Justine Musk

things that smart women know

2012-02-24T02:05:40Z

This morning I asked on Facebook and Twitter: What do smart women know? I distilled the answers into this post. Thank you to everyone who participated*. You are awesome sauce.

Smart women know that perfection is annoying and overrated.

Smart women know to be gloriously imperfect.

Smart women know that they are responsible for creating the beauty in their lives.

Smart women know that there is more to life than being in a relationship.

Smart women know that success stems from love, connection and leading from the soul.

Smart women know that great men exist and they are not the enemy.

Smart women know that people are going to talk whatever you do, so stand tall in power and intention and continue to forge ahead.

Smart women know that it’s good to be bold.

Smart women know that they can feel fear and still act fearless.

Smart women know who they are and what they’re worth.

Smart women know they have to make up their own rules to get ahead.

Smart women know not to get caught up in ego bullshit, but to get out into the world and do the work they’re called to do.

Smart women know that love is an action, and not (just) a warm fuzzy feeling.

Smart women know to let go and forgive.

Smart women know that their self-worth does not depend upon a man.

Smart women know how much they don’t know. They know humility.

Smart women know that being and expressing fully who they are brings joy and peace and fulfillment.

Smart women know to listen to their intuition and their hearts and live from the inside-out.

Smart women know how to say no nicely, how to say it like a hardass, and when to use either approach.

Smart women know other smart women, when to ask advice and when to listen.

Smart women know that misogyny is in our cultural DNA and when to push back.

Smart women know that men come and go but a dog will love you forever.

What else do smart women — and men — know? Add in the comments below.

*Emelie Rota, Sorinne Ardeleanu, Kaynek Young, Betsy Peters, A Luis Moro, Joanne Meade, D’Lanie Blaze, Jean Morgan Compton, Cyd Madsen, Julie M Daley, Laurie Sutherland, Naima Singletary, Susan Kelly, Erin Griggs, Tae Phoenix, Juana, Annie, Laura Anne Gilman

Demi Moore, the limits of beauty + why Cleopatra was badass

2012-02-21T17:27:00Z

I was skimming an article that claimed how the newly single Demi Moore has been partying with her daughter’s friends and chasing men half her age when I came across a quote from one of her alleged friends. It was something like:

“She’s going to turn 50 soon and has no idea what her life is supposed to look like.”

In these rapidly changing times, you could wonder if anyone knows what life is supposed to look like. On some level we’re all forced to wing it, creating and recreating ourselves and our ‘brands’ and innovating our way forward (or sideways or backwards before looping round again) into the rest of our lives.

Those who can adapt shall inherit the world.

People like to say that women have too many choices now, and get paralyzed and stressed and miserable in the face of them, and so blame the evils of feminism. I don’t think that’s true. I think women can choose to be traditional (marriage, kids) or trailblazing (anything else, including the attempt to combine marriage and motherhood with a career).

Once you step out of the “traditional” life script, there are no clear models to follow, which is why it’s so easy to think that we’re fucking it up (or fucking up our kids).

You have to see it to be it, but trailblazers can only “see it” in their heads.

You can look to other women as heroes, but every woman is piecing together her own idiosyncratic path that usually has to weave around and through the paths of others (spouses, children, aging parents).

Being a trailblazer is difficult. You’re always rebelling against some aspect of the status quo. You invite all kinds of criticism. You wrestle self-doubt on a regular basis. You have to juggle twenty different balls at the same time and damn, do you get tired. Etcetera. It’s easy to retreat into fantasies of a golden era (such as before feminism) when these problems didn’t exist and everything was rainbows and unicorns and fairy tales ending happily ever after. (Cause that’s what life was like back then. Right?)

Maybe that’s partly why the Hotness Olympics have such a fierce hold on girls and women. When so much about the kind of life that you’re “supposed” to have is unclear, the one thing that is crystal-clear is how much society rewards and valorizes good-looking people.

(So much so that career counselor and noted blogger Penelope Trunk in her Blueprint for a Woman’s Life advises women to get plastic surgery.)

If you make yourself as hot and sexy as possible, if you manage to finally lose those five pounds and go to yoga everyday, if you hold onto your youth long after your actual youth has passed, then you win, right? You get the prince and he loves you forever and everything comes up roses and unicorns and disco balls and cute happy children who always say please and thank you.

Right.

I live in Los Angeles, in a social milieu where Botox and plastic surgery are the norm. But when everybody competes according to the same beauty standards, everybody starts to seem, with varying degrees, the same. It’s become very clear to me that the Hotness Olympics are rigged. There are no winners, because even the winners don’t win. In the words of Michelle Pfeiffer, who would know: “Beautiful women get used a lot.” They’re commodities. They’re interchangeable. They have an expiration date.

Which is why the kind of trailblazing I would like to see more of is the rejection of the Hotness Olympics for erotic capital.

EROTIC CAPITAL: The Power of Attraction in the Bedroom and the Boardroom is the title of a book by Catherine Hakim. However you feel about her central message, the book recognizes – in a way that the Hotness Olympics do not – that attraction is multifaceted. Hakim breaks erotic capital down into six components, and physical beauty is only one of them. Even this definition of ‘beauty’ makes allowance for something other than genetics and plastic surgery:

“The French…speak of the belle laide…the ugly woman who becomes attractive through her presentational skills and style. Getting fit, improving posture, wearing flattering colors and shapes, choosing appropriate hairstyles and clothes – such changes can add up to a completely new look.”

The second component is sexual attractiveness, which is separate from beauty:

“….sex appeal can also be about personality and style, femininity or masculinity, a way of being in the world, a characteristic of social interaction. Beauty tends to be static and is easily captured in a photo. Sexual attractiveness is about the way someone moves, talks and behaves…”

The third component is

“definitely social: grace, charm, social skills in interaction, the ability to make people like you…want to know you and, where relevant, desire you…”

The fourth component is

“liveliness, a mixture of physical fitness, social energy and good humor. People who have a lot of life in them can be hugely attractive to others – as illustrated by those who are “the life of the party”…”

The fifth component is

“social presentation: style of dress, face-painting, perfume, jewelry, hairstyles, and the various accessories that people carry or wear to announce their social status and style to the world.”

(This component – otherwise known as personal style – is my favorite. I am fascinated with it.)

And the sixth and last component is

“sexuality itself: sexual competence, energy, erotic imagination, playfulness, and everything else that makes for a sexually satisfying partner.”

All six elements combine into someone’s “erotic capital”: a mix of aesthetic, visual, physical, social and sexual attractiveness to other members of your society in all social contexts. It includes skills that can be learned and aspects of your personality that can be cultivated, like intelligence and joie de vivre. If you lack in certain areas, you can actively develop other areas to compensate.

As Diana Vreeland once put it, “You don’t have to be beautiful to be wildly attractive.”

I am fascinated by the great courtesans and seductresses of history. Ellen T White refers to them as “sirens” who are “irresistible.” Not to everybody, necessarily. Certainly not each person every time. “But a Siren’s batting average is very high.” And in books like Katie Hickman’s COURTESANS or Eleanor Herman’s SEX WITH KINGS or White’s own SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE, a theme that emerges over and over is that true Sirens set themselves apart and make the world take notice through the force of their personalities. They are defined not by physical beauty – in some cases they were actually rather plain – but by “unshakeable confidence.”

“Be she a kook, character, sexpot, intellectual, muse, mother, or moll, the Siren lives large. Each embraces life in her own way and is determined to live it as thoroughly as possible.”

White also says:

“In fact, let me go out on a limb here: being physically exceptional can sometimes be a deterrent to becoming a world-class Siren…Being beautiful is too easy. Everyone naturally gravitates toward beautiful people; consequently, beautiful people are rarely forced to spend any time or thought on becoming magnetic people or in calculating how to get what they want.”

