 'marketing' (taken from marketing genius and online master Marie Forleo):

…an emotional connection with the people whom you're meant to serve.

(Did handing out bookplates and bookmarks and badgering people to come to your book signings create that 'emotional' connection? At least in the old world, there was the illusion that that kind of marketing actually worked.)

You serve people – not all people but your people, your right people, your tribe – through creating value for them. And, increasingly, what that 'value' looks like is a sense of community: individuals gathered round that offloaded version of you holding court in the center of your thoughtfully constructed idea-space. You, and your work, become a social object that gives like-minded souls a reason, or an excuse, to come together. You're no longer simply 'marketing'; you're creating a little values culture.

Thing is, when different forces meet up with each other – when the distance drops away between artist and audience – chemistry ensues and transformation happens. Nothing brings us face-to-face with ourselves the way a relationship does, or exposes us to new ideas, or reshapes the ideas we may currently hold. A blog becomes more than a blog: a site of discovery, of creative and intellectual collaboration. It's a living document, forever evolving, as readers shift in and out, and create value for themselves and for you through comments and sharing.

There's you, and your audience, and then this thing, this entity, this energetic space, created when you come together. Jerry Garcia attributed the success of his band The Grateful Dead to the magic that happened at live performances when the Deadhead community fed the band with their energy. Since the band never played the same show twice — and believed in experimentation and innovation — they created a new show each time with the audience, responding to the audience even as the audience was responding to them. "Everybody should be in the band," Garcia enthused. "And when that's happening, it's really something special. It's an amazing thing."

Writes Barry Barnes:

When you erase the distinction between band and audience, between producer and consumer, wonderful things can happen. Ken Kesey once explained the difference between the Dead and other bands: "The Doors were playing at you. John Fogarty was singing at you," he said. Garcia, on the other hand, "was not playing [at the audience]. He was playing with them," and often members of that audience would realize, "He's not only moving my mind. My mind is moving him!"

I'm not saying that you should let your readers dictate your plot choices, or that you should compromise your vision or pander to your people (they're too smart for that, and will abandon you in droves). But I'm reminded of a recent post in which successful entrepreneur/author Jonathan Fields discusses his decision to blog less frequently so he can create greater depth and quality, more value, with each post. "I write to make a difference," he says, and refers to the "sweet spot between your authentic genius zone and the deeper needs of your community." As an entrepreneur, Fields knows what online marketing is – and isn't.

It's not a billboard to let your readers know how great and accomplished you are.

It's writing to make a difference.

It's a sweetspot. It's an idea-space. It's a relationship with your readers…that can move your mind.

That is, if you're willing to let it.

how to flunk social media and lose a potential True Fan (based on a true story)

The other day I finished reading the kind of novel you develop a relationship with: the characters move off the page to take up residence in your head. Their reality runs like a shadowy river alongside your own, always waiting for you to step back into it.

When it was over, I leaped online to check out the author. For the most part, at least in my experience, literary writers tend to eye the various platforms as if they're instruments of sexual bondage: I'm supposed to do what, exactly? Surely you're joking. What exactly is that, anyway?

gratuitious sexual bondage photo

Still, I was hoping for a blog. I wanted to prolong the experience of the novel by remaining in contact with the author's voice. At the same time, I was curious about the author. More than curious: I felt a deep respect and even an affection for her.

I had touched her mind.

I had walked through her imagination.

I wanted to show up at her virtual doorstep with the equivalent of a bouquet of flowers to say thank you and let her know how much her novel meant to me. I was ready to evangelize her to the world – or at least my small corner of it.

reading is awesome

The website was static, uninteresting: I didn't care about any of the promotional stuff, I was looking for a blog, which there wasn't. The Facebook page and tweetstream were also broadcasting and promotional. I was invited to leave a message – a "polite" message, as if I might leave something rude – but the flush of my enthusiasm had faded and I no longer saw the point. So I clicked away.

I think about this now, because it reflects the changing nature of the artist-audience relationship. I bring different expectations to that relationship than I would have, say, five years ago, when of course the author would have remained this remote, mysterious figure in the far distance, giving me a well-meaning wave through her book readings and interviews but nothing more than that.

But now, here I was, ready to be not just a reader or an admirer but a True Fan.

And feeling denied.

What had I been expecting, exactly?

Interactivity. Engagement.

Not with me, since she had no idea who I was, and although I have many flaws I am not, at least to my knowledge, psychotic; but with others, as if she was holding court in the center of a lively café and I had happily wandered in to join the crowd. But it was like she had spurned the café entirely – I'm supposed to do that? — and so I ordered my mocha latte and took my Android tablet from my bag and started on another book, another author, hoping to fall in love again, knowing that, sooner or later, I would.

As a reader of literary fiction, I'm probably not the norm: although I do indeed love the smell of a physical book, the flick of the pages, the creak of the spine, the heft of the thing in my hands, I do most of my reading on my devices (pick one: my smartphone, my tablet, my Kindle Fire). I'm a social media enthusiast, live on the edge of the tech industry and spend a lot of time online, which might be why I seem to be in the minority who considers this a good and exciting time to be a writer. (Since I became a Kindle convert a couple of years ago, I buy and read even more books, not less – and, judging from the data, this is typical.)

But – dare I say – the future of reading looks like me (as William Gibson so succinctly put it, the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed). And as my reading habits adjusted to the new technology, as I absorbed the values and customs of social media culture (transparency, authenticity, connectedness), I became one of those people formerly known as your audience.

It's no longer enough to seduce me with a good book.

My world is crowded, noisy, and moves at lightning speed.

In order to keep me, you need to engage me, or in the time between your last work and your next work some other charismatic wave will have borne me away. You need to turn me into a True Fan. It's the difference between checking out your next book and seeing if it appeals to me – and buying it immediately, no matter what the content, and talking about you to my friends, and on my blog and Facebook and Google+ and whatever else I happen to be using at the time.

Let me be clear: I don't expect or demand one-on-one communication. I am happy to remain faceless and nameless to you. But the online world is exactly that – a world — full-bodied and dazzling and multi-dimensional — and it's turned my relationship to you (or any writer) into a place that I would like to visit at will.

In his book SMART WORLD: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas, Richard Ogle talks about "idea-spaces" and "the extended mind". Basically, in order to navigate a complex and sophisticated world with as a little mental effort as possible, we offload our intelligence into the spaces around us through our myths, customs, technology, business models, codes of behavior. Our knowledge, our different sets of ideas, live outside us (and breakthrough creativity happens when you can look across different idea-spaces, recognize emerging patterns and find ways to fit them together, reshaping entire paradigms).

