Justine Musk's Blog, page 29

vixen, temptress, slut: telling old + new stories about women

1

I don't know her name and I've never seen her face.

But she haunts me.

Gang-raped in a mobile home on the edge of a small Texan town.

18 boys and men arrested, including two star athletes at the high school. Someone filmed the assault on his cell phone and showed it around (a student reported the video to a teacher, who contacted the police).

At a town meeting held to supposedly "discuss concerns about the case", people expressed outrage.

Toward the girl.

Slut. Vixen. Asking for it.

Out to ruin the lives of our men!

(The girl is eleven years old.)

"After the meeting, many in attendance told reporters that the girl had consented to the sex.

"She lied about her age. Them boys didn't rape her. She wanted this to happen. I'm not taking nobody's side, but if she hadn't put herself in that predicament, this would have never happened," said Angie Woods, who lives in Houston but grew up in Cleveland."

One speaker asked the crowd to contribute to the defense fund for the accused. No one suggested donations for the rape victim, be it for legal or medical or therapeutic expenses.

If the men are presumed innocent until proven guilty – although 'innocent' and 'guilty' are used here as legal terms, and not actual factual truth – the question surrounding a rape victim seems to be: Just how guilty is she?

2

There is a story that our culture likes to tell about women.

They use their sexuality to lure, exploit, and ruin men, whether forcing them from the Garden of Eden or the high school football team. As Jessica Valenti points out in her book THE PURITY MYTH, a woman's character and moral worth are determined not by what she does but what she doesn't do: have sex.

Her virginity is her innocence.

Lose her virginity, she can no longer be presumed innocent.

Unless, of course, she's married (or in a monogamous relationship).

She is made legitimate – "an honest woman" – through a man, and if that relationship ends, so does her honesty.

Out to ruin the lives of these men!

A man marries an angel, and divorces a golddigger.

3

When a woman's moral character is conflated with her sexuality – preferably the heterosexually appealing, young and nubile kind, that sexily rides the edge of being sexy enough to be appealing but not so sexy that you're too sexy, because then, even if you're still a virgin, you're just a slut – and if that is what she gets judged and evaluated by, and she knows it, what is a girl to do?

A boy might want to have sex with her, and she might want it too. He has something to gain — and she to lose. Unless he's willing to jump into an instant monogamous relationship (thus valiantly protecting her from the perils of evil sluttery), their interaction can become a kind of game, a sport, a battle ripe for conquest: sex is the prize extracted from the woman's body.

The traditional "rules" of dating go something like this:

If you let a guy sleep with you too soon, he has no other reason to hang out with you, which means he will never call you back, which is a bad thing, because now you won't get to marry him.

And this has nothing to do with him, whether or not he's an asshole, or whether the two of you would have been even remotely compatible in the first place (really, what are the odds?), or the messages he absorbed growing up about how a girl who puts out, especially too soon, must be immoral, guilty, suspect and untrustworthy – vixen, temptress, slut. No no no, the problem is solely and completely that you slept with him without timing it correctly. Ergo, you are no longer worth anything — certainly not worth getting to know.

4

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves inform our history, our social norms, our beliefs, our interactions with each other. They establish a framework for our culture that we tend to accept as unquestioned truth. But a culture is not about what is objectively true; it's about what a group of people have agreed to believe in order to get along and share a reality.

We could (for example) tell a different story about sex, one that emphasizes the fact of mad mutual attraction, of the chemicals the brain releases during and after in order to promote human bonding. Instead of saying that friendship must precede sex (which is, admittedly, never a bad idea), we could add that sometimes it comes after sex; sex itself is the glue that keeps people interested in each other long enough to actually learn about each other, perhaps even venture into the deep ragged edge of true emotional intimacy (not for the faint-hearted). But in order to tell that story, we'd have to tell a deeper, underlying story that values women not for their hymen but for brain and heart and soul, action and accomplishment — none of which changes whether she sleeps with you on the first date, the thirty-fifth date, or never.

But we tell a story about the battle of the sexes: those who conquer and those who are conquered, girls who are pure and girls who are not, girls to sleep with after you marry and girls to sleep with before you marry someone else. Boys will be boys, after all (innocent until proven guilty), and so the girl must dress and act in a way that protects both him (and her) from his own desires (that he's somehow not fully responsible for in the first place).

The battle of the sexes.

Language frames thought frames perception frames reality. In places like the Congo, mass rape becomes a way to murder the soul of a people. You have to kill a man in order to truly kill him, but raping a woman is enough, her worth taken, her self so disposable that her own family or village will refuse to take her back. She is alive, and yet dead to them.

So the story goes.

5

What if we told a story that didn't rank the genders, but stressed instead our interdependence, and our right to be the heroes of our own lives (instead of supporting players in someone else's)?

What if we looked at our society not as a collection of individuals, but of relationships that influence each other? Hurt someone with less power than you, hurt the system, hurt yourself: actions ripple out in a way that ripples back to you.

What if we told our sexuality as an expression of our humanity, and not an annihilation of it, that men and women both must value and safeguard?

What if we retold the Adam and Eve story to express a different truth: about how human beings are wired, not for lounging around fruit trees all day, but challenge and meaning? What if the snake was a wake-up call to the adventure of the human experience, and when they left the garden she wasn't walking behind him. They were side by side, hand in hand, knowing that each would be lost without the Other.

If the boys and men accused of raping this eleven year old child had grown up within the context of these other stories, these alternative stories, would they still have allegedly done what they allegedly did?

There's a Hopi American Indian proverb:

Those who tell the stories, rule the world.

If we want a different world, perhaps we need to tell different stories.

What story are you participating in, right now? Are you contributing to it, rebelling against it, or seeking, in your own way, to transform it?

follow me on twitter

6 So-Called Rules for the Badass Creative Woman

"When a man gets up to speak, people listen, then look. When a woman gets up to speak, people look; then if they like what they see, they listen." — Pauline Frederick

1

You're at your most innovative when no one is watching, points out Jonathan Fields in his excellent new book UNCERTAINTY: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance.