(This reminds me of an incident at a black-tie fundraiser when an acquaintance of Adrien Grenier told me, rightly or wrongly, that “Adrien has no game.” I retorted, “Adrien Grenier doesn’t need any game.” “So if he ever does,” my friend said, “he’s in trouble.”)

Cleopatra, for example, knew the power of spectacle. She also knew exactly whom she wanted to impress. She smuggled herself into a heavily guarded palace and dazzled the great military strategist Julius Caesar; she sailed up the river Cydnus in a pimped-out barge, dressed as Aphrodite, reclining under a canopy of gold cloth while boys dressed as Cupids cooled her with fans, and dazzled the hedonistic and sensualist Mark Antony.

Cleopatra is not reported to have been particularly beautiful.

She was just badass.

White breaks the “siren” down into five archetypes: the Goddess, the Sex Kitten, the Companion, the Competitor, and the Mother.

(The funny thing was, even skimming the descriptions, I could recognize several of my female friends.)

Instead of traipsing off to the plastic surgeon for a new nose, women should, according to White, recognize which of the archetypes predominantly represents their own personality and play up the strengths and advantages: in other words, to become more of what they already are.

There is so much more to life than being desirable. Then again, we are biologically wired to want the kind of attention that just might deepen into love: so we can band together against the world with all its pitfalls and predators; so we can survive, thrive, and procreate (or not).

“What scares me,” Demi Moore told Harper’s Bazaar magazine, “is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m really not loveable, that I’m not worthy of being loved. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with me.”

When she collapsed in a Beverly Hills bungalow, according to People’s assistant managing editor Kate Coyne, she “was so frail and gaunt that some of the paramedics who arrived actually thought that she was a cancer patient who was in the final stages of treatment.”

I saw Demi and Ashton Kutchner at Chateau Marmont once, years ago, and what surprised me was how small she was: this quietly lovely woman with long dark hair who seemed to disappear into Ashton’s larger broader presence.

This is a woman who was the highest paid actress in Hollywood. Married to movie stars. Known for her beauty and fabulous body and seemingly unending youth. If life for women is a beauty race – and so many people will tell you that it is – Demi Moore won, and won big.

How did we get to a place where being intensely desirable went from living large and having game and embracing life with unshakeable confidence, to being mistaken for a cancer patient?

How can we get someplace else?

how to find the Big Meaning of your novel (+ blog) that will make your readers fall wildly in love with you

2012-02-18T03:39:49Z

So I realized I was coming at my novel from the outside in.

I’d created a complex storyworld with a cast of characters and tangled backstory shaping the frontstory. It was like I had the map, but couldn’t find the interstate freeway leading to my destination. I was going down some dark country roads, and it was only a matter of time before I’d end up in a town of cannibals or something.

(Cue the sound of a chainsaw.

…On second thought, DON’T.)

As Roz Morris suggests in her book NAIL YOUR NOVEL, one way to help yourself get unstuck is to remind yourself why you wanted to write the damn thing in the first place.

For me, for this book, it was the idea of repetition compulsion: how we recreate relationships and situations from the past in an ongoing effort to resolve them. I’m using reincarnation as a metaphor for that.

But what is the point of the book? If art is the creative demonstration of a truth, what is the truth I am trying to prove? I needed to get at the novel from the inside out.

Back to basics: a story is about a character who wants something and must overcome obstacles to get it.

But in order to do that, she’s forced to change in some way.

It’s in the overcoming of those obstacles that she finds what she lacks, and acquires what she needs, to achieve her goal (or not). The meaning of the story – the thematic significance – is in that character growth. That shift in consciousness that makes a new life possible.

In her book THE PLOT WHISPERER, Martha Alderson advises you to look to your own life, for your own truths, that you can then bring to bear on your novel. What are the big truths of your life?

I’m talking what Jim Signorelli refers to as big-t Truths, those metaphysical truths that we can’t measure or quantify but recognize, somehow, as right. We vibe with them.

In contrast, little-t truths are the facts and figures we find in the history books, for example. So-called objective information. (It’s not like history is, you know, written by the victors or anything.)

Little-t truths can be manipulated.

Big-t Truths cannot: they are what they are, and they remain the same from Homer to Shakespeare to Spielberg to Joyce Carol Oates. They are the abstract truths that live behind, and in between, and beneath the other kind. Little-t truths inform us; big-T truths live inside us, and a writer doesn’t teach or preach so much as stir them to life. We feel that shiver of recognition, that sense of deepening alignment with the values of the novel, as we live vicariously through the characters and arrive at a sense of what it all means.

Big-t truths live in your platform as well, your blog – that is, if you want to create something powerful enough to attract and engage new readers and deepen your connections with your fans.

It comes back to the question: What do you stand for? What is your purpose? What is your defining value or ideal?

The nature of blogging (and online writing in general) is to provide information that solves problems, that illuminates or improves your reader’s life in some way. Think of that information as the bait on the hook that draws your readers to you (you just want to make sure that it’s the right bait for the right kind of audience).

But to turn those readers into fans, you need to deepen that engagement, because information on its own isn’t enough.

The gurus will say that you need to connect with readers emotionally, and that’s true. But more than that, you need them to resonate with you. And that happens when they can sense the big-t Truth living behind that information, shaping the delivery of that information, and they recognize it as their Truth as well.

Community develops around shared values.

To find yours, Signorelli suggests what he calls the “laddering interview”, or what is elsewhere known as “the five whys”. You explore the motivation behind your motivation behind your motivation until you get to its root cause. That’s where you find your Truth.

For example:

Why blog about creativity?

Because I think it’s important to a well-lived life, a healthy society.

Why?

Because it deepens your connection to yourself and the world.

Why?

Because it helps you explore and develop your identity, your voice, your vision, and project that into the world.

Why?

So you can interact with the world as your full-bodied, amplified, authentic self, which allows you to stand in your power and connect with like-minded souls.

Why?

So you can work together to create a movement, raise awareness, find innovative solutions, that change the world. And sell your work and make some money as a side benefit.

You try it.

Getting back to my novel, this is the thematic statement I came up with:

The hunger for love leads to distortions of love, but only real love can heal and transcend the cycle of exploitative relationships.

So my character has to grow toward genuine love and intimacy in a way that helps her save herself (and others). I have to create the events, characters and situations – the objective information, the little-t truths, the ‘plot’ — forcing her to do that.

Wish me luck.

What are the Truths that you’re working with?

The ABCs of Self-Love: G is for Growth: how to find your life’s meaning. really.

2012-02-13T03:27:42Z

This Blog Crawl of Self-Love is hosted by Molly Mahar of Stratejoy. She believes in the transformational power of radical self-care and so do I. Find out more about The ABC’s of Self Love Blog Crawl + Treasure Hunt here.

So there’s this thing called a ‘growth mindset’ and this other thing called a ‘fixed mindset’.

If you have the former, you believe that things like talent and intelligence are not fixed at birth; that with work and effort, you can improve. You can invent and reinvent yourself.

You can grow.

If you have the latter, you believe that growth is not possible. You are who you are, and that’s the end of it. Instead of expanding to become more of what you want to be, you contract around those frozen beliefs about yourself.

You protect your self-image at all costs.

You avoid challenge. You look for the easy A. You don’t work hard when you don’t see the point. You sidestep anything that might show you up as quote-unquote inferior – because then you’ll be stuck with that inferiority, no way out.

Life is more interesting with a growth mindset.

Most of us tend to have a mix of the two; in some areas we believe we can grow, and in others we believe we are stuck in permanent positions.

Those beliefs shape our actions which shape our life.

They serve as a prism through which we filter the world.

