Justine Musk's Blog, page 39
January 11, 2011
how to be a creative badass: a 12-point plan
1. Live for the process
(that's how you lose yourself & find your best work)
When we focus on the process instead of the end result, we're more likely to reach flow. Otherwise known as being "in the zone", flow is a state of mind in which we lose all sense of self-consciousness and lock in on the task at hand. When we're in flow, we are…better. More focused, more creative, more skilled. It's when we do our best work, and grow toward new capabilities.
2. Give it away
(so they can't live without it)
Seth Godin writes in LINCHPIN: "…the real magic is the leverage this expansion adds, not the loss of commerce it causes. When you have more friends in the core circle, more people with whom to share your art, your art is amplified and can have more power."
Russell Simmons dedicates a chapter to this idea in his new book SUPER RICH: "…the best way to get a [record] deal is to forget about the labels and instead just start giving away your music for free…Never pass up any opportunity to share your gift with the world…[The labels are] going to want to find the person who's generating much love and enthusiasm. And when they find you, they're going to reward you…more handsomely than if you had come to them begging for a deal."
3. Work your ass off
(baby, you've got to ship)
The more blog posts you write, the better chance you have of writing one that goes viral. The more stories you write, the more paintings you paint, the more companies you dream up: not only will you develop your voice and improve at whatever it is that you do, you increase your own chances of success.
Obviously you don't want to sacrifice quality for quantity. You need instruction, feedback, the tough love of intelligent constructive criticism: fold all of this into your process. And then work it.
4. Tell the truth
(truth is beauty & power)
Telling the truth is about paying close attention to your own strengths and interests instead of just chasing the marketplace. It's about speaking in your own voice. When you tell the truth – your truth – you infuse your work with soul and originality. And because it's truth, it will resonate with others. People will find you unique, but still be able to relate. They might even feel like you're speaking their own truth in a way that they can't, or didn't even know to do.
That's powerful stuff.
5. Follow your instincts
(they know more than you do)
Howard Gardner put forward the idea of multiple intelligences, some of which are nonverbal. Scientists have discovered that neural intelligence doesn't just exist in the brain, but also in the body: your heart, your gut. Your intelligence is more complex and complicated than you probably think, and it is constantly absorbing and processing information on an unconscious level. Intuition is a form of nonverbal intelligence, and it's not just women who have it. Pay attention to it.
6. Be vulnerable
(you connect when you're authentic)
To produce good work, you need to dive beneath the surface of things. You need to "go there" in a way that we specifically train ourselves not to do in day-to-day life. We believe that if we reveal too much, we'll expose ourselves as unworthy. Shameful. But it's shame that keeps us isolated, silent, and disconnected from each other. Part of believing that you have something to say is flying in the face of all that. When you lean into what discomforts you, what scares you, you're getting to the good, original stuff.
Hey. If it was easy, then everybody would do it. And do it well.
7. Know yourself
(play to your strengths)
When you know yourself, you can figure out how to play to your strengths and navigate your weaknesses. Your strengths are the things that make you feel rejuvenated and powerful , not necessarily what you're already good at. (You might be good at accounting. That doesn't mean it fills you with a zest for life.) By cultivating your strengths, you can lose yourself in the process (see #1) and get better and better and better at specific things until no one can deny how freaking remarkable you are. If you are a writer with a strength for plotting, you might produce the next bestselling thriller. Or if your strengths are for prose and character, you might develop into the next prize-winning literary short-story writer.
8. Love the world
(makes you healthier & more creative)
Hate and bitterness are unproductive. Hate destroys and contracts; love builds and expands. Be a builder. Much more fun that way. We only have so much attention to put on the world; put yours on what you love. Let the rest fade into the background.
9. Value stillness
(that's where ideas live)
When you slow down your brainwaves, you literally downshift into a very different state of mind. Day-to-day life requires us to be alert and vigilant in a way that is not conducive to creativity. To create, you want to access the deeper, more unconscious parts of your intelligence. You want to let your mind roam freely to make new connections, factor in new bits of information, find new relationships between them. It's why daydreaming is linked to creativity. It's why Einstein believed in taking lots of naps. It's why meditation is a force of good. You've got to let your brain out of its practical, everyday cage.