What I wanted, I realize now, from the author I was referring to earlier, wasn't an online billboard or promotional brochure (which is what I found)….but her own personal idea-space, where she had offloaded enough of her mind and voice and personality* (through blog posts and ongoing conversations) that would invite me into relationship with her, even if it's a one-to-many kind.

And yes, this requires extra, unpaid work on the part of any writer. Then again, writers always had to market their work in one way or another. But writers also have to remember the definition of 'marketing' in the first place (taken from marketing genius and online master Marie Forleo):

An emotional connection with the people that you're meant to serve.

(Did handing out bookplates and bookmarks and badgering people to come to your book signings ever create that 'emotional' connection? But at least in the old-school publishing world, there was the illusion that that kind of marketing actually worked.)

You serve people – not all people but your people, your right people, your tribe – through creating value for them. And, increasingly, what that 'value' looks like now is a sense of community: that crowd of individuals gathered around that offloaded version of you, holding court at the café table in the middle of your thoughtfully constructed idea-space. You, and your work, become a social object that gives like-minded souls a reason, or an excuse, to come together. You're no longer simply 'marketing'; you're creating a little values culture.

Thing is, when different forces meet up with each other – when the distance drops away between artist and audience – chemistry ensues and transformation happens. Nothing brings us face-to-face with ourselves the way a relationship does, or exposes us to new ideas, or reshapes the ideas we may currently hold. A blog becomes more than a blog: it becomes a site of discovery, of creative and intellectual collaboration. It's a living document, forever evolving, as readers shift in and out, and create value for themselves and for you through the comments they leave.

There's you, and your audience, and then there's this thing, this entity, this energetic space, that is created when you come together. When commenting on the incredible success of his band The Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia attributed it to the magic that happened at live performances when the Deadhead community gathered together and fed the band with their energy. Since the band never played the same show twice — and believed in experimentation and innovation — they were creating a new show each time with the audience, responding to the audience. "Everybody should be in the band," Garcia said. "And when that's happening, it's really something special. It's an amazing thing."

Writes Barry Barnes:

When you erase the distinction between band and audience, between producer and consumer, wonderful things can happen. Ken Kesey once explained the difference between the Dead and other bands: "The Doors were playing at you. John Fogarty was singing at you," he said. Garcia, on the other hand, "was not playing [at the audience]. He was playing with them," and often members of that audience would realize, "He's not only moving my mind. My mind is moving him!"

I'm not saying that you should let your readers dictate your plot choices, that you should compromise your vision or pander to your audience (they're too smart for that, and will abandon you in droves). But I'm reminded of a recent post in which successful entrepreneur/author Jonathan Fields discusses his decision to blog less frequently so he can create greater depth and quality, greater value, with each post. "I write to make a difference," he says, and refers to the "sweet spot between your authentic genius zone and the deeper needs of your community." As an entrepreneur, Fields knows what online marketing is – and isn't.

It's not a billboard to let your readers know how great and accomplished you are. It's a sweetspot. It's an idea-space. It's a relationship with your readers…that can move your mind.

That is, if you're willing to let it.

* what you could consider her 'brand'

7 awesome reasons to kill your inner 'nice girl' (or maybe just send her to Cleveland*)

"Killing the angel in the house was part of the occupation of the woman writer." — Virginia Woolf

I give you seven awesome reasons to kill your inner nice girl.

(Or maybe just send her to Cleveland or something.)

You get to be kind.

As my friend Scott Hoffman told me, "Nice is not the same as kind." (He's a literary agent, so he should know.)

It's not the same as civility either. We are polite out of consideration for others. It is an act that we perform. Two people who despise each other can still make the decision to be civil to each other, while knowing full well that each holds the other in unqualified contempt.

Niceness also isn't a character trait – nobody gets described as 'nice-hearted' – so much as a superficial layer of behavior. But unlike civility or politeness, niceness pretends to have some depth to it, masquerading as the person's actual thoughts, feelings, or character. It often hides a self-serving agenda (like kissing up to your boss in order to keep your job; or wanting to please everybody in order to feel loved, accepted and safe; or trying to charm someone into random meaningless sex**.)

'Nice' can be a symptom of feeling powerless; people can't say what they truly mean or ask for what they really want, so they maneuver and manipulate to get it. Which is probably why we sometimes associate 'nice' with 'spineless'. (Also with 'resentful' and 'passive-aggressive'.)

Kindness, on the other hand, can require great courage.

You get to be authentic.



We all learn how to perform ourselves – online or offline – but the people we admire are the people who feel 'real' to us. Their persona is an honest expression of their personality (instead of a distortion or a disguise).

As Eckhart Tolle puts it:

"[They] function from the deeper core of their being – those who do not attempt to appear more than they are, but as simply themselves, stand out as remarkable, and are the only ones who truly make a difference in the world…Their mere presence, simple, natural and unassuming, has a transformational effect on whomever they come into contact with."

You get to stand for something.

You can't have your own strong point-of-view when you're too busy accommodating every other point-of-view out there, or when you're afraid of offending people or rocking a boat (any boat).

We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are. Your point of view is who you truly are. (It's also how you differentiate yourself.) To deny people that is to deny them – yourself – the chance to get to know you – as well as denying yourself the chance to get known.

Standing for something means that you will piss some people off. They won't like you. That's okay. (That helps to bond together the people who do like you.) It's much more liberating to live your life according to your values. Not to mention that when you do that, you attract people who stand for the same things that you do. They might even be inspired by you. And that is super cool.

You get to live off your ragged edge.

The ragged edge is the edge of your comfort zone. It's the jumping-off point on your way to mastery. It's where real growth begins.

Growth is a messy process, filled with events that some people label 'mistakes and failures' and others regard simply as 'data'. (It's the latter types that tend to be more successful.)

People who are overly invested in the opinions of others can be perfectionists. They don't want to risk falling on their face (or ass). They think appearing perfect = being loved.

(The ironic thing is, people as a general rule tend not to like 'perfect' individuals. We're quick to sense that that kind of perfection is bullshit.)

But if you don't let yourself rise to your level of incompetence, you'll never get the chance to explore, discover …and move on to something greater.

You get to love up your inner voice.



Your inner voice is who you are at core. It knows what you need – even if what you need isn't necessarily what you want – and points the way to your ultimate well-being and self-actualization.