Our subconscious draws our attention to the things that our beliefs have primed us to notice, so that we are constantly interpreting the world in a way that supports those beliefs. Between you and ‘objective reality’ is your own personal paradigm, to sift that reality and serve it up to you.

It aligns your reality with what you want to see – and blocks out what you don’t.

Change your beliefs, change your paradigm, change your world.

The question is how?

In the book CREATIVE THINKERING, Michael Michalko observes

Habits, thinking patterns, and routines with which we approach life gradually accumulate until they significantly reduce our awareness of other possibilities. It’s as if a cataract develops over our imagination over time, and its effects only slowly become obvious…

You cannot will yourself to change your thinking patterns any more than you can stop your foot from changing direction…You need some means of producing variation in your ideas. …

One powerful “means of producing variation” is: an antagonist.

A struggle.

I write fiction (when I’m not writing blog posts). Fiction concerns imaginary people who undergo a series of events and revelations that changes their paradigms and alters those characters forever.

This kind of change doesn’t come easily; an old sense of identity has to die, so a new one can rise from the ashes.

It’s that shift in identity – and how it enables the protagonist to overcome obstacles and face down antagonistic forces and achieve her heart’s desire (or not) – that shapes the ultimate meaning of the story.

Sometimes you seek growth; sometimes growth comes at you and for you like a heat-seeking missile.

Growth can announce itself with mess, discomfort, increasing pain. As children we learn our strategies of survival: our paradigm. Then one day we enter a place where those strategies no longer work for us. They hold us back or threaten us, they turn from angels to inner demons; we have to separate ourselves from them so that we can adopt new ones.

If we don’t, we stagnate.

We get caught in the repeating loop of our own history.

We sabotage ourselves and get preyed on by others.

Growth can announce itself with unease, with desire. There’s something (or someone) you want to have – or something you want to escape. There’s someone you want to become – and someone you need to stop being.

That desire is strong enough to push you out of your comfort zone and into a new act.

You struggle and you fight and you fail. Difficulty mounts. Your antagonist breaks you down, pushes you to the edge, strips you of everything you thought you knew – but it’s in that death, that moment of surrender, when you release the old beliefs and turn toward the new.

Your actions change accordingly.

You can do what you couldn’t do before — and the world finally offers up the prize.

One way to plan a novel is to reverse-engineer it. You look at the climax, the final showdown between your protagonist and your antagonist: exactly how does the protagonist prevail? What kind of person must she become, in order to prevail? What quality, what way of seeing the world, does she need to possess at the end of the novel and lacks in the beginning? How does she achieve that quality?

Then you can backtrack your way to the beginning, finding the moments to demonstrate that growth, that change, in your character.

One way to plan your life is to reverse-engineer it. You dream up a vision for your future. You imagine yourself having already achieved your goals.

The nature of goals is to force us to stretch: we need to acquire new skills and develop new aspects of our character.

In the beginning you may doubt yourself, think that the person you know yourself to be couldn’t reach such a lofty destination. And you’re right.

But what you need to remember is that the journey changes you.

The journey finds ways to turn you into what you need to be.

Which is why it’s important to ask yourself not only, What do I want out of life?

But also, Who do I want to become?

In that transformation – from who you are into who you need to be – you just might find the meaning of your life.

You can always fake it ‘til you make it. We have a funny way of growing into what we only think we’re pretending to be. Thought and feeling may generate behavior, but it turns out that behavior can generate thought and feeling.

As Michael Michalko observes:

Every time we pretend to have an attitude and go through the motions, we trigger the emotions we pretend to have and strengthen the attitude we wish to cultivate.

You can change the way you see yourself, and the way others see you, by your intention and by going through the motions.

Your pretense can change your psychology.

Growth can announce itself with little, seemingly superficial changes that audition a much larger change.

You can bring this about yourself: change your hair, change your dress. Fashion can serve as the thin end of a wedge that separates you from your past.

The makeover is a popular staple of television: when the woman (usually it’s a woman) changes her look, it’s understood that her life also changes. A new identity is cut and trimmed and styled into being. Growth happens from the outside in. And it’s not very threatening: if you don’t like it, you can always go back to your previous hair color.

But now that you look different, how are you received? Now that people receive you that way, who can you meet and what can you take part in? Now that you can engage with new people and events, how do you feel about the person you are becoming?

In his book TRANSFORMATIONS, Grant McCraken muses on how a generation forced the growth of an entire counterculture (bold italics are mine) :

They were growing their hair a little longer in the back, going to the occasional rally, listening to new music. And even as each of them was trying on novelty, the response of the world, and the meaning of the novelty, were changing. Working en masse, millions of Oscars created a more receptive, less risky environment for one another…[They] reset the tolerances and moved a culture toward change. The great change of the counter-culture came from millions of little gestures, tiny departures, modest risks brought together into a magnificent aggregate.

McCraken also writes about people he calls “playwrights” (we would call them “change agents”) who get “under” culture to rewrite its beliefs, its very rules of perception. He uses Ani DeFranco and the way she subverts traditionally feminine notions of delicacy and beauty as an example of someone who “is not only working on her persona, but on the culture that defines the persona.”

[Change agents] may be driven by inklings of cultural developments in the works, but they are traveling alone, driven by their own initiative and inclinations, haunted possibly by their own demons, writing from their own needs to their own specifications. Playwrights like DiFranco are inventing themselves, but in the culture of commotion their creations sometimes recruit avant-garde followers and even mainstream enthusiasts. From their efforts to invent themselves can come substantial changes in the global culture.

McCraken calls these followers and enthusiasts “off-Broadway players” who use the playwright’s work to “take their leave from the traditional order of things” and create lives according to the playwright’s innovations.

They “inhabit worlds that the playwright has opened up.”

The playwright becomes a light to steer by.

Her followers change their music, speech, clothing, residence and “invite and suffer the disapproval and sometimes the hostility, even violence, of the mainstream world.” But they are better protected than the playwright, because they travel in a group. They are not, as DiFranco is, reconstructing cultural categories and cultural rules. They grow and transform in ways that make them members of this group. (In contrast, the playwright stretches, grows and transforms to rebel against a group.)

McCracken observes:

Their collective effort, their community, can begin to move a culture’s center of gravity.

But this [change in the culture] is not the achievement of an individual. The off-Broadway player is engaged in a personal transformation. Only the playwright accomplishes cultural transformation.

DiFranco would be what Michael Michalko calls a “self-created individual”, who seems “more alive and creative than others.”

In the world of humanity, a person who is talking, walking and working can be alive and self-creating or lifeless and drab. This is something we all know, yet never talk about.

What makes some people seem especially alive and others seem lifeless and drab?

He compares these individuals to the emperor moth, with its wide and magnificent wingspan.

But first, the moth must be a pupa in a cocoon.

One day a small opening appears in the bottom and the moth struggles to force its body through it. The struggle takes hours. The moth often seems stuck.

But this struggle is how the pupa forces fluid from its body and into its wings; it prepares those wings for flight.

You could help the pupa by enlarging the hole with a knife or scissors so that the pupa simply slips out:

But it will have a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. In fact, the little moth will spend the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It will never fly.

In a novel, the antagonist serves a similar function. The antagonist is whoever or whatever traps, restricts, and opposes the protagonist; what the protagonist must struggle against to escape.

As Martha Alderson points out in her book THE PLOT WHISPERER:

External antagonists challenge [the protagonist] throughout the story and especially in the middle. They know how to push her, to ignite her flaws, to create gaps of imbalance, and become what she must overcome for ultimate success.

It’s the struggle that makes us strong, and readies us for flight.

It’s how you grow through and out of it – the meaning you make of it – that can not only shape yourself and your creative work (and your life) — but inspire others.

They see themselves in you and your struggle. Your meaning becomes their meaning.

They might seize on that meaning and create communities around it. They might even create a movement.