10. Make mistakes
(the real art grows out of them)
Give yourself permission to make mistakes. The best and fastest way to get better at anything is through something called deliberate practice, which requires (among other things) that you work at the limit of your abilities. When you make mistakes, your brain is forced to slow down, pay attention, and process what you did wrong. This is how we learn.
Not to mention, sometimes the mistakes can spark off new insights and directions of their own.
11. Get open
(let the world in)
'Get open' is a hip-hop phrase that I picked up from Russell Simmons: it means "losing your inhibitions, or letting down your defenses…You want to always be as open, creative and fluid as possible, and never become rigid, old, or tight. The freedom you experience when you're open is where all the positive change in your life will emanate from." Amen.
12. Remember that we are stronger for the broken places.
(you are worthy)
Every scar has a story behind it. Tell yours with pride.
image by Passigatti
January 4, 2011
ego vs soul
The ego is about image.
The soul is about authenticity.
The ego can't take constructive criticism.
The soul seeks it out and welcomes it.
The ego confuses itself with the work.
The soul stands apart from the work.
The ego wants to be seen as the best.
The soul wants to keep getting better.
The ego is about the number of fans and followers.
The soul is about relatedness and community.
The ego wants to be famous.
The soul wants to start a movement.
The ego is all about me.
The soul promotes self through serving others.
The ego tries to control the message.
The soul trusts the message to take on a life of its own.
The ego talks.
The soul looks and listens.
The ego is closed off.
The soul is open and transparent.
The ego competes and dominates.
The soul co-creates.
The ego lives from scarcity.
The soul lives from abundance.
The ego cares only about the end performance.
The soul is in love with the process.
The ego contracts.
The soul expands.
The ego is spam.
The soul is useful content.
The ego is hollow.
The soul contains multitudes.
December 28, 2010
why you probably do need a blog
There's a lot of talk about 'platform' and 'brand' and 'voice', as if these are individual elements that are separate from each other. What I suggest is this:
Your platform is your brand is your voice.
There is no clear separation of the three.
And the heart of this is your blog, which is why I think it's so important for writers to have one.
Because websites are static.
Which is the same problem I have with the way that a lot of bloggers talk about personal or author brands. They talk about the brand as something static.
In the old, offline world, a brand was static. Stephen King = horror writer. Danielle Steele = romance. You controlled your brand through what you chose to write and publish. Your brand wasn't a set of ideas so much as one overriding idea, based on the genre you wrote in or maybe the region you wrote about.
I think things are more complicated now. Spend enough time online and you quickly realize that social media isn't static. It's the opposite. Get deep enough, and it's like entering a wave of energy sweeping across the different platforms. It has a life of its own. It moves. Anything that's static is like a billboard at the side of the highway, passed and abandoned.
A writer absolutely does need a website. Websites are coming back into fashion. While you still need to spread yourself across the web – to fish where the fish are – you also need a central hub that pulls everything together, that can not only collect the people clicking through from different portals (twitter or youtube or facebook or whatever) but also serve as a kind of one-stop shopping for fans who want to see all your different streams gathered in one place. It makes life easier for them (and it's all about them, so pay attention).
And featured prominently on your website: your blog.
Because a blog isn't static. It changes the website into something else – a website/blog hybrid that takes on energy and motion. A blog changes and grows and evolves.
It gives people a reason to keep coming back. (So long as it's about something other than your books, which can get really old really fast.)
And when they come back, they get repeated exposure to your name — and your books. They develop a relationship with you, your 'brand'. Some of them engage in dialogue with you, the person. You become a part of their routine.
Your blog is what changes your website into an author platform. A platform could be loosely defined as the network of relationships you have, the tight and loose ties, the sets of eyeballs that you can command at any given time.
And people don't form relationships with billboards.
They form relationships with 'brands'.
Your blog helps you evolve your brand, because your brand is essentially your voice. Everything you do online contributes to your brand, to the mental impression that other people have of you. You may not even believe in having an 'author brand' – but you'll find you have one anyway (because it believes in you). And because you're tweeting, posting, tumbling, whatever, because you're engaging in different interactions and conversations, your brand moves as you move. Like you, your brand has become interactive. You can guide it, by knowing what you want to represent and staying (more or less) "on message", but you can't control it. Your brand is whatever other people say it is, and other people can see things about you and your work that you can't see yourself, because you're too close to them or simply take them for granted.