He lists 'fear of judgment' as one of the 'three horsemen' of the creative process (the other two being uncertainty and exposure to loss). This could be why extrinsic motivators tend to make you less creative rather than more: incentives such as cash prizes imply that your work will be ranked and judged.

We wrestle with the questions: Is this good enough? Am I good enough?

Our fear of the answers leads "so many to either cut their creative quests short or, worse, never begin," writes Jonathan.

2

Which makes me think of how Silicon Valley – that hotbed of disruptive, creative, innovative thinking – is also known for its unusually high rate of, shall we say, social awkwardness.

People who, today, would most likely be diagnosed as falling somewhere on the spectrum, demonstrate the kind of absorption (and apparent lack of empathy) that comes when you often don't give a damn what other people think. (You're — and I say this affectionately — maybe not fully aware of what goes on inside other people, or you maybe don't consider them intelligent enough to count.)

It also makes me think about women. Articles like this one are quick to point out that no woman has created the equivalent of a Facebook or an Ebay. Rather than assuming that women don't have the ability, could it have anything to do with the fact that being a woman comes hand-in-hand with being so intensely …watched?

In our culture, men gaze, while women are gazed at, and learn early the importance of self-presentation. It's easy to deride this occupation with appearance as shallow – but when you realize that how you look has a lot to do with whether or not you get listened to, there's more than vanity at stake. (A lot of women resent the amount of time, effort and money that goes into an acceptable appearance. It's not "pampering yourself", it's freaking work.)

Add the fact that women also tend to define themselves through their relationships, and will value those relationships above almost anything else (including, sometimes, a clear sense of their own identity).

Add the fact that many women wrestle with the nice-girl thing, where the urge to please so often overrides the need to tell the truth (which leads to many girls and women feeling alienated from themselves).

Add the fact that the female brain is wired for empathy, that women are equipped to read people and pick up what's unspoken.

Add the fact that, once upon a time in our far distant past, social disapproval could also mean social exile – which, to a woman, meant death. In other words, the nice girls survived to mate and pass down their genes and the rebels made for cautionary tales. So if some ancient part of a woman's brain still equates disapproval and rejection with exile and death, it stands to reason that she faces a slightly different set of obstacles if she is to be brilliantly, creatively disruptive.

So what follows are suggestions that might help you come up with more badass ideas and memorable work.

Create a safe environment.

The more we stress, the more we're conscious of the opinions of others, the less we can think and play in ways conducive to personal creative breakthroughs.

Take your work – and yourself – seriously enough to create a proper environment for it. Find or create a workspace – whether it's a studio or a basement or a corner of the kitchen — that makes you feel safe. Find a few personal talismans or other items that connect you to your playful side — and make you feel good about who you are and what you do.

Reject the toxic.

Have a strict "no assholes" policy. Your body knows who energizes and invigorates you – and who brings you down and makes you feel uneasy, self-doubting, contaminated. Your body can tell the difference between constructive criticism (even if we don't want to hear it) and the kind of bullshit that's intended to tear you down, knock you off-balance, or keep you in your place (often followed by comments like, "I was just joking" or "Lighten up, you're so oversensitive!"). Toxic people are crazy-making people, and even if you have to deal with them in other areas of your life, keep them out of your physical and mental creative space. Act and create as if their opinions don't matter. Because they don't.

Give yourself constraints.

The mind needs a starting point and something to chafe against. Every creative quest starts with a question or a problem. Even if you have all the time and resources in the world, give yourself some limits. Think against the box. When we confront it, we're forced to think around, behind and above it (and evolve our own opinions in the process).

Brian Eno relies on this process when working with bands like U2. He says:

"In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you're in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There's a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people."

Jonathan Fields warns against closing off your options too soon, out of fear and anxiety and inability to tolerate uncertainty. The key, he says, "is to hit that sweet spot, giving yourself enough time to play in the realm of possibilities before yielding to the limits and structures needed to execute on your best ideas."

Explore your ragged edge.

I first heard this phrase at a workshop when I started questioning a participant about her beliefs and perceptions. Recognizing that the conversation was heading off the rails, the leader said something like, "Justine is calling out your ragged edge, it's what she does, but let's get back to the subject at hand." Afterwards I went up to her and asked just what she meant by 'ragged edge'.

Because I love the phrase.

Your ragged edge is your point of growth, the outer limits of your comfort zone, where the stuff you know drops off into the stuff you don't. It's an unsettling place to be. You will have to experiment. You will fall down, and fail, and make mistakes, and flounder around, and live with the kind of ambiguity and uncertainty that comes with dealing with the unknown. It's where, says Brian Eno,

"….little shoots keep appearing of stuff you don't recognise. They look promising but pretty clumsy, because new ideas always look clumsy at first. And you don't know what to do with them, how to connect them. And I'm the one cheering for those things. 'Let's not do what we've done before, let's do these new things!' "

Working from the ragged edge is also a requirement for the kind of deliberate practice that pushes you to mastery.

Reframe judgment and uncertainty.

Mistakes and failures provide you with the data you need for success. That's it and that's all. When we can remove our ego from our work and reframe criticism this way, we don't have to fear it or struggle to avoid it. We can use it as fuel for the creative fire.

Jonathan Fields writes:

"Judgment, delivered constructively, provides the information needed to create at higher and higher levels. And uncertainty is a signpost of novelty and innovation, telling you that what you're creating is really worth creating."

(Which means that if something starts out perfect, without going through the fail-forward-faster learning process, it's most likely derivative and uninteresting.)

Reflecting on Jonathan's book, Dusti Arab blogs:

The most important concept Jonathan discusses in his book is reframing. It's the part that's easiest to forget and take for granted – until you're feeling so stuck you shut down.