They might shift the center of the culture.

how to be creative

2012-02-11T17:14:12Z

Accept that you’ve got the creative urge and it’s never going to go away. Make friends with it. Drink some tequila if you need to.

Commit to the process. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Unless of course it was built by aliens. This is doubtful.

Engage! Things start out murky, but that’s ok. Creativity builds on itself, and clarity comes through engagement. Usually very slowly. So in the immortal words of the great George Michael, you gotta have faith, or at least act like you do.

There is a gap between where you are and where you want to be. The only way to get where you want to be is to close the gap, through practice and learning and practice and feedback and more practice. There are no shortcuts, unless of course they were built by aliens. This is doubtful.

You eat the elephant one mouthful at a time. I am speaking metaphorically here. You are not really eating an elephant. But the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, baby. It’s not like you can hop in a Porsche. (I mean, you can, but it won’t help you become a better artist.)

Creativity happens in the relationship between you and your medium, whether it’s the violin or writing or painting or puppetry or interpretive dance or start-ups or some combination thereof (interpretive dance puppetry, which I hear is wildly underrated). So you need to find your medium. Keep yourself open to new experiences and be willing to try new things, because your medium might surprise you when you’re least expecting it. It might fall on your head like a piano, for example (a cartoon piano, since a real piano would probably kill you dead, and this would be counterproductive).

Find your tribe. Find the people you want to be like and put yourself in the path of their direct influence. You have to see it to be it.

Avoid toxic people. They kill your creativity and your spirit. They also don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about and are generally just saying it to hurt you. But part of your brain might not realize this and accept what they say as gospel truth. Bad idea. So let them gently know where they can go (and I don’t mean to Canada).

Seek constructive feedback. Seek mentors and coaches. You don’t have to go it alone. You also don’t have to reinvent the wheel (of cheese) — unless you want to.

Master your tools. They amplify your voice and open new dimensions of possibility. They help you close the gap.

Master the difficult. Most people won’t bother.

Celebrate your progress, step by step by step. We need that sense of forward motion to stay motivated, and nobody else is likely to do it for you.

Embrace your limitations and constraints. Magic often happens when you’re bootstrapping it (or the creative equivalent) because then you’re forced to work over and around and beside things. You’re forced to solve problems in new and interesting ways. Formula inhibits creativity – but form releases it.

If you don’t have any limitations, make some up. Create a structure, a form, in which you must work.

Develop creative rituals. They help you transition from everyday thinking, which is not creative, to creative thinking, which, um, is. The more regular and practiced your rituals, the more ingrained in your brain, the faster and easier the transition.

Control your space. Block out interruptions. Take your work seriously enough to carve out an inspiring little environment for it.

Be imperfect. Allow for mistakes. Often the art grows from the mistakes.

Reframe failure. It’s just another form of data. Before you can get to what works, you have to go through the stuff that doesn’t work, and why. The faster you fail, the faster you can figure this out.

Go for bold heroic failures. Why the hell not?

Be solitary. You need that space and time for dreaming, and mulling things over, and connecting the dots, as well as the creative act itself. These things require deep concentration, which you will not get if someone keeps interrupting you to offer you almonds or ask to have sex with you or talk about Spongebob. (Why Spongebob? I don’t know. It just came to me.)

Be social. We need that thrum of energy, that cross-section of perspectives. Creative work happens in solitude, but creative idea-gathering tends to happen in the world.

Feed your head. Don’t leave inspiration to chance. Schedule it in. Establish a creative routine, then step outside of it. Mix it up on a regular basis. Seek out sources of influence. Force your brain to think in new ways. The brain is a lazy brain. It will go on automatic if you let it, so it can sit on the couch and drink a beer and watch some godawful reality TV show featuring annoying housewives.

Steal ideas from everywhere you can find them, and then recombine them in new and interesting ways. Take ideas from a field or discipline as far away from yours as possible, and then find ways to apply those ideas. People will think you’re a genius. Or nuts. Or nuts, and then a genius.

Create conversation. Look behind the conversation and examine the beliefs and assumptions that are framing the conversation. Challenge those assumptions.

Go where the conversation isn’t. What are people not talking about, that you think we need to be talking about? Bring that into your work.

Freewrite on any given problem that’s been bothering you. Give yourself twenty minutes and go. Magic stuff happens when you do this. It’s like you channel a completely different part of your brain. When you write stream of consciousness, thoughts lead to more thoughts lead to more of what you’re really thinking. You know more than you realize. So go ahead. Impress yourself.

Shift perspectives. Create a cast of characters and examine your work through their eyes. What would Steve Jobs tell you to do? David Bowie? Michael Cunningham? Your younger self? Your older, fabulously successful, world-famous self? Your objective self? Your emotional self? Your friendly animal totem self?

Develop your signature voice. Follow your obsessions and bring them into your work. Build on your strengths. Do more of what you love. Do more of what you know. Do more of what you do too much of.

Be a freak. Your kind of freak.

Be generous. Give work away. When you empty the box, your brain will refill it. There’s always something in the box.

Ask yourself lots and lots and lots of questions. Your mind will come up with answers.

Write stuff down. Keep an ideas journal, or a creativity journal, or just a list of stuff that comes to you. Otherwise your mind will think it has to keep hold of everything itself. Then it stresses out. So do a brain dump on a regular basis. Clear the space for the fresh and the new.

Love the world. ‘Cause love rules.

Be a maverick. Have some swagger. Own it and work it. Why the hell not?

the art of becoming a (badass creative) thought leader

2012-02-04T03:10:40Z

I used to watch Project Runway (back in the days when I still watched TV) and the judges would talk about whether or not the aspiring designers had a point of view.

At the time, I didn’t get it. How could something like clothing have a point of view? It was only when I realized that I was interested in style rather than fashion that I made the connection.

Great personal style is an expression of who you are, so distinct and singular that it might even make you an icon (Kate Moss). It becomes a statement of identity. You move beyond expressing yourself to ideas of the self, inspiring others to adopt those ideas to express that same sense of identity.

That same point-of-view.

We talk about voice a lot. So-and-so has a great voice. You need to find your voice. She needs to get her voice ‘out there’ (wherever ‘there’ is). The best writers have voices so distinct that you can not only recognize them at a thousand yards, you recognize pale imitations.

Voice is about style of expression, but it’s also about the ideas that shape that expression. Readers take that ‘voice’ and construct a sense of identity around it. When you think of Hemingway or Stephen King or Anne Lamott (or Picasso or Jackson Pollack or Mick Jagger or Adele or Donna Karan or Steve Jobs, to take examples from other creative fields) you get a sense of the person as well as the work. Because although the person isn’t the work, the work (at least of a matured artist) is the person: an identity expressed through a particular point of view.

(It’s why we flinch at criticism, or sabotage ourselves to avoid it altogether. We take an attack on our work as a direct attack on us, at least until we train ourselves to think differently.)

I like to say that “style is the story you tell about yourself to the world”. Your ‘voice’ also tells a story. And every great story has a strong point of view.

Global business guru Paul Arden talks about “the conventional or popular” point of view versus the “small or personal point of view.”

Advances in any field are built upon people with the small or personal point of view.

This is what we talk about when we talk about thought leadership, whether it’s art or literature or pop music or business or blogging. Arden points out that “having an original point of view or angle is a novelty.”

People are like sheep: they follow the leader. It is the leader who has a point of view about which way they should go….

Having the courage to stand up for it in the face of public opinion is what makes you a winner.

It’s why telling your story isn’t (just) an exercise in narcissism, but a political act. It’s the overriding point of view that shapes the culture. It not only sets policy but influences the way we talk and think about different groups of people as well as ourselves.