(This is why authenticity is so important: your brand may grow, naturally and organically, in different directions and incorporate different ideas, but the core of the brand is who you truly are. Your persona, your worldview, your set of values, your big meaning, your voice. Fake that, and the center cannot hold. There is no 'there' there.)
As more and more people buy e-readers, as more and more books go digital, we'll be downloading books instead of browsing the tables at Barnes and Noble. Which changes the process of how we discover new writers in the first place. Your potential Ideal Readers might be in the bookstore once in a while – where your book may or may not be featured – but they are online everyday. Give them a way to find you, give them a blog post they resonate with…and share with their friends, pass around their networks …and your 'brand' grows on its own. Your brand is like your alter-ego, your double, going out to meet new people even while you sleep or make out with your partner or watch that reality show you don't admit that you watch.
I, for one, find that extremely cool.
Your platform is your brand is your voice.
Bring your voice to life – over and over and over again – in your blog.
image by Orientaly
December 19, 2010
developing your audience through a "world worthy of devotion"
….and if you don't want to watch the video, this is what I said:
Once you have the reader's attention you have to engage her and keep her coming back for more. That's why storytelling is so important, and a good author platform tells its own story as it grows and evolves along with the author. The readers get to be part of that journey and participate in it and even co-create it.
New forms of technology create – after an initial period of resistance – new forms of storytelling, and the Internet is seeing the rise of transmedia storytelling or what Frank Rose terms "deep media". Narratives are no longer so linear. Different strands of a single story can be told across multiple platforms at the same time, through books and TV and games and movies, which leads to a deeply immersive experience and creates what a friend of mine referred to as a "world worthy of devotion".
How can you turn your author platform into a "world worthy of devotion?" How can you turn your platform into a story you're telling through multiple platforms, whether it's blogs and tweets and videos and podcasts and pictures and any other form of media that strikes your fancy and plays to your particular strengths? Each platform is an opportunity to reveal a different side of both yourself and your "big meaning".
Perhaps the new challenge of the 21st century storyteller is how to turn yourself into the most interesting story of all.
December 17, 2010
books to change your life, or at least your mind: creativity
I was inspired by Danielle Laporte's blog to think about the books I've read in the past year or two and cull the ones I found especially powerful.
So I give unto you, Dear Reader, as we consider the ending of one year and the beginning of another, some lists of really cool books. I've divided them into categories (Creativity, Life Strategy, Social Media, Blogging, Writing, For Fun). These are not namby-pamby self-help books, but authors who know their stuff and have something to say. They have fed my head — and thus my blog — and they can feed you too.
CREATIVITY
THE MEDICI EFFECT: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersections of Ideas, Concepts and Cultures (Frans Johansson)
Hands down one of the best and most fascinating books I read this year, or in the last several years. The book looks at how cultures and disciplines and people converge to create instrumental, game-changing insight, and how you can create this kind of convergence in your own life.
THINK BETTER: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking (Tim Hurson)
Worth reading just to learn why most people suck at brainstorming, what real brainstorming looks like, and the power of "the third third".
CREATIVITY FOR LIFE (Eric Maisel)
Eric Maisel is one of my heroes; he's a psychologist who pretty much invented the whole profession of "creativity coaching". CREATIVITY FOR LIFE takes a holistic approach to living a life that's committed to art, from establishing a creative practice to managing the balance between solitude and community, and provides strategies and insights to find your creative destiny. (I just really wanted to say 'creative destiny'. So dramatic!)
MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN (Scott Belsky)
This book recognizes that it's not only important to generate ideas, you also need to execute, and someone who is strong at one might not be so strong at the other. Belsky is the founder and CEO of Behance, "a company on a mission to empower and organize the creative world", and gods know the creative world needs it.