If you can reframe, your anxiety transforms into creativity. Reframing can take an ugly picture and make it much more bearable. You owe it to yourself to use this on that situation you swear you have no control over right now. Because you do. You control your attitude.

Your uncertainty is the opportunity you've been searching for….It's the fear that can drive you to do something crazy – and potentially brilliant.

So I leave you with the same question. "What is the uncertainty you are dealing with?"

Get it out there. Let's try reframing the situation so it works for you, not against you.

Own your stories.

Your life experiences made you who you are today. Own them. Shame only grows in the dark. It diminishes us. It keeps us silent – and when you don't tell your story, someone else tells it for you, or distorts you in a way that serves their own. (What is one of the first things that a tyrant takes away? Freedom of expression.)

Here's the thing about stories: they connect us to each other. Telling your story makes you part of a much larger consciousness. It was when they opened up about their experiences — breaking the silence and isolation of the suburban middle-class housewife — that women of the '60s and '70s could reject the reality culture and 'science' urged upon them (that wanting anything other than marriage, children, and shiny new appliances meant you were, quite literally, crazy). When you show some vulnerability, you give other people permission to be vulnerable with you, which allows for intimacy, trust — and strength in numbers. You can turn pain to power.

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open," wrote poet Muriel Rukeyser.

When you own your stories, you know who you are. You recognize where you end and someone else begins: the things in yourself that you won't give up for anyone, and the things in someone else that you won't tolerate for any reason.

When you own your stories, you can speak as yourself.

You can take the world and split it open.

follow me on twitter

6 So-Called Rules for the Badass Creative Woman

"When a man gets up to speak, people listen, then look. When a woman gets up to speak, people look; then if they like what they see, they listen." — Pauline Frederick

1

You're at your most innovative when no one is watching, points out Jonathan Fields in his excellent new book UNCERTAINTY: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance.

He lists 'fear of judgment' as one of the 'three horsemen' of the creative process (the other two being uncertainty and exposure to loss). This could be why extrinsic motivators tend to make you less creative rather than more: incentives such as cash prizes imply that your work will be ranked and judged.

We wrestle with the questions: Is this good enough? Am I good enough?

Our fear of the answers leads "so many to either cut their creative quests short or, worse, never begin," writes Jonathan.

2

Which makes me think of how Silicon Valley – that hotbed of disruptive, creative, innovative thinking – is also known for its unusually high rate of, shall we say, social awkwardness.

People who, today, would most likely be diagnosed as being "on the spectrum" of autism and Asperger's, demonstrate the single-minded absorption (and lack of empathy) that comes when you just don't give a damn about what other people think. (You're — and I say this affectionately — maybe not aware that people possess inner lives of their own, or you maybe don't consider them intelligent enough to count.)

It also makes me think about women. Articles like this one are quick to point out that no woman has created the equivalent of a Facebook or an Ebay. Rather than assuming that women don't have the ability, could it have anything to do with the fact that being a woman comes hand-in-hand with being so intensely …watched?

In our culture, men gaze, while women are gazed at, and learn early the importance of self-presentation. It's easy to deride this occupation with appearance as shallow – but when you realize that how you look has a lot to do with whether or not you get listened to, there's more than vanity at stake. (A lot of women resent the amount of time, effort and money that goes into an 'acceptable' appearance. It's not 'pampering yourself', it's freaking work.)

Add the fact that women also tend to define themselves through their relationships, and will value those relationships above almost anything else (including, sometimes, a clear sense of their own identity).

Add the fact that many women wrestle with the 'nice girl' thing, where the urge to please so often overrides the need to tell the truth (which leads to many girls and women feeling alienated from themselves).

Add the fact that the female brain is wired for empathy, that women are equipped to 'read' people and pick up what's unspoken.

Add the fact that, once upon a time in our far distant past, social disapproval could also mean social exile – which, to a woman, meant death. In other words, the 'nice girls' survived to mate and pass down their genes and the rebels made for cautionary tales. So if some ancient part of a woman's brain still equates disapproval and rejection with exile and death, it stands to reason that she faces a slightly different set of obstacles if she is to be brilliantly, creatively disruptive.

So what follows are suggestions that might help you come up with more badass ideas and memorable work.

Create a safe environment.

The more we stress, the more we're conscious of the opinions of others, the less we can think and play in ways conducive to personal creative breakthroughs.

Take your work – and yourself – seriously enough to create a proper environment for it. Find or create a workspace – whether it's a studio or a basement or a corner of the kitchen — that makes you feel relaxed and 'safe'. Find a few personal talismans or other items that connect you with your playful side — that make you feel good about who you are and what you do.

Reject the toxic.

Have a strict "no assholes" policy. Your body knows who energizes and invigorates you – and who brings you down and makes you feel uneasy, self-doubting, contaminated. Your body can tell the difference between constructive criticism (even if we don't want to hear it) and the kind of bullshit that's intended to tear you down, knock you off-balance, or keep you in 'your place' (often followed by comments like, "I was just joking" or "Lighten up, you're so oversensitive!"). Toxic people are crazy-making people, and even if you have to deal with them in other areas of your life, keep them out of your physical and mental creative space. Even if you know they're watching, act and create as if their opinions don't matter. Because they don't.

Give yourself constraints.

The mind needs a starting point and something to chafe against. Every creative quest starts with a question or a problem. Even if you have all the time and resources in the world, give yourself some limits. Think against the box. When we confront it, we're forced to think around, behind and above it (and evolve our own opinions in the process).

Brian Eno relies on this process when working with bands like U2. He says:

"In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you're in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There's a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people."

Although Jonathan Fields warns about closing off your options too soon, out of fear and anxiety and inability to tolerate uncertainty. The key, he says, "is to hit that sweet spot, giving yourself enough time to play in the realm of possibilities before yielding to the limits and structures needed to execute on your best ideas."