If, that is, it hasn't been drowned out by all the voices of all the individuals you're so busy trying to please.

(And if it has, don't worry. That voice isn't going anywhere. You just need to get yourself to a still and quiet place so you can tune back into it.

Also, a beer might be helpful.)

You get to be the hero of your own freaking life.

The whole point and purpose of a 'nice' girl is to support somebody else — usually male — in his life quest for accomplishment, purpose and epic meaning. As Carolyn Heilbrun observes in WRITING A WOMAN'S LIFE, throughout history women have been expected to live out 'marriage plots' while men live out 'quest plots'. Although obviously this is changing – and has been changing for decades – there's still an expectation embedded in the culture, often unspoken and maybe barely registered, that at some point the woman will put her dreams and ambitions in check and follow her man to wherever his quest might take them. The woman's own quest ended with marriage and children – the rest is details.

Clearly, for those of us who are maybe not such domestic goddesses, who may want marriage and children and/or something else, it doesn't have to be this way. But to take full control of your destiny and assert the importance of your own needs is to risk being called 'selfish', and a nice girl doesn't do those things.

You get to have a voice.



And when you tell your truth, you give other people permission to tell their truth. Because we're not as alone as we think.

* I have absolutely nothing against Cleveland.

** which might not be a bad thing, depending.

how the power of free can help you become a raging success (just ask the Grateful Dead)

1

Why should you bust your ass on your creative content and give it away, online, for free?

How is this supposed to help you?

And it can't be mediocre stuff, either.

It has to be remarkable, engaging, useful, distinctive…or else no one will care.

2

Part of becoming a powerful artist involves being a relevant artist.

Consistent blogging gives ideas life and energy as it tosses them to you, dear reader, and you bounce them around and back to the blogger.

The blogger can lean into what works, what resonates, and discard or reshape what doesn't.

I'm not saying that, as a blogger, you learn to pander — which doesn't work all that well anyway, since people respond to authenticity (tricky to define, an easy word to overuse, but we know it when we see it, or at least when we don't).

I'm also not saying that you learn to compromise your vision to fit your (inaccurate) sense of the (ever-shifting) creative marketplace. But ideas evolve through expression and social interaction, and that growth weaves through your creative work.

Creative work requires isolation, but creative insight develops when you're in the world, observing and asking questions and testing your aforementioned ideas and exploring stuff and meeting cool people and taking risks and learning cool shit.

Blogging is a way to be in the world that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

3

Even if the benefits stopped there, I would wonder why more writers in particular, especially literary writers, don't take advantage of this.

"But why should I write," they grumble, "for free?"

Which brings me round to my opening question.

John Perry Barlow* nails it in his introduction to the book EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT BUSINESS I LEARNED FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD (seriously, how could you not want to read a book with this title)?

The band became a massive success without compromising their values or vision in large part because they gave away their music for free. Or rather: they allowed tapers in the audience. As bootleg tapes of their concerts (free content) circulated among fans, they attracted new fans who paid money to come to their concerts (paid content). And because fans knew from listening to the tapes that Grateful Dead concerts changed from night to night they had incentive to attend as many concerts as possible

endowing us eventually with a following so devoted that we could, for a time, fill any stadium in America.

Barlow makes the point that an information economy is "fundamentally different" from a physical economy. In the latter, scarcity equals value. If we can't have it, we want it more. It's why De Beers manipulated the diamond market so that diamonds appeared scarce when they were all over the damn place.

But these rules don't seem to apply to expression

where there appears to be an equally strong relationship between familiarity and value instead.

The worth of a diamond remains the same whether it's hidden in your pocket, displayed in public, or dropped into the ocean like in the movie TITANIC (which I always thought a stupid pointless move on the part of the heroine, but whatever).

Barlow continues:

…the world's greatest song has no value to anyone but me as long as it's in my head…Only when a lot of people have heard and enjoyed it does it start to accumulate value, and even then not so much for itself but for me as its source. In this, music is more like a service, something that is continuously provided, rather than an object of commerce. The more people who become aware of the quality of that service, the more that can be economically derived from providing real-time access to its provision. Thus, every time we "gave away" a show to the tapers, we increased the value of the music that hadn't been played yet.

It's the free content that draws you in to a much larger story the artist is telling.

The unfolding of that story — that sweeping, creative, singular vision expressed over years through an evolving body of work — is a service rather than an object. The more people become aware of "the high quality of that service", the higher the demand, the higher the perceived value, and the more the artist can charge for access to certain aspects of it (if the artist is inclined in that direction).

Blog posts, in a way, are like songs: little units that have value in and of themselves, fluttering out in all directions, assuming lives of their own –

– if they're good enough to win attention.

Familiarity builds trust and likeability. There's a psychology study in which a girl at college shows up for class everyday — and then, in another class, shows up only some of the time. In both cases, she doesn't speak to anybody, or make eye contact, or linger in any way before fleeing the lecture hall.

But the students who saw her everyday rated her 'likeability' much higher than the students who barely saw her at all.

The more you hear a song, the more you tend to like it (at least until you hate it again for being so overplayed).

When the success of your creative work depends largely on subjective elements — appealing to subjective tastes — it makes sense to attract your right people (through the power of your amazing content) — and make your style as familiar as possible — even before you have anything to sell them.

Because this whole question — are people willing to pay for content? — is, in my mind, kind of ridiculous.

Yes! They are!

It just depends on the story you're telling.

* I met Barlow at a String Cheese Incident concert. It was a highly memorable evening.

what the Grateful Dead can teach creatives about blogging (+ the power of free)

1

Why should you bust your ass on your creative content and give it away, online, for free?

How is this supposed to help you?

And it can't be mediocre stuff, either.

It has to be remarkable, engaging, useful, distinctive…or else no one will care.

2

Part of becoming a powerful artist involves being a relevant artist.

Consistent blogging gives your ideas life and energy as it tosses them to you, dear reader, and you bounce them around and back to the blogger.

The blogger can lean into what works, what resonates, and discard or reshape what doesn't.

I'm not saying that, as a blogger, you learn to pander — which doesn't work all that well anyway, since people respond to authenticity (tricky to define, an easy word to overuse, but we know it when we see it, or at least when we don't).

I'm also not saying that you learn to compromise your vision to fit your (inaccurate) sense of the (ever-shifting) creative marketplace. But ideas evolve through expression and social interaction, and that growth weaves through your creative work.