There's a massive shift of consciousness going on, as the old paradigm dies and the new one takes its place. In the new order, "artists" win the day because what they do cannot be outsourced or automated. Seth Godin calls these people "linchpins" because they "invent, lead, connect others, make things happen…figure out what to do when there's no rule book." Godin shows you why this is and inspires you to be one yourself. He's been criticized a bit for not showing you how to be one, but that's kind of the point: there is no real map, no "one path" that everyone can follow. You have to figure it out for yourself by playing to your own personality. Some good insights on "the resistance", the culture of gifts and connection, and "the seven abilities of the linchpin."
So sally forth, dear readers, and kick some creative ass.
image by Valery Moiseev
December 15, 2010
how to find a niche to dominate (& battle your way through the blogosphere)
Lo, it is my attempt at a video blog post! I am not sure why the sound is so out of sync, but clearly I've got some learnin' to do.
Bullet points:
There's a lot of stuff on the Internet. (You didn't already know this, right?)
To cut through the blogosphere, it helps to make yourself into a trusted resource.
To deal with the oversaturation, you want to carve out a niche within a niche.
You can do this by combining different elements of your identity.
This way you also exploit "the power of the intersection": where two different sets of ideas meet and mingle, and spark off fresh new insights that can make you look like a GENIUS.
Another advantage is that by writing out to the different edges of your niche, you can further develop your audience.
Anthony Bourdain is hot.
(Okay, this last wasn't quite what I said, but close enough.)
December 8, 2010
the secret ingredient to a strong author platform
I have come to believe that an author platform is its own cool thing. It isn't something you can just slap on top of your novel – a coat of promotion, a sprinkle of marketing – but a living, growing entity in its own right.
It needs to reach into many different places. You can't just sit on your blog like a spider in its web and wait for the pretty flies to come. You need to find your readers across the different platforms – and you need to re-imagine and re-purpose your content to fit those platforms.
This requires work and time. An editor at a webinar advised her listeners to take half of your writing time and dedicate it to platform. Gone are the days when marketing your novel was something that happened after the fact. Now it has to be baked into the process.
Now it requires big meaning.
And by this I mean a big idea, a theme, an obsession, a vision, a mission statement, a full-fledged manifesto/a. Call it what you will. I like the phrase 'big meaning' because meaning is what we seek and make out of our lives, fleshed out through our creative work.
A sense of meaning is intrinsic to happiness. We need to love and work in meaningful ways. When we're depressed, we say our lives have no meaning.
If an author platform is to be truly powerful, it has to mean something to you and to others.
It has to represent something that taps into your deepest values. Your intellectual and emotional sweetspot. Your core.
It has to be juicy.
This is because it needs to inspire you on those days — and you will have them — when you'd rather poke your eyes out than blog or tweet or do anything that has anything to do with social media. 'Should' just won't cut it: as in, I should do this because I need to do this because I have to build a platform because everybody says so. Dammit. That line of thinking leads to discouragement and burnout.
There has to be pleasure in the process. And if the pleasure isn't always there, it helps to have a sense of purpose that goes beyond selling your books and yourself; goes to somehow making the world a better place.
Which makes your platform something that other people can buy into. Because then it's not just about you, it's about them, and the satisfaction and stimulation it gives them, and even the sense of identity they get through aligning themselves with your mission, your vision, your particular point-of-view.
Meaning is the crack cocaine of the Internet. If you can provide that, you've got a world at your fingertips.
Which helps you create your author-brand. I know that 'brand' is a bit of a dirty word, tainted by many many years of one-way corporate-speak, but think about what brand is: an evolving set of ideas and associations that represent you when you yourself aren't anywhere around.
Your brand is like your avatar, your alter-ego, your signature style, walking around the 'Net and growing or shrinking according to the conversations that other people have about you (or don't).
When you know the meaning behind your brand, it's easier to streamline and focus. You'll know what to share, or include, or jettison, or edit out, and what not to bother with in the first place. You will know what is relevant to your brand. This enables you to find the method in the madness of the stuff that's on the 'Net; what to build on, deepen, collect and curate for your readers.
But most of all, it's your big idea, your big meaning, that generates and feeds your content ecosystem.
(Full disclosure: I just really like to use that phrase. 'Content ecosystem.' It gives me a bit of a thrill. I don't know why. I'm just like that.)