Explore your ragged edge.

I first heard this phrase at a workshop when I started questioning a participant about her beliefs and perceptions. Recognizing that the conversation was heading off the rails, the leader said something like, "Justine is calling out your ragged edge, it's what she does, but let's get back to the subject at hand." Afterwards I went up to her and asked just what she meant by 'ragged edge'.

Because I love the phrase.

Your ragged edge is your point of growth, the outer limits of your comfort zone, where the stuff you know drops off into the stuff you don't. It's an unsettling place to be. You will have to experiment. You will fall down, and fail, and make mistakes, and flounder around, and live with the kind of ambiguity and uncertainty that comes with dealing with the unknown. It's where, says Brian Eno,

"….little shoots keep appearing of stuff you don't recognise. They look promising but pretty clumsy, because new ideas always look clumsy at first. And you don't know what to do with them, how to connect them. And I'm the one cheering for those things. 'Let's not do what we've done before, let's do these new things!' "

Living "on the edge" is also a requirement for the kind of deliberate practice that pushes you to mastery.

Reframe judgment and uncertainty.

Mistakes and failures provide you with the data you need for success. That's it and that's all. When we can remove our ego from our work and reframe criticism this way, we don't have to fear it or struggle to avoid it. We can use it as fuel for the creative fire.

Jonathan Fields writes:

"Judgment, delivered constructively, provides the information needed to create at higher and higher levels. And uncertainty is a signpost of novelty and innovation, telling you that what you're creating is really worth creating."

(Which means that if something starts out perfect, without going through the fail-forward-faster learning process, it's most likely derivative and uninteresting.)

Reflecting on Jonathan's book, Dusti Arab blogs:

The most important concept Jonathan discusses in his book is reframing. It's the part that's easiest to forget and take for granted – until you're feeling so stuck you shut down.

If you can reframe, your anxiety transforms into creativity. Reframing can take an ugly picture and make it much more bearable. You owe it to yourself to use this on that situation you swear you have no control over right now. Because you do. You control your attitude.

Your uncertainty is the opportunity you've been searching for….It's the fear that can drive you to do something crazy – and potentially brilliant.

So I leave you with the same question. "What is the uncertainty you are dealing with?"

Get it out there. Let's try reframing the situation so it works for you, not against you.

Own your stories.

Your life experiences feed into who you are (and made you who you are today). Own them. Shame only grows in the dark. It makes us diminished and small. It keeps us silent – and when you don't tell your story, someone else will tell it for you, or distort you in a way that serves their own. (What is one of the first things that a tyrant takes away? Freedom of expression.)

Here's the thing about stories: they connect us to each other. Telling your story makes you part of a much larger consciousness. It was when they opened up about their experiences — breaking the silence and isolation of the suburban middle-class housewife — that women of the '60s and '70s could reject the reality that culture and 'science' urged upon them (that wanting anything other than marriage, children, and shiny new appliances meant you were, quite literally, crazy). When you show some vulnerability, you give other people permission to be vulnerable with you, which allows for intimacy, trust — and strength in numbers. You can turn pain to power.

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open," wrote poet Muriel Rukeyser.

When you own your stories, you know who you are. You can recognize that part where you end and someone else begins: the things in yourself that you won't give up for anyone, and the things in someone else that you won't tolerate for any reason.

When you own your stories, you can speak as yourself.

You can take the world and split it open.

follow me on twitter

why seth godin says we are all weird now + what this means for your blog

1

Your mama probably warned you that not everybody's going to like you, and there's no point in trying.

So often, though, we water down our point of view, we go for the subjects that (we think) have the broadest appeal, we try to play it safe. We've been trained to find safety in numbers, so that's our aim: Facebook fans and 'friends' and Twitter followers, the more the merrier.

By trying to win over everybody, you win over nobody.

Go for mass appeal and chances are you'll end up alone.

'Everybody' doesn't exist anymore.

This is the overriding point that Seth Godin makes in his new book, We Are All Weird. There used to be a bell curve of 'normal', a.k.a. 'the masses', and then a handful of freaky outlier types to either side.

Then something happened.

The Internet took the concept of 'choice' and blew it to pieces.

People used to be 'normal' for lack of options: we all listened to the same few bands on the radio, watched the same lame sit-coms on TV. Options were limited.

Now, however, we can let our freak flags fly.

Whatever our tastes, our true interests, we can not only find them somewhere on the Internet, we can find other people who like the same things. So as choice continues to shatter into a zillion more, we flee the ho-hum hump of the middle for the interesting stuff at the edges and our fellow comrades in 'weirdness'.

The bell curve, says Godin, is in the process of flattening out.

That big group of the middle keeps dividing and dividing again, into loose communities organized around interests and topics and subtopics and sub-sub-topics.

When we think we are talking – trying to talk – to the masses, we are actually addressing a "loose collection of tribes".

And by attempting to be relevant to all of them, you won't prove relevant to any of them.

Which means they're not listening. They tune you out. They've gotten good at it.

2

Figure out who your people are.

Talk to them. Create for them. And only them.

3

I know, I know. Just how the hell do you do that? Often, 'your people' won't exactly be who you thought they were. They will surprise you.

Bloggers will advise other bloggers to choose a niche. To specialize. Become the 'go to' person for whatever topic lights you up inside. Then you're supposed to figure out what makes you different from everybody else in your niche: that unique point of awesomeness that will separate you from the crowds and laser through the noise and clutter.

Which is all very well.

I would suggest, though, that instead of thinking in terms of niche, you think in terms of purpose. What is the purpose of your blog? What is the Big Meaning? And I don't mean in terms of what you want it to accomplish for you – although that is an important question – but what you want it to accomplish for others. What do you want to give people? What change in the world, however big or small, do you want to work toward?