Creative work requires isolation, but creative insight develops when you're in the world, observing and asking questions and testing your aforementioned ideas and exploring stuff and meeting cool people and taking risks and learning cool shit.

Blogging is a way to be in the world that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

3

Even if the benefits stopped there, I would wonder why more writers in particular, especially literary writers, don't take advantage of this.

"But why should I write," they grumble, "for free?"

Which brings me round to my opening question.

John Perry Barlow* nails it in his introduction to the book EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT BUSINESS I LEARNED FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD (seriously, how could you not want to read a book with this title)?

The band became a massive success without compromising their values or vision in large part because they gave away their music for free. Or rather: they allowed tapers in the audience. As bootleg tapes of their concerts (free content) circulated among fans, they attracted new fans who paid money to come to their concerts (paid content). And because fans knew from listening to the tapes that Grateful Dead concerts changed from night to night they had incentive to attend as many concerts as possible

endowing us eventually with a following so devoted that we could, for a time, fill any stadium in America.

Barlow makes the point that an information economy is "fundamentally different" from a physical economy. In the latter, scarcity equals value. If we can't have it, we want it more. It's why De Beers manipulated the diamond market so that diamonds appeared scarce when they were all over the damn place.

But these rules don't seem to apply to expression

where there appears to be an equally strong relationship between familiarity and value instead.

The worth of a diamond remains the same whether it's hidden in your pocket, displayed in public, or dropped into the ocean like in the movie TITANIC, (which I always thought a stupid pointless move on the point of the heroine, but whatever).

Barlow continues:

…the world's greatest song has no value to anyone but me as long as it's in my head…Only when a lot of people have heard and enjoyed it does it start to accumulate value, and even then not so much for itself but for me as its source. In this, music is more like a service, something that is continuously provided, rather than an object of commerce. The more people who become aware of the quality of that service, the more that can be economically derived from providing real-time access to its provision. Thus, every time we "gave away" a show to the tapers, we increased the value of the music that hadn't been played yet.

It's the free content that draws you in to a much larger story the artist is telling.

The unfolding of that story — that sweeping, creative, singular vision expressed over years through an evolving body of work — is a service rather than an object. The more people become aware of "the high quality of that service", the higher the demand, the higher the perceived value, and the more the artist can charge for access to certain aspects of it (if the artist is inclined in that direction).

Blog posts, in a way, are like songs: little units that have value in and of themselves, fluttering out in all directions, assuming lives of their own –

– if they're good enough to win attention.

Familiarity builds trust and likeability. There's a psychology study in which a girl at college shows up for class everyday — and then, in another class, shows up only some of the time. In both cases, she doesn't speak to anybody, or make eye contact, or linger in any way before fleeing the lecture hall.

But the students who saw her everyday rated her 'likeability' much higher than the students who barely saw her at all.

The more you hear a song, the more you tend to like it (at least until you hate it again for being so overplayed).

When the success of your creative work depends largely on subjective elements — appealing to subjective tastes — it makes sense to attract your right people (through the power of your amazing content) — and make your style as familiar as possible — even before you have anything to sell them.

Because this whole question — are people willing to pay for content? — is, in my mind, kind of ridiculous.

Yes! They are!

It just depends on the story you're telling.

* I met Barlow at a String Cheese Incident concert. It was a highly memorable evening.

cool quotes by badass women

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."

― Marilyn Monroe

"The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud."

– Coco Chanel

"Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it."

–Edna St. Vincent Millay

"A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together."

–Margaret Atwood

"One is not born a woman, but becomes one."

""The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels."

– Simone de Beauvoir

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

– Anais Nin

Add one in the comments below.

the art of the creative pause (+ not being Amazon's bitch)

It's good to disrupt yourself on a regular basis.

My kids went to their father and I went to Palm Springs and Joshua Tree. I'd forgotten how much I love the desert. I felt drawn to it as a kid – to the New Mexico landscapes featured in Lois Duncan's YA novels, or Judy Blume's book TIGER EYES – and it was good to be reminded of that.

Shift your location, shift your perspective.

She ponders how far she is from Coffee Bean.

We get attached to ways of thinking. We don't realize that we need to change the frame.

So I'm writing this novel, and one day I'll finish it, and decide what I'm going to do with it. I read this piece about reasons not to self-publish. It's an intelligent, well-written article, and my mind kept circling back to it.

Something keeps nagging me about it. Something about the old-school frame that's shaping the writer's question ("self-publish or traditional publisher?") It's a good question. But is it the right, truly central question?

The problem is no longer getting published, but finding your readership.

Where and how are your right readers going to find you? How to initially catch their interest and make them care when they have a zillion other things to do?

"I don't want to be Amazon's bitch," this writer says: a reason why she seeks a traditional publishing contract for her first literary novel.

I don't want to be Amazon's bitch either. But I've been through the traditional-publishing thing (on the genre side), and I don't want to be anyone's bitch. William Goldman's famous words come to mind – he was talking about Hollywood, but they still seem appropriate:

Nobody knows anything.

It's a time, I think, for strategic improvisation. For what business theorist and jazz musician Frank Barrett describes as "fabricating and inventing novel responses without a pre-scripted plan and without certainty of outcomes; discovering the future that [your] action creates as it unfolds."

It's the ability not just to plan and act in real time, but to make adjustments, lean into what works and pivot away from what doesn't.

If you're locked into a traditional publishing contract for the next couple of years – and god knows what the publishing landscape is going to look like by the end of that (how many generations of e-readers will we have cycled through, advancing not just the technology but our comfort with it, our reliance on it?) – how, exactly, can you stay fluid enough to adapt as you need to?

When you sign that contract, how can you know what rights you need to fight for when the objects of those rights are in the process of…redefining themselves? How do you know that your books are going to be in bookstores when the bookstores themselves keep closing down and going under? What are the other places that might stock your book – drugstores, Target, Wal-Mart, airports? Are they likely to stock your book?

Don't get me wrong. I think traditional publishers are still a great way to go…especially if you've built up a platform on your own, and maybe sold enough self-published novels that demonstrate your healthy, growing readership. You're less likely to be someone's bitch if you've followed Seth Godin's advice and created your own media company. You've given yourself options (a.k.a. 'leverage').

And the interesting thing about finding your audience is that it involves finding yourself.

There's something to be said for that.

Writers feel such a sense of urgency when it comes to getting published – and that often works to our detriment. We submit manuscripts before they're ready. Or we do get published, and it turns out to be a mistake. We weren't yet the writer we were meant to become.