(For example, a woman who marries or divorces a wealthy man is assumed to be a golddigger long before the man is considered to be abusive or an addict or maybe just an asshole, to take the examples of ex-wives like Robin Givens and Denise Richards and how they were treated in the media before revelations of Mike Tyson and Charlie Sheen came to light years later. If this culture was told from a woman’s point of view, would the ‘golddigger’ story be the default cultural narrative, the kneejerk story that we like to tell? And what does that narrative say about the way we think about women? But I digress.)

A strong and original point of view is what sets you apart from the masses, which means in today’s overpopulated post-consumer marketplace, where anyone can upload and self-publish, it’s more important than ever to have one.

But if it’s to mean anything to anybody other than yourself (and your mom), it has to connect with an audience in a way that resonates: they have to see themselves in you. By aligning themselves with your set of ideas, they’re expressing a key part of their identity.

(I’m going to form a different impression of someone who dresses like Audrey Hepburn from someone who dresses like Lady Gaga, for example.)

Which goes back to the whole leadership thing.

It’s scary to lead. You are putting yourself out there. You are hanging part of your identity on the line. You become a target for all kinds of criticism.

There’s a theory that the fear of public speaking – the most common phobia out there – has its roots in the ancient survival instinct.

If you were out on the plains, and you felt eyes trained on you, chances were it was someone or something with hostile intentions: to kill you or eat you. It makes a lot of sense, according to that primitive part of the brain, to get the hell off the stage.

So how can you put yourself out there and keep those eyes trained on you in a way that your old brain can tolerate?

I think that’s where purpose comes in.

When you connect yourself to something bigger.

When you shift your focus from your self (and your own self-consciousness) to the ideal that you want to serve, and how you embody or manifest that ideal for other people. When you know what you represent. So when your wrong people attack you (and they will) you recognize that they are attacking what they think you stand for, not you personally; and you, in turn, are defending your ideas (or opting out of the argument altogether).

The challenge then becomes identifying what your purpose is, and understanding how it connects to other people.

Your purpose has to be authentic, so that it invokes your intensity and passion and stamina, and rings true to your natural audience. It has to run through the center of who you are. In that sense, you don’t choose your purpose; your purpose chooses you, and you don’t discover it so much as unearth it from your layers of personality and personal history.

(But more on that in a future post.)

I’m reading the book GROW by Jim Stengal, who examined how “ideals power growth and profit at the world’s greatest brands”. His study noted how the ideals that connect with people in a way that inspires fierce brand loyalty – and deep, engaged followings – are

grouped into five very rich and interesting fields…five fields of fundamental human values that improve people’s lives by:

Eliciting Joy: activating experiences of happiness, wonder, and limitless possibility.

Enabling Connection: enhancing the ability of people to connect with one another and the world in meaningful ways

Inspiring Exploration: helping people explore new horizons and new experiences

Evoking Pride: giving people increased confidence, strength, security and vitality

Impacting Society: affecting society broadly, including by challenging the status quo and redefining categories

I’m fascinated by how we can take this stuff from the business sphere and apply it to what we do, both in our creative work and the voice with which we ‘promote’ it through our ‘platform’ (I hate both those words).

If we can recognize our own specific point of view and the purpose that powers it (and motivates us in the first place).

If we can locate that purpose in one of the fields of “fundamental human values” mentioned above, and understand how that connects us to our right audience.

If we can take that set of ideas – and ideals – and create a ‘platform’ that actually means something, in a way that becomes an organic extension of the work itself.

Our platform, then, becomes a discussion of the ideas that inform our creative work, which can refine and deepen our own understanding of them – and make us better artists (and entrepreneurs). And our work – whether it’s a novel, an installation piece, or a company — becomes a way of illuminating those ideas/ideals through the emotional experience it creates for other people.

And we become thought leaders in the true sense of the phrase.

In my previous post about the power of introverts (inspired by Susan Cain’s book), I noted how our culture is a story told from an extroverted point of view.

Extroverts throw themselves into events; introverts throw themselves into the meaning-making of those events. It’s why so many introverts grow up to be creators of one kind or another, and so many extroverts go into sales or business (with its emphasis on constant networking).

My point isn’t that one is better than the other (we need both). But extroverts, by their very nature, tend to dominate the conversation (while introverts hang back, observe, and keep their own counsel). This leads to an increasingly lopsided perspective. I see this in social media as much as anything else.

Recently I was at a conference where I sat at a table with four other people. During a break in the seminar, three people started networking with each other while the (cute) guy beside me and I worked on our assignments. When he and I engaged in conversation, we went to the deep stuff – the ideas the seminar was presenting. Then we relaxed into the where-are-you-from and what-do-you-do kind of smalltalk.

Thinking about it afterwards – and having just read Cain’s book – I recognized that encounter as textbook introversion. Cain makes the point that the ‘small talk’ so many introverts claim to hate is an important form of social glue. It allows us to connect with one another. But whereas extroverts tend to open with small talk, and use it to bond with each other — and then move to the deep stuff — introverts do the opposite. Introverts prefer to open with ideas. And then they move to the smalltalk.

Cain also mentions that one out of every three or four people is an introvert, as seemed to be the case at my conference table. Despite the stereotypes (often created by extroverts), you wouldn’t recognize us just by looking. We can present ourselves well and add to the conversation. It was actions rather than appearance that suggested introversion.

So my point is this:

There’s a significant part of the population that bonds over ideas. Because they’re the quiet sort (and the extroverts are not), this might not be readily apparent. Social media may seem to be ruled by small talk, chitchat, nonsense chatter – but your corner of it doesn’t have to be. Like your creative work, it can express a strong and purposeful point of view that connects to the value system of other people like you.

And they will be so glad to find you.

If you’re willing to put yourself out there.

I hope from the bottom of my heart that you do.

The world needs your story (even if it doesn’t know it).

And some of us – maybe a lot of us – need you to lead us.

We’re waiting.

cool creatives from around the web

2012-02-16T03:16:14Z

Here’s some people who intrigue and inspire me. They might do the same for you.

Natasha Wescoat

Natasha’s bio describes her as a “self-taught artist who is a force of nature” and I believe it. She’s a savvy artist-entrepreneur I discovered when I was just becoming interested in artist-entrepreneurs.

She not only cut out the middleman and seized control of her destiny, she takes out the elitist vibe that so often infuses the very idea of Art by offering her work at warm, friendly, accessible prices. She reminds me a little of the innovative art dealer Edith Gregor Halpert, subject of the bio THE GIRL WITH THE GALLERY, who believed in art for the people (and was herself a force of nature).

I bought a piece from Natasha as a gift for one of my closest friends after she had her first baby, and it’s possibly my favorite gift I’ve ever given. I like her art – it’s kind of got this dreamy pop art deco primitive surrealist thing going on, if you know what I mean (and if you don’t, that’s okay, because I’m not sure I do either).

And I like her, even though I don’t know her and have met her only passingly at a tech thing in LA. I just bought this piece for myself, titled VIRGO, from her Sirens series, because I am one (a Virgo, not a Siren, although sometimes I do try).

Electric Literature

This literary journal is the bomb. And I love their website because it’s fun (‘cause, you know, ‘fun’ and ‘literary journal’ are so often used in the same sentence). They have animations. They have Youtube videos involving gunplay (“Let’s shoot some books.”) They have a blog featuring lines like

It was a reading, a listening, a cartoon-watching event rolled up into one uber-intimate media presentation that made a few people tear up.

These people are smart, literary and cheeky.

I like that.

The Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing on Rainbows Guy

I don’t know who this dude is. I’m not sure I want to know. Some mysterious force compels me to post this here.

See if you can decipher these complex and challenging lyrics.

Kristin McCloy

True story. Many, many years ago – I do not wish to say how many – I read a book called VELOCITY, in which a young woman grieves the loss of her mother and takes up with a biker named Jesse who is not, shall we say, husband material.