To write about the power journey, as a creative and as a woman.

When you know what your purpose is, you can filter everything through it: every decision, every blog post, the books and articles and blogs you read in order to come up with and incubate ideas.

When you know what your purpose is, the niche takes care of itself. Your purpose becomes your differentiating factor: because your purpose is also your personal journey, taken in your particular voice, unique to you. What you learn for yourself you can then share with others.

When your purpose is strong, and your voice is strong, your tribe will hear your call and recognize you as one of their own. It won't happen overnight, but they will find you. They will organize themselves around you.

4

I believe that there's a point where your right audience is you, and you are your right audience, like two lines running parallel into the distance until they appear to narrow and converge. You make your way to that vanishing point, so that by writing for yourself you are writing for your audience, and by writing for your audience you are writing for yourself. It's not an either/or proposition.

I like how Kelly Diels puts it:

…this platform building thang is about building an audience and a community so people will read my work, and about writing regularly. Having a blog is a writing practice… Blogging isn't only about content marketing – I've publicly taken issue with that model – it can be about developing as a person and as an artist. Blogging doesn't have to make you a dime to be a worthwhile and transformative practice.

4

Our choices reflect who we are. I suspect that one reason why it's so tempting to write for Everybody is because it doesn't saddle us with the responsibility of choosing our audience, of naming our tribe. When you face a million choices, it's easy to become paralyzed…but to make no choice is, in the end, just a choice by default.

Like happiness, or money, maybe it's best to come at that choice indirectly. You find your audience as an indirect benefit of looking deep inside yourself and your past to find your purpose; and then by following that purpose (or as some might call it, "living your brand").

By making that meaning for yourself, you also make it for others. It is the value that you create. It is a wealth all its own.

As Seth Godin puts it:

…Rich isn't a measure of a bank balance. No, rich means making a choice, choosing an identity and following a path that matters.

Based on that notion, we're at our best when we're weird, and when we're enabling others to become weird as well.

If we're going to demonize, criticize and isolate people who no longer fit our definition of normal, we will fail. The alternative is an attitude based on respect, the respect we accord to someone brave enough to choose precisely what it is they want.



5

So what do you want?

why seth godin says we are all weird now + what this means for your blog

1

Your mama probably warned you that not everybody's going to like you, and there's no point in trying.

So often, though, we water down our point of view, we go for the subjects that (we think) have the broadest appeal, we try to play it safe. We've been trained to find safety in numbers, so that's what we go for: Facebook fans and 'friends' and Twitter followers, the more the merrier.

By trying to win over everybody, you win over nobody.

Go for mass appeal and chances are you'll end up alone.

'Everybody' doesn't exist anymore.

This is the overriding point that Seth Godin makes in his new book, We Are All Weird. There used to be a bell curve of 'normal', a.k.a. 'the masses', and then a handful of freaky outlier types to either side.

Then something happened.

The Internet took the concept of 'choice' and blew it to pieces.

People used to be 'normal' for lack of options: we all listened to the same few bands on the radio, watched the same lame sit-coms on TV. Options were limited.

Now, however, we can let our freak flags fly.

Whatever our tastes, our true interests, we can not only find them somewhere on the Internet, we can find other people who like the same things. So as choice continues to shatter into a zillion more, we flee the ho-hum hump of the middle for the interesting stuff at the edges and our fellow comrades in 'weirdness'.

The bell curve, says Godin, is in the process of flattening out.

That big group of the middle keeps dividing and dividing again, into loose communities organized around interests and topics and subtopics and sub-sub-topics.

When we think we are talking – trying to talk – to the masses, we are actually addressing a "loose collection of tribes".

And by attempting to be relevant to all of them, you won't prove relevant to any of them.

Which means they're not listening. They tune you out. They've gotten good at it.

2

Figure out who your people are.

Talk to them. Create for them. And only them.

3

I know, I know. Just how the hell do you do that? Often, 'your people' won't exactly be who you thought they were. They will surprise you.

Bloggers will advise other bloggers to choose a niche. To specialize. Become the 'go to' person for whatever topic lights you up inside. Then you're supposed to figure out what makes you different from everybody else in your niche: that unique point of awesomeness that will separate you from the crowds and laser through the noise and clutter.

Which is all very well.

I would suggest, though, that instead of thinking in terms of niche, you think in terms of purpose. What is the purpose of your blog? What is the Big Meaning? And I don't mean in terms of what you want it to accomplish for you – although that is an important question – but what you want it to accomplish for others. What do you want to give people? What change in the world, however big or small, do you want to work toward?

To empower creative people to explore their potential, step into their full power, and connect with their right audience.

When you know what your purpose is, you can filter everything through it: every decision, every blog post, the books and articles and blogs you read in order to come up with and incubate ideas.

When you know what your purpose is, the niche takes care of itself. Your purpose becomes your differentiating factor: because your purpose is also your personal journey, taken in your particular voice, unique to you. What you learn for yourself you can then share with others.

When your purpose is strong, and your voice is strong, your tribe will hear your call and recognize you as one of their own. It won't happen overnight, but they will find you. They will organize themselves around you.

4

I believe that there's a point where your right audience is you, and you are your right audience, like two lines running parallel into the distance until they appear to narrow and converge. You make your way to that vanishing point, so that by writing for yourself you are writing for your audience, and by writing for your audience you are writing for yourself. It's not an either/or proposition.

I like how Kelly Diels puts it:

…this platform building thang is about building an audience and a community so people will read my work, and about writing regularly. Having a blog is a writing practice… Blogging isn't only about content marketing – I've publicly taken issue with that model – it can be about developing as a person and as an artist. Blogging doesn't have to make you a dime to be a worthwhile and transformative practice.

4

Our choices reflect who we are. I suspect that one reason why it's so tempting to write for Everybody is because it doesn't saddle us with the responsibility of choosing our audience, of naming our tribe. When you face a million choices, it's easy to become paralyzed…but to make no choice is, in the end, just a choice by default.