Because your platform cannot live by your blog alone. Or your Twitter stream or Facebook page or Youtube channel. You have your hub, your online home, the place where you lure and catch your readers (and their email addresses), but moving out from that you have all the other places that form your social media framework.
(For example, the mighty online Obama presidential campaign reached out to a network of millions through 15 different platforms. Each vehicle you use – LinkedIn or Tumblr or Ning or Goodreads or whatever – creates its own little network, which links up to all your other little networks, which can create something very very big.)
And those different platforms require different forms of content. But you can take your big content – long blog entries, or ebooks or whitepapers — and break it into smaller chunks and bites and tweets. You can take your small content and explode it into something more in-depth. You can transcribe your podcasts and post on your blog; you can tweet cool quotes from your video interviews; you get the idea. Your content feeds your content feeds your content.
And it's all fueled by your big meaning.
Your big idea.
Which generates and grows your content.
I was doing yoga at a Big Sur retreat called Esalen when the big meaning for Tribal Writer popped into my head (somewhere between the chanting and the naked people in the mineral baths). I saw it simply as this, an image emblazoned across my mental mindskin:
art + entrepreneurship
Tribal Writer is about creativity, craft and platform, but ultimately it's about learning how to become a creative entrepreneur. Being entrepreneurial is part of how I define being a twenty-first century writer (combining self-publishing with traditional publishing). I'm early in the journey…but it is a journey, and one I'm psyched to be on.
And if Tribal Writer is part of a larger platform – my Justine Musk author platform – then the big meaning that drives it has to do with empowerment, including creative empowerment, including this idea that once you yourself start to find it, it's your duty (and privilege) to share your process and tools and knowledge with others. Everybody wins.
Did I know this when I first started blogging, or took my first (mis)steps into the world of social media? Well, no. I didn't think in these terms at all; author platform was not a phrase that applied to fiction writers until a relatively short time ago. Finding your big meaning is part strategic thinking, and part following-your-instinct as your social media life takes root, and grows and shifts in your hands. It's about listening to the voices that emerge through your work, the voices of your deeper self, and giving them the respect they deserve. It's about paying attention to your life, your past, your self, the things and themes that tend to obsess you, or that surface and resurface within the ongoing narrative of your life. It's about figuring out what you're truly driven to write – and not what you feel you should write.
Chances are that you at least have an inkling of your Big Meaning, and that's all you need to start. Go in the direction of your inklings, which lead to other inklings, which lead the way. You'll promote your own work while you're at it.
November 30, 2010
two sides of marketing: what makes people buy your books
I was reading through Chris Brogan's blog the other day and noticed a post he did about "the two sides of marketing":
Some marketing is designed to convince you that your life would be better if you had this (we'll call that the A side). Other marketing is designed to find the people who are actually seeking that and give them more education to help them make a decision (this, we'll call B). When I look at how we use social media more often than not, it's for B and not A. We usually use social media to listen for the people who are expressing an interest in a product or service that we offer, and then we give them content like blog posts and videos to help them better understand how much better the world would be once you really get the product or service that you want.
He later points out that
The A-side of marketing, the "ADVERTISING" side of marketing, still has to sneak in between what we know and what we NEED (being bombastic and smirky here) to know, so that we can then help educate people (the "BRIDGING" side of marketing) that it's what they want.
When it comes to marketing your fiction, you have to figure out whether you're going to play the A or the B side (or, more likely, how to combine them). But it's not like you can "educate" people about why reading your book will make their world a better place.
Because it's not like fiction solves a particular problem or fills an easily identifiable need. The needs of readers will vary and whether your work satisfies those needs can be wildly subjective (especially since the most powerful kinds of fiction also tend to be the most polarizing). If I start educating you about why you should go to Amazon right now (!) and buy my first novel, it will come off as a hard sell. Because it is. And since I'm the one who wrote the damn thing in the first place, you're not likely to think that I have anything other than my own best interests in mind.
I lack credibility.
Someone once told me that people buy books from authors they like. While I think there's some truth to this, I also don't expect a person who likes me to automatically buy my books. And if the only reason I'm trying to make you like me is so that you will go off and buy those books — well, ugh. That's not particularly authentic of me. That has the tone of a used car salesman. Or saleswoman. You know what I mean.