What if we took this time of uncertainty as a chance for a creative pause?

As a time for radical exploration and experimentation? While the publishing industry shakes itself out and the trailblazers forge new pathways and make mistakes — so that the rest of us don't have to?

As a chance to write whatever the hell we want, embrace mistakes of our own, and learn from them?

To get really fucking good?

And develop our own, drop-dead style?

(Because are you, right now, as good as you want to be? As singular as you need to be?)

In his book BRAND LIKE A ROCK STAR, Steve Jones observes that

There are very few Facebook-style overnight success stories to tell…Every band, and brand, needs that incubation time to refine their craft. Lennon and McCartney needed to figure out how to write songs together. Bob Dylan needed to meet Woody Guthrie and immerse himself in the folk counter-culture of Greenwich Village….

At some point every rock star brand finds that moment of transition when the kindling catches fire and the tiny flame becomes a massive blaze.

Maybe it's time to improvise your way forward by looping back to learn something you didn't quite get the first time. Maybe it's time to change the frame and ask yourself new questions about what a writing career might look like if it played uniquely to your strengths, not just as a writer but a blogger, speaker, online entrepreneur, multimedia producer. Etc.

Or maybe you just want to take some time to make that manuscript a freaking masterpiece.

And when the kindling catches fire, you'll be ready to blaze.

beauty, sex + power?

1

I went to an exhibit called BEAUTY CULTURE and saw a documentary by Lauren Greenfield in which a woman said something like, "People think that we're living in a beauty culture now…but we have always been living in a beauty culture."

I like to look at beautiful women. I admit it.

I'm hardly alone in this; BEAUTY CULTURE is the most popular exhibit the Annenberg Space for Photography has ever shown. A slowly shuffling line of attendees snaked past the walls of photographs.

"There aren't any pictures of men," I pointed out to my boyfriend. Although the exhibit didn't claim to be about women specifically, it didn't even pretend to take an interest in beautiful males.

(And it's interesting that male supermodels make a fraction of the money and get a fraction of the attention that female supermodels do. This can't be just a 'male gaze' thing; if women wanted to look at pictures of beautiful men the way some of us want to read vampire novels, for example, I have a feeling that chiseled males in various stages of seductive undress would be selling us everything from makeup to furniture to luxury vacations to wine to footwear.)

And it struck me that men aren't celebrated for their sexual power, because in men, power is sexual. Their sexuality is expressed through what they do and who they are…not just what they look like.

2

Our fascination with gorgeous women is like our fascination with sex: visceral, primal and unlikely to go away anytime soon. I'm not sure I would even want it to. I kind of agree with a woman in a different documentary (also about female beauty) who cheered, "Let's hear it for the hot young things! Where would we be without them?"

The problem I have is with the disconnect, the distance that our culture tries to put between the fact of 'beauty' — and the woman who has it. What you see in photographs is an attempt to isolate that beauty, to freeze one perfect moment brought about by god knows how many hours of makeup and hair and stylists and lighting and so on and so forth, to turn it into a thing that will never change, age, or evolve in any way.

This is the kind of 'beauty' that becomes a caricature of itself. It's got nowhere to go. It's a definition of being beautiful that, among other things, is embedded in being young, and not even the greatest of beauties can be young forever.

And when I walk around Beverly Hills, I can see them: women in their fifties or sixties, brittle-thin, hair dyed and shellacked in place, their faces stretched and freeze-dried. I saw one of the most famous women in the world come into my gym every now and again, with that same preserved 'look' from so many years ago – except, now, drained of all the movement and sensuality that made her so magnetic in the first place.

3

There is no real sense of personhood in our definition of beauty. Beauty gets abstracted, presented as a set of standards for us to live up to – and those standards change just often enough to keep us off-balance. It's kind of like a lover who makes us want him all the more because even when you have him, you don't really have him (or her).

Beauty is static, inanimate and perfect.

Human beings are none of these things.

To meet those standards – to try to meet those standards – we're encouraged to turn ourselves into objects, distorted versions of youth where our faces used to be.

What the fuck?

We collude in this, we continue to fuel the beauty industry, because on some level we grow up believing that a very singular and narrow definition of beauty will bring us love, and that female sexuality translates to power in the world.

The problem, of course, is that these things aren't true.

4

When I was 19 and living on Nantucket Island for two weeks, I noticed how the people around me – including my boyfriend at the time, including the very lovely middle-aged couple we stayed with – spoke with disdain about pretty, supposedly less-than-bright girls. When I asked my female host about this, she seemed surprised. She had to think for a moment: "I guess it's because things come easy to them. They don't really have to work for anything."

From my vantage point now, that's an interesting statement to think about. What is it, exactly, that comes so easily to pretty women? Love and money? How many clubgirls, aspiring models and actresses would agree with that? I suspect they'd be more likely to resonate with Michelle Pfeiffer's statement that Beautiful women get used a lot. If people are only interested in you for your looks, then you're not a person, you're a commodity; and you get discarded.

5

We complain about people who need too much attention, but the truth is that we all require some degree of it: it's as if some primitive part of the brain equates it with love and survival.

But if the rest of us don't feel that you've properly 'earned' it, we resent you for it. And we're so quick to resent girls and women. We make snide remarks behind their backs (and sometimes to their faces). We massacre them in online forums. This girl was assaulted in a public place – by other girls – for posting provocative, artistic photographs of her exceptionally attractive self online.

And this is the strange thing about female beauty: if, by some freak of genetics, you actually have it, you're not supposed to admit to knowing you have it (and if this can't be helped, because denying your beauty would make you seem like an imbecile – like with supermodels — then you need to stress what an ugly duckling you were as a child). You're not supposed to knowingly use your looks to get attention (like the girl above) —-because then you're a slut.

You're also not taken seriously.

There seems to be an unspoken law in this culture that in order to be a powerful woman….you should be asexual. Your own sexuality can undercut you; it can be used against you. Two of the most powerful, brilliant, strategic and political women in history – Cleopatra and Catherine the Great – are remembered, respectively, for being a wanton manipulative seductress, and for having sex with a horse: not because these things are true, but because of the rumors that their enemies carefully and artfully spread about them after they died (it's hard to defend yourself when you're dead).

If this is power, it's a very strange form of it.

6

I fantasize about a culture that celebrates women not (just) for being exotic objects of beauty, but for being sensual.

Sensuality, to me, is about who you are as a person, how you move and laugh and talk and think and style yourself and relate to other people. It's the fullness of your life. It's your charisma and your character.