Like happiness, or money, maybe it's best to come at that choice indirectly. You find your audience as an indirect benefit of looking deep inside yourself and your past to find your purpose; and then by following that purpose (or as some might call it, "living your brand").

By making that meaning for yourself, you also make it for others. It is the value that you create. It is a wealth all its own.

As Seth Godin puts it:

…Rich isn't a measure of a bank balance. No, rich means making a choice, choosing an identity and following a path that matters.

Based on that notion, we're at our best when we're weird, and when we're enabling others to become weird as well.

If we're going to demonize, criticize and isolate people who no longer fit our definition of normal, we will fail. The alternative is an attitude based on respect, the respect we accord to someone brave enough to choose precisely what it is they want.



5

So what do you want?

how to flow with the go to get what you want + give the world what it needs

"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." — Basho

Common wisdom has it that first, you form your vision.

Then, you break it down.

You reverse-engineer a roadmap of goals and milestones that will take you from point Z to point A.

You become a man, or a woman, with a plan.

But any plan rests on a boatload of assumptions – about yourself, about the future, about the world around you – that may or may not be true. A lot of those assumptions are about things that are not within your control.

It could be that you fail to achieve your vision because it was never achievable in the first place.

Maybe instead of assuming that we create our own destiny, we need to shift to a different understanding. We co-create it. We work hand in hand with the shifting circumstances around us to understand how we can best use our talents and have real impact – in a way that still leaves us creatively satisfied.

We work to avoid the conflict between Karma and Dharma.

In his book Strategic Insight: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement William Duggen defines Karma as "the full set of circumstances the universe presents to you that are beyond your control." He goes on to say

Your Dharma is your own set of thoughts and actions. These are within your control. You find your Way by sorting out what exactly is within your control and what is not, and then finding the particular thoughts and actions…that best fit what is beyond your control…You do what you can, not what you want. Your Dharma follows your Karma.

And in his book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries presents the notion of "validated learning". Your aim, in the beginning, isn't to present to the world a perfect and perfectly completed Thing (that the world may not want in the first place), but to test the assumptions your Thing depends on to find out what is true, what works – and what doesn't.

He writes about "Build-Measure-Learn": you build the minimum viable version of whatever it is that you're working on, show it to people, find ways to measure reaction and impact, and learn, learn, learn. You then apply that learning to the next version of your Thing. And so on. The aim is to cycle as swiftly as possible to make as much progress as possible.

(In my world we refer to this process as "the writer's workshop".)

Keep in mind, you are not asking people what they think they want. People are generally resistant to change and don't know what they want until they have it — and then wonder how they lived without it in the first place.

Instead, you're studying the conversation between you and your audience. Change doesn't happen with one individual, but in the spaces, the interactions between them.

You search out those spaces where your strengths and desires naturally intersect with that conversation, instead of falling beyond it where no one is listening.

When necessary, you pivot – you change your direction – you find a new way to follow your Vision or perhaps change that Vision to reflect what you know now that you didn't know before.

So instead of blindly imposing your Vision on the world, you stay closely connected to that world through observation, experimentation and insight. And the more you learn about the different pieces of your Karma…the more likely it is that those pieces will combine and recombine with what's already in your mind to produce a flash of creative insight that alters your Vision (in a good way) or gives you a new one.

You flow with the go.

But you do it in a way that

sets yourself up to have flashes of creative insight that can influence both your 'flow' and your 'go'.

Instead of thinking of destination first, journey second….you focus on the journey: what you learn, how it feels and how it changes you. You let your Vision arise from that.

Journey first, destination second.

What do you think?

how to flow with the go to get what you want + give the world what it needs

"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." — Basho

Common wisdom has it that first, you form your vision.

Then, you break it down.

You reverse-engineer a roadmap of goals and milestones that will take you from point Z to point A.

You become a man, or a woman, with a plan.

But any plan rests on a boatload of assumptions – about yourself, about the future, about the world around you – that may or may not be true. A lot of those assumptions are about things that are not within your control.

It could be that you fail to achieve your vision because it was never achievable in the first place.

Maybe instead of assuming that we create our own destiny, we need to shift to a different understanding. We co-create it. We work hand in hand with the shifting circumstances around us to understand how we can best use our talents and have real impact – in a way that still leaves us creatively satisfied.

We work to avoid the conflict between Karma and Dharma.

In his book Strategic Insight: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement William Duggen defines Karma as "the full set of circumstances the universe presents to you that are beyond your control." He goes on to say

Your Dharma is your own set of thoughts and actions. These are within your control. You find your Way by sorting out what exactly is within your control and what is not, and then finding the particular thoughts and actions…that best fit what is beyond your control…You do what you can, not what you want. Your Dharma follows your Karma.

And in his book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries presents the notion of "validated learning". Your aim, in the beginning, isn't to present to the world a perfect and perfectly completed Thing (that the world may not want in the first place), but to test the assumptions your Thing depends on to find out what is true, what works – and what doesn't.

He writes about "Build-Measure-Learn": you build the minimum viable version of whatever it is that you're working on, show it to people, find ways to measure reaction and impact, and learn, learn, learn. You then apply that learning to the next version of your Thing. And so on. The aim is to cycle as swiftly as possible to make as much progress as possible.

(In my world we refer to this process as "the writer's workshop".)

Keep in mind, you are not asking people what they think they want. People are generally resistant to change and don't know what they want until they have it — and then wonder how they lived without it in the first place.

Instead, you're studying the conversation between you and your audience. Change doesn't happen with one individual, but in the spaces, the interactions between them.

You search out those spaces where your strengths and desires naturally intersect with that conversation, instead of falling beyond it where no one is listening.

When necessary, you pivot – you change your direction – you find a new way to follow your Vision or perhaps change that Vision to reflect what you know now that you didn't know before.