So I would put it like this: people buy books from authors that they resonate with. And by resonate, I mean that there's something about the author's voice and point of view that they can relate to. That point-of-view compels them. It sparks off a sense of recognition. (This also works in reverse. When I read a book that I resonate with, I go online to find the author.)
It's a chemistry between author and reader.
It can't be faked.
It just is (or isn't).
So you educate people — you do what Brogan calls "bridging" — by putting yourself out there in the different social media spaces and expressing yourself (your self) and your point of view. To catch interest, that point of view has to be passionate, and to earn trust, that point of view has to be consistent over time. Which doesn't mean that you hit the same points over and over again (although you certainly can, if you're artful about it); it means that you unfold your beliefs so that they build on and deepen each other. They create, in the reader's mind, a sense of who you are as a person and writer. The stronger that sense of identity, the more likely it is that your Ideal Readers will find it and align themselves with it and go on to buy your books.
They have been officially "educated".
Before other people can know who you are, you have to figure out how you want them to know you. This happens partly through instinct, experimentation and strategy, and some of it is beyond your control (since you can't control the conversations other people have about you). You want to play to the natural strengths of your own personality and find that sweet spot where your deepest interests overlap with the needs and interests of others*. You'll not only find your audience this way (be it very large or very small), you might even find a self in you that you didn't quite know was there.
* If you blog, for example, you'll start to notice the blog posts that generate the strongest reactions. If you follow those reactions, they'll lead you to the sweet spot. Which is why you might start out blogging about one thing, but end up blogging about something else. Your life online is like your life offline; it grows and evolves and sometimes surprises.
image by Reynald Belanger
November 28, 2010
how to put heart & soul into your story structure
There are few things more intellectually beautiful, to me, than a well-crafted story structure. To quote Hannibal from the 80's show THE A-TEAM – not exactly a literary figure, I know, but bear with me – "I love it when a plan comes together."
When you can't put the book down. When different storythreads weave through each other then come together in the end in a way that seems inevitable yet you also didn't see coming. When the conclusion finishes the story off and yet opens the story up so that everything is illuminated. When you put the book aside with a pang of regret, maybe, but also a sense of…fullness.
When – as a writing instructor once put it – "everything hangs together."
Fiction takes the crazed random tumble of life and shapes it – some of it – with order and meaning.
Structure is form. Structure holds everything together: it's like the vase you pour the story into. But the danger of form is turning it into formula: the difference between handcrafting something exquisite and churning out factory-made items.
I believe in the hero's journey, three-act structures, plot points and midpoints and all of that (and the blog Storyfix by Larry Brooks is an awesome place to learn all that).
But it's possible to follow these principles and produce a well-crafted, well-written story that nonetheless fails to excite and engage the reader. It also might be difficult to explain why (especially when the agent or editor rejects it with a bland, "I just didn't fall in love with it"). You could say the story lacks soul or originality, which I've posted about before (see this piece about writing soulful fiction).
But I think what explanations of story structure often fail to get at is the story beneath the story, which is also its emotional heart. And its guts and brains and soul. This is where the story works out its overall meaning, and it's the difference between something that feels slick and shallow and familiar, and something that gets under your skin and lives there for a very long time.
Kate Wright calls this the story spine. She puts it forth as this: one set of ideas wrestling with an opposing set of ideas as made manifest through the characters. The story spine, in short, is a continuing conflict of ideas, growing and deepening until there is some kind of resolution.
Some kind of synthesis.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about abstract ideas pretending to be characters but real flesh-and-blood people who populate your novel and fight with one another and fall in love with one another and go on quests and have sex and regress and make wrong choices and also the right choices and confront their inner demons and so on and so forth. It's difficult to get people emotionally involved with an abstraction. Whatever ideas are battling it out in your novel, you need to anchor them in your captivating and complicated characters. You take a wandering generality and turn it into a meaningful specific. It's not just about true love; it's about Romeo and Juliet. You get the idea.
But your protagonist – and everything that supports her — represents your main idea, your thesis.
Your antagonist – and everything that supports her — represents your opposing idea, your antithesis.