Prettiness fades, but sensuality evolves.

Sensuality is living and organic; it's not a thing, but an energy.

Sensuality can't be disconnected from a woman's personhood the way beauty can, because sensuality is expressed through her personhood. Which is why, ultimately, sensuality fascinates in a way that beauty does not. The greatest courtesans in history weren't necessarily beautiful, or even young – but they knew how to evoke the senses, how to provoke and dazzle and charm. They did it, of course, to survive; they had to capture, and hold, the imagination of their patrons.

What if we simply did that for ourselves?

What if, instead of being hot, we encouraged girls to be fascinating?

What if we gave girls attention and recognition simply for being their own lovely, creative, complicated selves? What if we celebrated them for doing well in school, for chasing and achieving professional success, financial independence? What if girls looked out at the culture and saw women celebrated not just as models and actresses and the reality TV stars that we love to hate, but teachers and nurses and doctors and engineers and investment bankers and mothers (including single mothers) and artists and orchestra conductors and politicians and venture capitalists and entrepreneurs? What if we expected and demanded of them to develop their minds and talents along with their wardrobes?

What if we didn't punish them for seeking attention, but offered them lots of legitimate, constructive ways to do so?

We give all of this lip service, of course.

But what if we actually meant it?

how to be a creative genius (or just look like one)

1

I'm not surprised that the recent biography of Steve Jobs turned out to be controversial, revealing – as Malcolm Gladwell put it – "a man with a nasty edge."

Apparently Jobs had a mean streak. He could be a bully. He played fast and loose with reality – otherwise known as his "reality distortion field" – and took credit for ideas not his own.

It's possible that he was what Linda Martinez calls a high achieving narcissist. Or what Michael Maccoby refers to as a productive narcissist.

If so, he's in great company. Maccoby identifies creative and cultural forces such as Picasso, Henry Ford, Richard Wagner, Coco Chanel, Winston Churchill, as 'productive narcissists.'

2

I am fascinated by Coco Chanel, and it's not because I carry her handbags (too ladylike for me) or wear her clothes (wrong body type). Style is the story you tell about yourself to the world, and here's a woman who told a story that was so radically different from everything around her it challenged the very idea of what it meant to be 'feminine' (and caged in bustles and corsets).

Chanel was tiny, slender, flat-chested, spirited, independent: big, torturous clothes (involving whalebone*) that pushed up your breasts, clamped your waist, severely limited your movements, caused fainting spells, squashed your internal organs into odd positions, threatened to knock over people when you turned sideways, and required help putting on, were no good to her.

She dressed the way she damn well pleased, then turned her style into a business – in an age, remember, that was not exactly a hotbed of professional opportunity for women.

She should have been booed off the stage. ("Taking menswear and turning it into womenswear? Taking a cheap ugly hard-to-manage fabric like jersey and turning it into a chic dress? Is this woman smoking crack?") Instead, she managed to revolutionize an entire industry. (Last time I checked, I had three jersey dresses hanging in my closet. Maybe four. Long cardigans? Little black dresses? Yep, got those too. Thank you, Coco.) Her look is so focused and singular that you can practically recognize it in the dark.

The woman had vision, she never let other people talk her out of it, and she communicated it to the world in a way that resonates today.

That is awesome.

3

The more I learn about creativity, the more I think about how our culture stamps it out of most of us, starting when we're young. Our public educational system is a relic of the Industrial Age, founded by tycoons who needed to stock their factories with competent and literate employees. The last thing they wanted to cultivate among this future workforce was the ability to "think different" . If 'genius' is about achieving unprecedented levels of creative insight, conventional schooling does not provide the conditions conducive for this. If anything, it provides the exact opposite. It's a genius killer.

Unless, perhaps, you're an extreme narcissist.

4

Human beings are social animals. We form our self-images according to the feedback, the reflections, we get from the people around us. If people think well of us, then we tend to think well of ourselves (and form our ambitions accordingly). The more positive attention we get, the more powerful we tend to be – or become.

(Unless, of course, it's sexual attention, which is transitory and uncertain.)

At the same time, studies show – as Jonathan Fields discusses in his book UNCERTAINTY– that we do our most creative and risk-taking work when we don't think that anyone is watching. If we know we have an audience — or that our work will be judged and evaluated — we're more inclined to play it safe. We color inside the lines. We don't want to fail or make mistakes or look stupid. We want, instead, to get the top prize.

We want the A.

There are two kinds of motivation: extrinsic vs intrinsic. When we engage in creative work with one eye on the possible outcome – the grade, the prize, the money, the fame, or any other external reward– we do not make the kind of truly cool, epic shit as when we take joy and satisfaction in the process itself. Doing the activity for the sake of the activity (aka intrinsic motivation) appears to be the key to flow and creative achievement.

So even as our sense of self evolves through the ongoing process of social feedback, our innate creativity suffers for it. As kids, we start out with grandiose ambitions: a vision of the future that we can create, a sense of the self that we can become. As we grow older, and interact with the people around us, that vision gets tempered and compromised. Some would say we turn 'realistic'. Others might say that we trade in that vision, as well as the guidance it gives us, in exchange for approval from others. In the quest to get along, and to belong — and avoid social exile, which our primitive brain equates with death – we smooth away the freaky edges of our personality. We lose track of our true inner knowing. Instead of going for greatness, we go for the A.

This doesn't seem to happen with narcissists.

What characterizes extreme narcissism – and makes it dangerous to be in relationship with it – is a pronounced lack of empathy. So if most of us tune into other people in order to establish and navigate a shared reality, the narcissists' reality starts – and ends – with themselves. It's possible they never lose faith in their quote-unquote crazy dreams because they define their own reality – which could be known as a "reality distortion field" , and is sometimes known as pathological lying. But the best and brightest and most charismatic manage to seduce other people into that reality along with them — and help flesh it out into actual, factual being for the rest of us.

If not for the fact that extreme narcissists tend to end up alienated, embittered, alone – and confused as to why, exactly, their loved ones can't stand them – you might think that it's great to actually be one. (Going through life without the burden of worrying about other people? Sign me up!) Instead, it might be worthwhile to look at what works for them and how the rest of us can apply some of those tactics to our own lives.

5

Develop an authentic and compelling point of view.

An authentic point of view is a singular point of view because it's unique to you. It combines your tastes, beliefs, ideas and personality with the skillset needed to express that point of view in the most powerful way possible.