So instead of blindly imposing your Vision on the world, you stay closely connected to that world through observation, experimentation and insight. And the more you learn about the different pieces of your Karma…the more likely it is that those pieces will combine and recombine with what's already in your mind to produce a flash of creative insight that alters your Vision (in a good way) or gives you a new one.

You flow with the go.

But you do it in a way that

sets yourself up to have flashes of creative insight that can influence both your 'flow' and your 'go'.

Instead of thinking of destination first, journey second….you focus on the journey: what you learn, how it feels and how it changes you. You let your Vision arise from that.

Journey first, destination second.

What do you think?

how to unlock the Big Meaning of your life and find your vision

1

I had a question for Ashley Sinclair (of Self-Activator). I wanted to know my why, as a writer and as a person.

Or rather, I wanted to put my why into words. Because I can feel it in me when I write from that 'emotional sweetspot'. Everything aligns: my purpose, values, work, audience.

But you can't communicate your why – the Big Meaning that drives you and your content – with just a gut feeling.

So I wanted a different kind of clarity. I wanted words.

Later, I did some reading and learned that your why is rooted in the limbic part of your brain. It's the part that deals with emotions – and it's nonverbal, delivering information in feelings and hunches.

When your why meshes with someone else's limbic why, magic happens. You feel connection and recognition. You know you're of the same kind.

Your why is the drum that you beat, the call you send out across the landscape so that your right people can find you.

2

It's also the thing that sets you apart. Call it your brand, or your point of differentiation, except it goes deeper than either of those. It comes from the bones of your identity. It can't be invented – it can only be discovered (or maybe recovered).

It's the defining vision of your life.

When you live in alignment with it, you embody a strong and particular point of view, whether you're Steve Jobs or Coco Chanel or Stephen King or Donald Trump or Joyce Carol Oates or Indra Nooyi.

You stand for something. People will join you or align with you or rail against you accordingly, or use you as a kind of symbol to express something about themselves. They might love or hate you (the most fascinating people tend to be the most polarizing.)

3

You find your why in your life story. You sift through your past. Often it originates in some kind of childhood wound, like – to use a theatrical example – a man who becomes a district attorney because his mother was murdered when he was a boy. His why involves the need to seek justice.

You examine the people, places, events and influences that shaped you. You recall the turning points of your life. You look at how you connect these things into the story that you tell yourself (and others) about yourself. (You might need to change the angle, update the story. I recommend Michael Margolis for this!)

You look into the different chapters of yourself and see the things that repeat, the themes and values.

You look at who and what you are drawn to (since we are what we're attracted to).

You study the meaning that emerges.

Your why is a strategic insight into you. It is the bend in the road that links your past to your future. It suggests a destination and a course of action.

3

When you know your why, it can liberate you from your ego because you're in service to something bigger than yourself. You have a vision (and you can share it with others).

Your why becomes your true north. So long as you're heading in that general direction, you can be adaptive, flexible and experimental in the way that you get there. You can change course when new information requires it. You can experience mistakes and failures – in fact, you seek them out, because you know they provide valuable information that you need in order to learn as much and as soon as possible, adjusting your assumptions and revising your map to more accurately reflect the landscape.*

Your why is your brand…and you need to live your brand, to be in alignment, to work in your sweetspot. It's your challenge and your call to power.

It's your constant reminder to refuse to play small.

4

I received a new Tesla Roadster in my divorce settlement (glacier blue with beige interior, utterly gorgeous) and I'm giving it to the nonprofit organization V-Day — committed to ending violence worldwide against girls and women – to auction off, possibly at an event in late September. Proceeds will go to the City of Joy in the Congo, a community that shelters, educates and empowers female survivors of brutal sexual violence. It's a place for these women to heal, and to learn to lead a movement.

* Eric Ries writes about these ideas in his book The Lean Startup — they're applicable to other endeavors.

follow me on twitter

how to unlock the Big Meaning of your life and find your vision

1

I had a question for Ashley Sinclair (of Self-Activator). I wanted to know my why, as a writer and as a person.

Or rather, I wanted to put my why into words. Because I can feel it in me when I write from that 'emotional sweetspot'. Everything aligns: my purpose, values, work, audience.

But you can't communicate your why – the Big Meaning that drives you and your content – with just a gut feeling.

So I wanted a different kind of clarity. I wanted words.

Later, I did some reading and learned that your why is rooted in the limbic part of your brain. It's the part that deals with emotions – and it's nonverbal, delivering information in feelings and hunches.

When your why meshes with someone else's limbic why, magic happens. You feel connection and recognition. You know you're of the same kind.

Your why is the drum that you beat, the call you send out across the landscape so that your right people can find you.

2

It's also the thing that sets you apart. Call it your brand, or your point of differentiation, except it goes deeper than either of those. It comes from the bones of your identity. It can't be invented – it can only be discovered (or maybe recovered).

It's the defining vision of your life.

When you live in alignment with it, you embody a strong and particular point of view, whether you're Steve Jobs or Coco Chanel or Stephen King or Donald Trump or Joyce Carol Oates or Indra Nooyi.

You stand for something. People will join you or align with you or rail against you accordingly, or use you as a kind of symbol to express something about themselves. They might love or hate you (the most fascinating people tend to be the most polarizing.)

3

You find your why in your life story. You sift through your past. Often it originates in some kind of childhood wound, like – to use a theatrical example – a man who becomes a district attorney because his mother was murdered when he was a boy. His why involves the need to seek justice.

You examine the people, places, events and influences that shaped you. You recall the turning points of your life. You look at how you connect these things into the story that you tell yourself (and others) about yourself. (You might need to change the angle, update the story. I recommend Michael Margolis for this!)

You look into the different chapters of yourself and see the things that repeat, the themes and values.