Your story – your plot points and act breaks – describe how these forces clash and impact each other until eventually they knit together into something new. Your synthesis. Your ultimate conclusion. Which is also the ultimate meaning of the novel. The story underneath the story – the story spine — is the dialogue these different ideas keep having with each other.
If you're blocked – or if you've outlined your story structure and technically know what happens next but feel flat and uninspired – take a fresh look at your characters, then look through your characters to the ideas they represent. What are those ideas? How can those ideas come into conflict with each other, whether it's a dialogue between a boyfriend and girlfriend in a coffee shop or a death-defying chase along the edge of [insert name of impressively tall famous building here]?
Make your characters stand for something, and your story will stand on its own.
image by Anna Karwowska
November 23, 2010
what a conversation with a seduction guru taught me about creativity
This week I wrote an article for a magazine. Which is an interesting development in itself, because I never saw myself as someone who wrote articles for a popular women's magazine. I saw myself as someone who wrote fiction. Period. I was a novelist. Period. Nonfiction just hadn't been woven into my DNA (never mind that I'd been blogging for five years, which is how this magazine discovered me in the first place). And why I ever thought this — well, who knows.
The research for this article involved a conversation with a "seduction guru". (I'm not sure he would call himself that – in fact, he probably wouldn't – but I get such a kick out of the term that I have to use it. I just really like the word 'seduction'.)
He was as charming and engaging as I expected him to be – I would have been bewildered otherwise (this guy has built a 30 million dollar business on how to charm and engage).
One of the points he made was that human beings are lousy at predicting how they'll feel in different situations, which is why it's important to put yourself in as many new situations as possible.
Which reminded me of an idea I came across in a book by Sir Ken Robinson about creativity:
You don't know who you are until you know what you can do.
Because we tend to have such a messed-up idea of ourselves. We rely on other people to reflect us back to ourselves — on how parents, teachers, friends, strangers react to us, and our interpretations of those reactions. Which is kind of like walking through a funhouse hall of mirrors. Some of those mirrors distort you more than others, but none of them are fully accurate.
And we internalize way too much crap.
My ex-husband used to tell me that I wasn't funny. For years I accepted what he told me as gospel truth (I was gullible that way, but that's a whole other article). But then I started noticing that, at dinner parties, I could…wait for it…say things that made people laugh. Sometimes I even managed to crack everybody up, so that a guy would have his forehead on the table, he was laughing so hard. And people started telling me that some of my blogging, my emails, were…wait for it…funny.
"Well, no," I said, "I'm actually not. I'm not funny at all."
Finally one night a male friend, who I kind of had an innocent crush on, said, "Justine, every time you start drinking you start saying things that are hilarious."
"Quick-witted," said someone else.
And I realized: when I had a drink, or two, I loosened up and started saying the stuff that was running through my head on a fairly constant basis. Which also made me realize that I was a lot more inhibited than I'd ever thought. It was as if I'd clamped down on my own personality in order to fit into this twisted definition of myself. And also, quite possibly, my marriage.
(And now a moment of silence for my marriage. Okay. Moving on.)
It's not just that people reflect us badly, or at least incompletely, but that we get stuck in those reflections. Someone tells us something when we're young and it is forever sealed into our sense of who we are, so much so that we seek out other people to tell us the exact same things ("you're too stupid to try that", "who do you think you are?", "you're a spoiled ungrateful brat"). It's familiar, so it seems like home.
And because we keep telling ourselves we're this way and not that way, we never put ourselves in certain situations that we would actually enjoy, or have a talent for; where we could even learn to excel.
Which means that we don't allow ourselves to learn what we can truly do.
Which means that most of us don't know who we are – who we really are.
It's a very high price to pay, when you think about it. And for what, exactly?
Do you know who you are?
Is there something you want to do – feel yourself yearning toward – but won't attempt — won't even let yourself seriously consider? Maybe it's that yearning that holds an important truth about your identity, and it's the stuff holding you back, the reasons and justifications and 'logical' thinking, that's bullshit.
Maybe you're more of a shapeshifter than you ever realized.
And you could seriously surprise yourself, if you gave yourself a real chance. (A real chance, not a half-hearted, setting-yourself-up-to-self-sabotage chance, and I bet you know exactly what I mean.)
Something to think about.