Sometimes we refer to it as your "voice".

A great creative voice develops over time. It feeds off a diversity of influences, so you want to seek out and soak up as many ideas as possible. As Steve Jobs pointed out, creativity is little more than "connecting the dots": through combining and recombining different, pre-existing ideas, you arrive at something fresh. But you can't connect the dots if you don't give yourself all that many to work with in the first place.

To be compelling, a point of view has to be relevant to others. If it has some scope to it, and inspires a sense of awe, so much the better.

Note that Steve Jobs' stated vision was never to "make a gajillion dollars" or "build a powerful company" or "become so revered that people leave flowers outside Apple stores when I die." His vision was to challenge the status quo, to put a dent in the universe, to change the world, by giving people the tools that would democratize creativity. That is pretty amazing. Not to mention, it's a vision that lots of other people could regard as personally meaningful for themselves, even as it connects them to something bigger than themselves.

Get truly excellent at something.



We value what is rare, so if you master the difficult, learn the tough stuff, do what other people are not willing to do, you can create your own niche and dominate the outcome. If you are heeding your inner voice then you probably love what you're doing — which makes those ten or fifteen or twenty thousand hours of deliberate practice slip by a lot faster.

Give yourself an A.

I took this idea from a book called THE ART OF POSSIBILITY. Since we all, on some level, are working for the A, give it to yourself right at the beginning of the process ("Boom. Done. The 'A' is mine, dammit!"). This frees you up to focus on the process. When you know you already have the A, you are willing to take more creative risk, try new things, make the mistakes that serve as learning experiences on the path to the kind of achievement that lives beyond the A.

Be a naked blazing ball of totally obscene ambition.



We think of time as linear – the past is done, the present is now, the future hasn't happened yet. But if you shift to a non-linear, holistic, visual way of thinking, you can see it all at once: pastpresentfuture. Your past – or rather, how you tell the story of your past to yourself – influences your actions in the present, which shapes the way you conceive of the future. At the same time, the ambitions you have for your future can provide a context for your present, one that inspires you to action…or not.

Books that explore narcissistic personality disorder will talk about the narcissist's sense of time. The extreme narcissist lives solely in the present. They act according to how they feel and what they want from you in this particular moment, which is why they can eviscerate you, leave you in tears – and then ask if you want to go to a movie (and wonder why you're so upset). The narcissist will also create and recreate their story of the past so that it supports whatever they need to believe about the present – which is one of the reasons why, if you happen to have shared that particular past, dealing with a narcissist can be frustrating and crazy-making.

Although playing fast and loose with the actual facts of your life is probably a bad idea, the way that you choose to interpret those facts and tell them as a story is up to you. Facts are facts, but story is what gives them meaning. Story acts as a unifying thread that links your past to your future. Why not reverse-engineer it? Think of the future that you would like to have, then "re-truth your past": think of a way to re-tell your past so that it sets you up to achieve that future.

Learn to sell it.



Productive narcissists tend to be great communicators. What a narcissist requires above all else is attention, and from a young age they figure out strategies to get as much attention as possible. They tend to be outgoing, charming and persuasive in person – at least when they want to be, or deem you important enough to expend that kind of effort.

(A recent study demonstrated that, on first impression, people tend to like narcissists more than non-narcissists. As time goes on, though, people tend to like narcissists less and less, until about four months into the study people rate the non-narcissists higher in likeability than the narcissists. )

The lesson here? Put 'becoming a great communicator' at the very top of your to-do list. Steve Jobs was famous for the compelling, theatrical flair with which he staged presentations. Narcissists seem to instinctively know what the rest of us don't always learn: in one way or another, we are always selling something, whether it's our work, our ideas, or ourselves. You can force yourself on people – which, in the end, leads to resentment, subterfuge, rebellion. Or you can communicate yourself in such a way that other people want to be part of your bigger picture and help bring your great dream into being.

Which might be the ultimate creative act.

*Let's think about that for a moment. Freaking whalebone.

how to be a genius (or just look like one)

1

I'm not surprised that the recent biography of Steve Jobs turned out to be controversial, revealing – as Malcolm Gladwell put it – "a man with a nasty edge."

Apparently Jobs had a mean streak. He could be a bully. He played fast and loose with reality – otherwise known as his "reality distortion field" – and took credit for ideas not his own.

It's possible that he was what Linda Martinez calls a high achieving narcissist. Or what Michael Maccoby refers to as a productive narcissist.

If so, he's in great company. Maccoby identifies creative and cultural forces such as Picasso, Henry Ford, Richard Wagner, Coco Chanel, Winston Churchill, as 'productive narcissists.'

2

I am fascinated by Coco Chanel, and it's not because I carry her handbags (at least not anymore). Style is the story you tell about yourself to the world, and here's a woman who, in 19XX, told a story that was so radically different from everything around her it challenged the very idea of what it meant to be 'feminine' (and caged in elaborate bustles and corsets).

Chanel was tiny, slender, flat-chested, spirited, independent: big, torturous clothes (involving whalebone*) that pushed up your breasts, clamped your waist, severely limited your movements, caused fainting spells, squashed your internal organs into odd positions, threatened to knock over people when you turned sideways, and required help putting on, were no good to her.

She dressed the way she damn well pleased, then turned her style into a business – in an age, remember, that was not exactly a hotbed of professional opportunity for women.

She should have been booed off the stage. ("Taking menswear and turning it into womenswear? Taking a cheap ugly hard-to-manage fabric like jersey and turning it into a chic dress? Is this woman smoking crack?") Instead, she managed to revolutionize an entire industry. (Last time I checked, I had three jersey dresses hanging in my closet. Maybe four. Long cardigans? Little black dresses? Yep, got those too. Thank you, Coco.) Her look is so focused and singular that you can practically recognize it in the dark.

The woman had vision, she never lost faith in it, she never let other people talk her out of it, and she communicated it to the world in a way that still resonates today.

3

The more I learn about creativity, the more I think about how our culture stamps it out of most of us, starting when we're young. Our public educational system is a relic of the Industrial Age, founded by tycoons who needed to stock their factories with competent and literate employees. The last thing they wanted to cultivate among this future workforce was the ability to "think different" . If 'genius' is about achieving unprecedented levels of creative insight, conventional schooling does not provide the conditions conducive for this. If anything, it provides the exact opposite. It's a genius killer.

Unless, perhaps, you're an extreme narcissist.