You look at who and what you are drawn to (since we are what we're attracted to).

You study the meaning that emerges.

Your why is a strategic insight into you. It is the bend in the road that links your past to your future. It suggests a destination and a course of action.

3

When you know your why, it can liberate you from your ego because you're in service to something bigger than yourself. You have a vision (and you can share it with others).

Your why becomes your true north. So long as you're heading in that general direction, you can be adaptive, flexible and experimental in the way that you get there. You can change course when new information requires it. You can experience mistakes and failures – in fact, you seek them out, because you know they provide valuable information that you need in order to learn as much and as soon as possible, adjusting your assumptions and revising your map to more accurately reflect the landscape.*

Your why is your brand…and you need to live your brand, to be in alignment, to work in your sweetspot. It's your challenge and your call to power.

It's your constant reminder to refuse to play small.

4

I received a new Tesla Roadster in my divorce settlement (glacier blue with beige interior, utterly gorgeous) and I'm giving it to the nonprofit organization V-Day — committed to ending violence worldwide against girls and women – to auction off, possibly at an event in late September. Proceeds will go to the City of Joy in the Congo, a community that shelters, educates and empowers female survivors of brutal sexual violence. It's a place for these women to heal, and to learn to lead a movement.

* Eric Ries writes about these ideas in his book The Lean Startup — they're applicable to other endeavors.

follow me on twitter

the art of watching two friends seduce each other + what it taught me about badass blogging

The two most seductive people I know ended up engaged to each other. One night they started arguing about who seduced whom. Jordan came to my house and said, "You know how I always had this prescient feeling about him, that we'd end up together? And I couldn't figure out if I was being psychic or cocky?"

"Uh-huh." Jordan is so intuitive and tuned into people that it can be downright eerie. She's also totally cocky, at least about some things (ie: men).

"Because the first couple of times we hung out, I just felt like we had a way of connecting, you know? Which made me realize how attractive he is."

I did know this. Adrian had broken up with someone and Jordan didn't want to date him until he played the field a bit (or, as she put it, "slept with some models and gotten that out of his system"). For almost a year, they exchanged friendly texts, bantered, and kept each other up to date on their dating lives while keeping each other in play. ("He's a total flirt," Jordan had reported. "I like that. I relate to that.") When Jordan sensed Adrian's interest drifting too far toward another woman, she made her move. He kept warning her that he didn't know if he'd ever be ready for a monogamous relationship. She smiled and nodded along, and then one night she stood him up at a book party and he realized he couldn't live without her.

"I felt that way," Jordan said, "because he made me feel that way. He's just really good at getting a woman to open up and tell him things she wouldn't tell anyone else, because there's something so comfortable and trustworthy about him. It doesn't feel like seduction. But it is." She said, "I fell for the oldest trick in the book."

"That's because with him it isn't a trick," I pointed out. "He's genuinely interested in what you have to say. He enjoys it, enjoys you. And he doesn't care if it leads to anything, because he knows he has other options. So you don't feel like he's trying to get something from you. So you let down your guard."

"I always liked her," Adrian said, "I just didn't expect to end up in a serious relationship." When I asked him how this had happened, he thought for a minute and said, "She made me feel honored and respected. She knew when to draw close and when to back away. There were times when I felt like I was going to lose her, and I knew I had to step up. So I did."

I refrained from pointing out that he was never in as much danger of losing her as he had probably feared. It wasn't a trick. Jordan would wait until she sensed he was ready, then draw a line in the sand and see if he crossed it. She was prepared to walk away; she had just known that she wouldn't have to.

By making her feel like she had a special connection to him, Adrian had reeled in a woman who made that connection manifest.

"You realize that she seduced you into ever-deeper levels of commitment," I told him.

"It didn't feel like seduction."

This made me think of a quote by Voltaire, which I'm using in my novel-in-progress (which itself is about seduction): "The difference between being conquered and being seduced is: everybody wants to be seduced."

Because the key to seduction involves getting inside the other person's head, recognizing what he or she wants, and then giving it to them without making them feel like they're expected to give something back in return. (As soon as someone feels unduly pressured or chased, or senses an agenda, it's over.) It's not about the sexy black dress or the flashy car: those are props.

Most people suck at seduction because most people suck at good listening. When you know how to tune into the other person, to make them feel like the object of your authentic and focused attention, you don't need the perfect breasts or the big stock options (although they probably don't hurt).

This is what I don't think many writers (or other creatives) understand about blogging: that it's a form of content marketing, which itself is a form of seduction.

Content marketing is content that has value in and of itself, but is also driving the reader toward some kind of future action (ie: buying something, whether it's a service or a painting or a book or a product). Many creatives blanch when they think of marketing, because marketing is like plastic surgery: you only notice it when it's done badly. When it's done well, it's a connection made through recognition of a need, and providing a solution to that need, and it leaves both people feeling good about the exchange (ie: that neither was manipulated or taken advantage of). Which inspires trust. Which leads you (if you want) into deeper relationship. There's no pressure, because there's no desperation; people know they have other options. There's nothing slick or cheesy or fake, because both parties honor and respect each other.

Yet how rare that seems. How sad.

As a true creative, of course, you're not supposed to "sell out", as if connecting with an audience – especially a big audience – automatically means compromising your soul. But maybe, if you're authentic from the beginning about who you are and what you have to give, it means that you've found the right audience (or you've allowed the right audience to find you). And although we need solitude in which to dream and reflect and synthesize and Do the Work, we also need relationship and connection, those intersections with each other, to spark creative thinking in the first place (and provide constructive feedback).

In other words, the artist needs a right audience as much as the right audience needs her. Good marketing is the road that enables them to find each other. Good marketing is about authenticity, connection, and relationship (whether that relationship lasts for five hours or five years).

Blogging might indeed be a form of marketing — but marketing is a form of seduction — and seduction itself is an art.

follow me on twitter