I loved this book. I wanted to write one just like it. The sex scenes are elegant and awesome. Then, somehow I lost the novel – and I mean truly lost it – I couldn’t remember the author’s name and couldn’t track it down.

Now and again over the years, I would remember the book and take to the Internet and again fail to find it, until I wondered if I was remembering the title correctly.

Then, only recently, a stranger left a comment on my blog in which she casually mentioned that, many years ago, she came out with this book called VELOCITY. And btw, she’s a fan of the blog. I promptly emailed her because how cool is that? I acquired a used hardcover copy of the stupidly out-of-print VELOCITY and bought her other two books as well (SOME GIRLS and HOLLYWOOD SAVAGE).

So there’s a lesson here, people. I may not know what it is, exactly, but somewhere in here there’s a lesson.

nerve.com

I enjoy Nerve.com — “the center of the Internet for sex, love and culture” — partly because they run pieces like The Third Annual Nerve Awards for Love & Sex on Film. Love and sex and movies. It’s kind of like a holy trinity. Throw in some Belgian chocolate and you’re good.

Abby Kerr and Tara Mohr

There’s a rising wave of smart young online female entrepreneurs, and one of the smartest is ‘brand editor’ Abby Kerr. I discovered Abby’s work through a Google group – her ‘this is what you get when you give me your email address’ newsletter series on niche branding is well-informed and well-written. When I noticed that she was retweeting my blog posts, we made contact.

Tara Sophia Mohr is a poet and Huffington Post blogger who coaches women on how to play big. I like that. She did the talk show circuit when one of her posts – 10 Rules for Brilliant Women, in which she urges women to “clear a path by walking it, boldly” – went viral. In her bio she writes this:

When I was fourteen years old, I listened to my high school English teacher explain that our class would read a variety of books centered around the theme “Coming of Age.” The teacher passed out a list of the books we would read over the course of the year: Black Boy, A Separate Peace, Lord of the Flies, and others.

I looked at the list and saw: all the books were about boys coming of age. All were written by men. I knew, from my own experience, that the story of girls coming of age was very different from that of boys. I understood we’d only be learning only half the story of “coming of age” if we only read books by men and about boys….

…I [am] following a calling that continues to be at the heart of my work: to restore women’s voices where they are missing, to amplify women’s impact in the world – both for the wellbeing of women and for the wellbeing of our civilization.

I like that too. I’ve been following Tara for a while now, and so when she showed up on Abby Kerr’s blog so Abby could interview her about ‘voice’ – well, hey, two for the price of one. Except it’s free. Very cool.

Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler, author of THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES isn’t afraid of saying the words that you’re not supposed to say in polite company – or, really, at all. Well, fuck that. Having spoken with women all over the world, having created a rehabilitative and educational community in the Congo for female survivors of the worst sexual violence that you can (not) imagine – at a time when no one wanted to speak words like Congo or rape – Eve writes one of the most powerful blog posts I’ve ever encountered, called ‘Over It’. And she uses the word rape. Repeatedly.

….I am over women still being silent about rape, because they are made to believe it’s their fault or they did something to make it happen.

I am over violence against women not being a #1 international priority when one out of three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime — the destruction and muting and undermining of women is the destruction of life itself.

No women, no future, duh.

I am over this rape culture where the privileged with political and physical and economic might, take what and who they want, when they want it, as much as they want, any time they want it.

I am over the endless resurrection of the careers of rapists and sexual exploiters — film directors, world leaders, corporate executives, movie stars, athletes — while the lives of the women they violated are permanently destroyed, often forcing them to live in social and emotional exile.

I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?

You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?

I am over years and years of being over rape.

Susannah Conway

If you want to learn how to take cool photographs – so you can use them in your blog, for example – you could do a lot worse than Susannah Conway’s ‘photo meditations’ online course. I’d been eying it – and Susannah’s blog – for months before I finally jumped in.

My favorite part is when Susannah takes us through a weekly slideshow in which she analyzes the photographs that she likes and teaches us why she likes them. She knows her stuff, plus she has that cool British accent that conveys added authority (why is that?).

Susannah interviewed me for her ‘How I Write’ series, in which I followed the formidable Danielle LaPorte. Since I’m a fangirl of Danielle – her blog was one of the blogs that showed me a way in to blogging – I was, shall we say, pleased.

And finally, I liked Caitlin Flanagan’s piece on Joan Didion that ran in The Atlantic. I have started to suspect that I like reading about Joan Didion more than I like reading Didion herself, and Flanagan has done nothing to disabuse me of this notion:

Women who encountered Joan Didion when they were young received from her a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them. She was our Hunter Thompson, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem was our Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He gave the boys twisted pig-fuckers and quarts of tequila; she gave us quiet days in Malibu and flowers in our hair. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” Thompson wrote. “All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better,” Didion wrote. To not understand the way that those two statements would reverberate in the minds of, respectively, young men and young women is to not know very much at all about those types of creatures. Thompson’s work was illustrated by Ralph Steadman’s grotesque ink blots, and early Didion by the ravishing photographs of the mysterious girl-woman: sitting barelegged on a stone balustrade; posing behind the wheel of her yellow Corvette; wearing an elegant silk gown and staring off into space, all alone in a chic living room.

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has.

I love that line “….a way of being female and being writers that no one else could give them.”

It makes me think of Muriel Rukeyser’s line: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”

Yes, please. More of that.

the art of being an introvert creative (forced to cope with social media)

2012-01-31T00:57:02Z

I’m giving a workshop on blogging/social media at the Southern California Writer’s Conference in San Diego in February.

I asked people on Facebook if there were particular questions that I should address.

Canadian novelist Adrian Kelly made this point:

….I’d like to hear less about the end of the book, and more about how we still need to make room for the book, for deep, attentive reading and writing, even as we explore the benefits of blogging and social media. Good writing, good reading, takes time and silence and solitude, three things that blogging and social media, used injudiciously, erode.

My first response was, I always take this as a given. And because we tend to project ourselves on the world – we think that other people think like we do (except, of course, when they don’t, which can be so annoying) – I assumed that other people did as well.

Meanwhile, over on his wildly popular blog, Chris Brogan ran a post called 97 Ideas for Building a Valuable Platform in which he urged people to “keep everything brief” because

We are in a consumption society. People can barely read a tweet.

Well.

I can read a tweet, and I sure as hell know that you can. But Brogan is playing into this extremely familiar idea that we live in an ADD culture, chasing after shiny objects, constantly on the move, so keep your content bite-sized. People can’t pay attention.

Chris Brogan, whom I would tag as an extrovert, and Adrian Kelly, whom I would not, seem to live in different worlds.

(I just flashed on an image of a Brogan vs Kelly smackdown, but no matter.)

Here’s the thing. I do have ADD – I was diagnosed with it as an adult – and I am very capable of long, sustained attention when I am interested in the matter at hand. (ADD isn’t about a failure of attention so much as a failure to modulate it appropriately, which means I’m just as likely to hyper-focus on my Kindle as I am to forget my car keys. Or my car.)

It’s true that I don’t finish reading a lot of the stuff that I start, especially online. I am distractible. But maybe that’s not because of some basic inability. Maybe that’s because a lot of stuff is crap, or starts out strong and then turns into crap. Maybe it loses my attention because it’s no longer worth my attention, which is limited and valuable and, like a flashlight, can only shine in one direction at a time.

Maybe I’m not the only one who feels this way.

What keeps my attention is this:

Meaning.

For all the stuff that flies at us in the course of any given day, all the messages and TV shows and blog posts and movies and news and ads and commercials and Oscar announcements, how much of it is stuff we truly care about? How much of it actually means something?

Not enough.