4

Human beings are social animals. We form our self-images according to the feedback, the reflections, we get from the people around us. If people think well of us, then we tend to think well of ourselves (and form our ambitions accordingly). The more positive attention we get, the more powerful we tend to be – or become.

(Unless, of course, it's sexual attention, which is transitory and uncertain.)

At the same time, studies show – as Jonathan Fields discusses in his book UNCERTAINTY– that we do our most creative and risk-taking work when we don't think that anyone is watching. If we know we have an audience — or that our work will be judged and evaluated — we're more inclined to play it safe. We color inside the lines. We don't want to fail or make mistakes or look stupid. We want, instead, to get the top prize.

We want the A.

There are two kinds of motivation: extrinsic vs intrinsic. When we engage in creative work focused strictly on the outcome – the grade, the prize, the money, the fame, or any other kind of external reward (aka extrinsic motivation) – we do not make the kind of truly cool, epic shit as when we take joy and satisfaction in the process itself. Doing the activity for the sake of the activity (aka intrinsic motivation) appears to be the key to flow and creative achievement.

So even as our sense of self evolves through the ongoing process of social feedback, our innate creativity suffers for it. As kids, we start out with grandiose ambitions, a vivid internal vision of the future that we can create for ourselves. As we grow older, and interact with the people around us, that vision gets tempered and compromised. Some would say we turn 'realistic'. Others might say that we trade in that sense of inner vision, as well as the guidance that gives us, in exchange for approval from others. In the quest to get along, and to belong — and avoid social exile, which our primitive brain equates with death – we smooth away the freaky edges of our personality. We internalize those outside voices and lose track of our true inner knowing. Instead of going for greatness, we go for the A.

This doesn't really happen with narcissists.

What characterizes extreme narcissism – and makes it dangerous to be in relationship with them – is a lack of empathy. So if most of us tune into other people in order to establish and navigate a shared reality, the narcissists' reality starts – and ends – with themselves. They never lose faith in their crazy ambitions because they define their own reality – which could be known as a "reality distortion field" , and is sometimes known as pathological lying. The best and brightest and most charismatic of them manage to seduce other people into that reality with them and help flesh it into being for the rest of us.

If not for the fact that extreme narcissists tend to end up alienated, embittered, alone – and confused as to why, exactly, their loved ones can't stand them – you might think that it's kind of great to actually be one. (Going through life without the burden of worrying about other people? Sign me up!) Instead, it might be worthwhile to look at what works for them and how the rest of us can apply some of those tactics to our own lives.

5

Develop an authentic and compelling point of view.

An authentic point of view is a singular point of view because it's unique to you. It combines your tastes, beliefs, ideas and personality with the skillset needed to express that point of view in the most powerful way possible.

Sometimes we refer to it as your "voice".

A great creative voice develops over time. It helps to seek out a diversity of influences so you can soak up as many ideas as possible. As Steve Jobs pointed out, creativity is little more than "connecting the dots": through combining and recombining different ideas, you arrive at something fresh. But you can't connect the dots if you don't give yourself many to work with in the first place.

To be compelling, a point of view has to be relevant to others. If it has some scope to it, and inspires a sense of awe, so much the better.

Note that Steve Jobs' stated vision was never to "make a gajillion dollars" or "build a powerful company" or "become so revered that people leave flowers outside Apple stores when I die." His vision was to challenge the status quo, to put a dent in the universe, to change the world, by giving people the tools that would democratize creativity. That is pretty amazing. Not to mention, it's a vision that lots of other people could regard as personally meaningful to themselves, find inspiring, and get behind.

Get truly excellent at something.

We value what is rare, so if you master the difficult, learn the tough stuff, do what other people are not willing to do, you can create your own niche and dominate your own outcome. If you are heeding your inner voice then you love what you're doing, which makes those ten or fifteen or twenty thousand hours of deliberate practice slip by a lot faster.

Give yourself an A.

I took this idea from a book called THE ART OF POSSIBILITY. Since we all, on some level, are working for the A, give it to yourself right at the beginning of the process, which frees you up to focus on the process. And when you know you already have the A, you are willing to take more creative risk, try new things, make the kind of mistakes that serve as learning experiences on the path to the kind of achievement that lives beyond the A.

Be a naked blazing ball of totally obscene ambition.

We think of time as linear – the past is done, the present is now, the future hasn't happened yet. But if you shift to a non-linear, holistic, visual way of thinking, you can see it all at once: pastpresentfuture. Your past – or rather, how you tell the story of your past to yourself – influences your actions in the present, which shapes the way you conceive of the future. At the same time, the ambitions you have for your future can provide a context for your present, that inspires and energizes you.

Books that explore narcissistic personality disorder will talk about the narcissist's sense of time. The narcissist lives solely in the present. They act according to how they feel and what they want from you in this particular moment of time, which is why they can eviscerate you, leave you in tears – and then ask if you want to go to a movie (and wonder why you're so upset). The narcissist will also create and recreate their story of the past so that it supports whatever they need to believe about the present – which is one of the reasons why, if you happen to have shared that past with them, dealing with a narcissist can be frustrating and crazy-making.

Although playing fast and loose with the actual facts of your life is probably a bad idea, the way that you choose to interpret those facts and tell them as a story is up to you. Facts are facts, but story is what gives them meaning. Story acts as a unifying thread that links your past to your future. Why not reverse-engineer it? Think of the future that you would like to have, then "re-truth your past": think of a way to re-tell your past so that it sets you up to achieve that future.

Learn to sell it.

Productive narcissists tend to be great communicators. What a narcissist requires above all else is attention, and from a young age they figure out how to use their natural abilities to get as much attention as possible. They tend to be outgoing, charming and persuasive in person – at least when they want to be, or deem you important enough to expend that kind of effort.

(A recent study demonstrated that, on first impression, people tend to like narcissists more than non-narcissists. As time goes on, though, people tend to like narcissists less and less, until about four months into the study people rate the non-narcissists higher in likeability than the narcissists. )

The lesson here? Put becoming a great communicator at the very top of your to-do list. Steve Jobs was famous for the compelling, theatrical flair with which he knew how to stage presentations. Narcissists seem to instinctively know what the rest of us should know: in one way or another, we are always selling something, whether it's our work, our ideas, or ourselves. You can force yourself on people – which, in the end, leads to resentment, subterfuge, rebellion. Or you can learn to communicate the story of yourself in such a way that other people want to be part of your bigger picture and help you bring it into being.

Which might be the ultimate creative act.

*Let's think about that for a moment. Freaking whalebone.