find the "edgy" blog topic that will give you total superpowers
1
I did an online guest lecture/Q&A for the e-course "How to Build Your Author Platform" offered by Dan Blank of www.wegrowmedia.com.
Much fun.
One of the questions involved the question of what to blog about. The student knew the way to attract an audience is to go narrow and deep: choose a niche, write to a specific person instead of trying to throw out something for everybody (which wins over nobody). Yet, she pointed out, Tribal Writer seems to range across different topics. How was I managing this?
So I talked about how your niche could actually be a sub-niche, created by intersecting one interest or passion with another. That not only gives you a little realm of your own to Totally Dominate (at least in your head) – where, say, social media crosses with the pursuit of the creative life — it gives you a number of different edges you can roam along and explore. And when you write out to the various edges of your sub-niche, you can appeal to different audiences and lure some of them back to your lair (where they can fall madly in love with you and live happily ever after).
2
Edges are interesting.
Edges are where one thing meets up with another thing and transforms and is transformed by it. Ideas bang into each other. Sparks fly.
Out on those edges is where you find the creative and intellectual outlaws, the restless soul-searchers, the rebels and misfits, the early adopters.
It's where you find truths people don't want to know and secrets they won't admit to keeping.
The only thing you need to get there is your own curiosity (if you don't have it, then you can always fake it). You write out to the very edges of your knowledge – and then learn more. You ask yourself, "What else?" and "What next?" This is how you slowly turn into an expert, which, in the world of blogging, is a fine and helpful thing to be. (Note: you never. ever. in a zillion years. refer to yourself as an expert. You're only an expert when other people call you that, when they are confident that you know more than they do.)
John Hagel refers to all this as the passion of the explorer:
…a passion that takes the form of a long-term commitment to explore a particular domain, usually fairly broadly defined. It is not content with passive observation, but it wants to learn through doing. In the process, it seeks to achieve a growing impact on that domain by continuing to test and extend one's own personal performance limits.
He also refers to the questing disposition
People with this kind of disposition need continuing stimulation. But it is stimulation of a certain type – the kind that comes from going beyond one's comfort zone, addressing new challenges, engaging in creative problem-solving and developing new skills to make progress in a challenging environment.
Hagel also points out how nature rewards us with a dopamine high:
When we undertake a challenge and expect to overcome it, our brains release a surge of dopamine which gives us a sense of pleasure and helps to motivate us to pursue the anticipated reward…
As a result, dopamine stimulates exploratory/seeking behavior. It is much more tied to the anticipation of a reward than the actual attainment of the reward…
It makes us much more willing to explore unfamiliar territory and try out new activities.
In other words, nature rewards us for going to extremes, even if the extremes are nothing more than the self-perceived limits of our minds and personalities.
As fate would have it, so does the Internet.
Gary Vee points out in his new book The Thank You Economy:
…very little in the middle is often memorable, and what is memorable is what sticks. Stories and ideas that catch us off guard, make us pay attention, and show up where we didn't expect them – those are sticky. Sticky stories are the ones that get carried forward, permeating the barrier around the middle and reaching far more people than you'll ever find in that limited space.
–4–
The problem is, we're not trained to ride the edges, go to extremes, develop our questing dispositions.
When we do that, we put ourselves out there to be judged, laughed at and hurt.
We learn young that edges = different, and difference = isolation and social estrangement. When you're a kid, this feels like abandonment, which feels like death. So you smooth out your own edges, or maybe cut them off. You go to the middle, where everybody else is, where your friends are; where you would read the same books and listen to the same songs and go to the same movies and watch the same TV shows. It's where the advertisers knew they could find everybody, to bombard them with the same commercials.
The middle often looks safe. It seems like a center, except it's a false center. Instead of feeling the freedom to express yourself to the fullest, you tamp yourself down. You slouch. You pretend to be shorter, or dumber, or quieter, or nicer, or tougher, or sexier, or less sexier than you are. You fake an interest in sports, or the opposite sex, or law school, or babies. You become a kind of performance of yourself.
Which is not what the Internet wants. The Internet wants authentic, or else we might as well go back to watching Superbowl commercials.
–5–
When you think about it, the middle kind of sucks.
What's the most difficult part of writing a novel? The middle. When are you most tempted to give up a task or activity? In the middle, when the bloom of beginning has worn off and the light at the end isn't in sight yet. Why is Jan Brady famous for saying, "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia…!" Because she suffered middle child syndrome.
Seth Godin writes about The Dip: that period of progress when it doesn't feel like you're making any progress at all. It's when most people quit. Those who don't, who push on through to the other side, emerge into mastery.
But the point is that the Dip – the middle – is not the place where you're supposed to stay. Either you realize that you're on the wrong road entirely, and get off as soon as you can, or you're just passing (or struggling) through in order to pick up the skills needed and demonstrate the grit required. You're not in one place or the other, fully one thing or the other; you are journey, change, and transformation.
Enlightenment is never in the middle. Whatever you're doing, and whatever emotion attends it – fear, for example, — enlightenment is always on the other side.
–6–
I'm not into what I think of as New Age imagery – feathers and dreamcatchers and Spirit and women running with the wolves and things like that – but I've always been intrigued by the concept of shamanism. A shaman is a "wounded healer" – wounded from his or her time in the middle, maybe – who has been marked as 'different' through mysterious dreams and visions. Shamans travel out to the edges of experience and encounter other worlds. They suffer, but they transfigure that pain into power, special knowledge, to bring back to the tribe.
They return to the middle not to get stuck there, but to change it.
–7–
When I spoke to Dan Blank's online class, I didn't mention shamans or The Dip or Jan Brady or any of this.
Choosing a topic for your blog is such a personal thing, and your choices are a lot more limited than you maybe realize. Your topic needs to sustain you over years, and there are only a handful of things – if that – likely to ignite your deep, sustained interest and curiosity. In order to Feed the Blog week in and week out, you're forced to chase that topic down, to learn and evolve.
Not to mention that your subject matter gets folded into your 'brand', which is your reputation, which is your online identity. So, in a way, you are what you write. And by writing out to the edges of your topic, you're writing out to the edges of yourself. Whether those edges are rough, smooth, jagged, whatever – doesn't matter. So long as you get there, and hang out for a while.
Which reminds me of lines from a Margaret Atwood poem:
I move
And live on the edges
(what edges)
I live
On all the edges there are.