This, according to author and game designer Jane McGonigal, is why “ reality is trivial” – at least compared with the high stakes, feedback loops and epic questing of computer games. My seven year old son can barely get through his ten minutes of math homework, but if I let him he can sit cross-legged on the floor and play a newly downloaded game on my Asus Transformer for hours.

Jane writes in her book REALITY IS BROKEN (bold italics are mine):

Games make us a part of something bigger and give epic meaning to our actions.

She stresses the word epic, defining it as something “that far surpasses the ordinary, especially in size, scale and intensity.” Epic is awe-inspiring, and awe, according to neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall, is “the orgasm of positive emotions.”

Jane writes:

Awe is what we feel when we recognize that we’re in the presence of something bigger than otherselves. It’s closely linked with feelings of spirituality, love, and gratitude – and, more importantly, a desire to serve…

And then she quotes Dacher Keltner, who wrote the book BORN TO BE GOOD:

…It is about finding your place in the larger scheme of things. It is about quieting the press of self-interest. It is about folding into social collectives. It is about feeling reverential toward participating in some expansive process that unites us all and that enobles our life’s endeavors.

(Awe makes us feel good. It also inspires us to do good. That’s cool.)

Our ability to feel awe in the form of chills, goose bumps, or choking up serves as a kind of emotional radar for detecting meaningful activity. Whenever we feel awe, we know we’ve found a potential source of meaning. We’ve discovered a real opportunity to be of service, to band together, to contribute to a larger cause.

In short, awe is a call to collective action.

Jane believes that if we can design our reality like we design our games – including “to always connect the individual to something bigger” – the depth and quality of our collective attention will expand accordingly.

Which reminds me of a study that agent Donald Maass refers to in a post on Writer Unboxed, in which researchers studied the articles in the New York Times that people emailed the most. In other words, they were looking for the quality that inspires word-of-mouth.

Their conclusion?

A feeling of awe.

Notes Maass:

These researchers defined awe as an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.” Stories that inspire awe have two important dimensions: 1) Their scale is large, and 2) they require of readers “mental accommodation”, meaning they force the reader to view the world in a different way.

Show me a tweet that can do that, and I’ll show you an attentive reader.

Perhaps the problem isn’t (just) that we live in what Brogan calls a ‘consumption culture’. American culture is an extremely extroverted culture. In her book QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS, Susan Cain discusses how introverts and extroverts

…work differently. Extroverts tend to tackle assignments quickly. They make fast (sometimes rash) decisions, and are comfortable multitasking and risk-taking. They enjoy “the thrill of the chase” for rewards like money and status.

Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They are

…drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling…extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves.

Cain observes what she calls the “rise of the extrovert ideal”, which started with the Industrial Age and the migration to the cities. Cut off from the traditional networks of family and community, people had to differentiate themselves from the masses and win the trust and admiration of others through the force of their personal charisma. This created the Culture of Personality:

The new economy called for a new kind of man – a salesman, a social operator, someone with a ready smile, a masterful handshake, and the ability to get along with colleagues while simultaneously outshining them.

Today, we find ourselves in yet another new economy – call it the new new economy – where we have to create not just a personality but a charismatic personal brand. We have to hustle, promote ourselves, get our voices heard (whether or not we have anything to say), become an expert, join Toastmasters, and become productivity ninjas so we can (maybe) also have a life. We have to be go-getters who are GETTING THINGS DONE. We must AWAKEN THE GIANT WITHIN. We have to be master networkers who NEVER EAT LUNCH ALONE. We have to build platforms. We have to Be Remarkable.

Etcetera.

In short, we have to be extroverts. And if we’re not extroverts, we have to learn to pass as extroverts, at least convincingly enough so that we won’t be regarded as weird or anti-social or “too much in our heads”. (God forbid that you be, you know, an intellectual.) We also have to pretend that many of the real extroverts, as they dominate the conversation and confidently hold forth with their faulty opinions, who will talk without thinking and rarely think to listen, don’t annoy us.

But if we’re all extroverts – if we’re all rushing into events without carving out the time and silence and solitude required to connect them, and ourselves, to a sense of meaning, much less epic meaning – who is left, then, to make that meaning for us?

Science journalist Winifred Gallagher writes:

The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither the theory of relativity nor Paradise Lost was dashed off by a party animal.

(Nothing against party animals.)

The creation of meaning requires contemplation and reflection. It requires an observing, a listening, a curious and thoughtful gathering of ideas, and time for those materials to incubate in the mind before they synthesize into something new.

Time and solitude and silence.

But we have no time. We’re so interconnected through all our devices that genuine solitude is difficult to come by. And silence, in this culture, is often linked with powerlessness. It’s the person who talks the best game who is generally perceived to be the master of it – whether or not that is actually true (and many studies show that it isn’t.)

I find it rather ironic that such an extroverted culture is now exhorting the values of creativity and creative insight. Now, we don’t just talk about leadership; we talk about thought leadership. But the raw work of thinking, in this action-oriented culture, has generally belonged to the introverts. As children, they were often accused of thinking too much, or being too serious, or being bookworms or study grinds or geeks. Traits that were not exactly celebrated.

After all, people can barely read a tweet.

Except I don’t believe this, and never have. As Susan Cain points out, one out of every two or three people you know – is an introvert. If that surprises you, it might be because so many introverts have grown up learning to imitate something that they’re not, feeling pressured to manufacture a kind of rah-rah version of the self. “Some,” Cain remarks, “fool even themselves.”

And because introverts aren’t angling to dominate the conversation, because oftentimes we’d rather stay at home with a good book, the benefits of introversion get increasingly eclipsed by a story of culture as told by the extroverts (in which creativity is deemed the product of collaboration and groupthink and wildly sociable office environments).

But if we lose sight of what introversion can offer us, we stand to lose its considerable gifts.

Janet Farrall and Louise Kronberg note in Leadership Development for the Gifted and Talented:

While extroverts tend to attain leadership in public domains, introverts tend to attain leadership in theoretical and aesthetic fields. Outstanding introverted leaders, such as Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Patrick White and Arthur Boyd, who have created either new fields of thought or rearranged existing knowledge, have spent long periods of their lives in solitude. Hence leadership does not only apply in social situations, but also occurs in more solitary situations such as developing new techniques in the arts, creating new philosophies, writing profound books and making scientific breakthroughs.

Which reminds me of something my friend Jeremy Lee James recently said to me: “Writers are leaders.”

And it occurs to me that the people teaching us how to “use” social media tend to be business-oriented, or in marketing or PR. Fields which are known for “the extrovert ideal”. So the social part of social media gets emphasized; social media becomes a vehicle for networking and “relationship marketing”.

These things are valuable, no question. But what if writers and artists and other types of highly sensitive, creative people, the kind who do their best work alone (thank you very much), could reframe their use of social media in a way that promotes an introvert ideal?

If we could use social media to support the book, to make room for the book, and then guide our right people to that very room?

Cain notes that

Religious leaders from Jesus to Buddha, as well as the lesser-known saints, monks, shamans and prophets, have always gone off alone to experience the revelations they later shared with the rest of us.

Your typical writer may not be Jesus or Buddha, but it’s true that epic meaning generally isn’t found in a Facebook status update. Instead of allowing social media to erode away at our “deep, attentive reading and writing”, our “time and silence and solitude”, we should find our own rhythm of movement between working in silence and voicing the gifts that silence has brought us.

After a few sessions of an online photography course, I noticed a change in the way I perceive space. I became fascinated with negative space, how it defines the objects in the picture and presents them for contemplation. I even started visualizing my To-Do tasks this way. I see the task surrounded by the mental equivalent of negative space. This allows my ADD mind to settle and focus, instead of getting overwhelmed by everything else that is yammering at me.

When composing a scene for a shot, I focus on what to take out before I do anything else.

This seems a good way to approach the noisy tumble of social media.

If we can come to it with intention and purpose.

If we can use an introvert’s quiet strength to carve out negative space and block out the chattering static.

If we can say what we want to say and create what we need to create.

It could turn into something epic.

why Pinterest is totally not a waste of time: creating a visionboard for your creative project ( + why it’s helpful)

2012-01-27T02:49:52Z

I joined Pinterest for one major reason. I am returning to my novel-in-progress THE DECADENTS after a couple months’ break from it and wanted to create a digital visionboard to help drive it to completion.

This book has been tricky for me because it deals with some challenging subject matter. It’s also drawing on some raw life material from my years in LA which (it turns out) I’m still processing.

It’s a big departure from my three previously published novels, which I regard as the work of a much younger writer: someone who was still finding her way to her true voice, who hadn’t yet realized the Big Themes of her life – and thus her fiction. I’m not the same person I was back then, and I’m not the same writer. (I like to think I’ve deepened with age.) I’ve also lost a lot of illusions, which means that the personal world I am writing both from and about is very different. And some of those changes, I realize now, still had to settle into me before I was equipped to write the novel that I need to write.

But I digress. (Clears throat.) So.

Pinterest.

Visionboard.

Yeah.

I’ve always – always – written to music, and I create playlists for each novel (and for some of the characters) to serve as a private soundtrack. My brain learns to associate certain songs with a certain kind of fiction writing – neurons that fire together, wire together – so when I sit at my desk and start up iTunes on my Mac, my brain realizes it’s Bidness Time and shifts into the required state. (This is why creative rituals can be so effective – once they’re ingrained, they can shortcut you into productivity. )

Not to mention — music inspires, even without the power of ritual.

Music gets you in the mood.

So why not do this visually?

Marketers have realized that the more senses a brand can evoke, the more powerful the connection it can form with the consumer. It makes sense to apply this to the creative process. The more senses you engage as you bring your work into being, the more vivid and committed the relationship you form with it – which ends up creating a more powerful experience for your audience.

In his book BLAH BLAH BLAH: WHAT TO DO WHEN WORDS DON’T WORK, Dan Roam compares our visual and verbal minds.

Our visual mind, he says, is a hummingbird.

Our verbal mind is a fox. (How cute.)

The fox is:

Linear
Analytical
Patient
Clever
(A little smug)

The fox “advances step by step with laser-like focus.” He shifts as he needs to but keeps his eyes straight ahead. He “tests the wind, calculates distance and velocities, and, at the precise moment…he strikes!”

And then he’s very impressed with himself.

The hummingbird is:

Spatial
Spontaneous
Synthesizing
(flighty and easily distracted)

The hummingbird “sees clearly in all directions at all times…She sees her environment as a three-dimensional space with food potential everywhere; she can fly backward (and even upside down) to get to the nearest flower.” She’s so speedy that she doesn’t have to get from point to logical point like the fox; she just appears where she wants to be. And she synthesizes: “touching and seeing everything, she builds a complete model of the forest in her mind.”

And then she wonders where she put her keys.

The verbal mind is the “piece-by-piece” fox mind. The visual mind is the “all at once” hummingbird mind. The fox is the trees; the hummingbird is the forest.

I wanted, in writing my novel, a little less fox and a little more hummingbird. I felt like I was losing the forest for the trees, and getting trapped in thickets. Which is one reason I decided to cultivate the visual side of my brain.

By creating a visionboard, I am ‘telling’ the story of my novel….all at once. I can get a kind of deep visceral feeling for how the different parts relate to each other, and flash on some new insights as a bonus.

A visionboard acts as a creative trigger in other ways as well:

a) It sends you on a hunt for appropriate images. Since images, like music, evoke mood and feeling, you not only have to think about the look of your novel, but how it should make you feel.

(When I come across images that I like, and want to keep, but that don’t feel right for my visionboard, I use the ‘like’ button to tag them and store them away for whatever.)

Which means you define the general aesthetic of your novel by what you reject as much as — if not more than — what you select. As I do this, my vision for the novel assumes greater depth and clarity.

And for any vision to be compelling, it needs to be clear. A strong, clear vision that resonates with you emotionally can act like a kind of motivational tractor beam. It pulls you along. It pulls you in. Which means you’re more likely to achieve your goal – or finish the novel.

b) As you search out images, you are also feeding your head.

There’s a great quote by Gertrude Stein: Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

When you open yourself up to different kinds of influence, you are priming your creative pump. The mind is a restless, pattern-making machine: and, like a shark, it must be constantly on the move. Which means it’s constantly digesting what you feed it: seeking out new connections and relationships that incorporate this new material into whatever pre-existing scheme you might be working with.

So by discovering images that symbolize your old ideas….you’ll also find images that help you produce new ideas (or tweak the old ones in new ways).

c) Like any other form of social media, Pinterest can be addictive. But if used with intention and timing, it can also help your writing because of how it allows you to take a break from it.

Thoughts create neural pathways in the brain. When those thoughts repeat, those pathways deepen. We get blocked in our creative work when we get trapped in the same loops of thinking and cut ourselves off from the kind of stimulation that can trigger new ideas (see above).

In the book THE BREAKOUT PRINCIPLE, Harvard professor Herbert Benson refers to
“a powerful mind-body impulse that severs prior mental patterns and…opens an inner door to a host of personal benefits”

including an increase in creative insight.

In sum, the way to achieve this is by working a problem as hard as you can until you hit that inner wall and cannot get beyond it. Then you remove yourself to a completely different activity that lulls you into a kind of trance. Random thoughts might drift through your mind….and then, without warning, some kind of solution bursts forth.

(Benson talks about “the relaxation response, which measured cardiovascular and respiratory responses”, etc., and how the science of that underpins the breakout principle, but excuse me if I don’t get into all that. I’m going for the really general gist of it.)

Switching from your writing to Pinterest can also serve to switch off those repeating thought-loops that weren’t getting you anywhere. By immersing yourself in a different activity – one which allows your mind to relax and roam – you’re setting yourself up to kick some more creative ass.

As always, intention is important. Stating your intention at the beginning of any endeavor sends a signal to your unconscious mind to bring certain things to your attention while ignoring what’s not relevant.

To that end, you could create a “vision statement” for your board – and your novel – that keeps you focused and on track. You could come up with what Joyce Schwarz in her book THE VISION BOARD refers to as a “power word” that serves a both a “vision statement and defining image” for what you want your board to accomplish. It could be a word or words that states the general theme of your project, or the end result you want to create, or a feeling you want to invoke in the audience, or…anything, really.

After all, it’s your visionboard.

Do you work with visionboards? Do you have any thoughts on them or experiences to share in the comments below?

If you’re on Pinterest, and especially if you’re creating a visionboard of your own, look for me.

Maybe we can inspire each other.

how to become your own rebellion

2012-01-19T03:16:32Z

“I became my own rebellion,” writes Twyla Tharp in her book THE CREATIVE HABIT, and I have loved that phrase ever since I came across it a handful of years ago.

She was talking about her decision to become a dancer/choreographer: generally not a choice of profession that fills parents with glee. She goes on to say:

Going with your head makes it arbitrary. Going with your gut means you have no choice. It’s inevitable, which is why I have no regrets.

I was in my early thirties when I read this and realized that I, too, wanted to become my own rebellion.

Even if I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant.

I’m reminded of a conversation with an older, worldly friend shortly after my ex-husband filed for divorce. I was at the beginning of what we both knew would be a volatile transition.

My friend said, and I will always remember this: “You’re going to think and feel your way forward.”

She was telling me to listen to my gut. To take each day as it came and let my intuition lead me, like an unseen hand guiding me through a maze lined with thorns. The problem was, I had become disconnected from that sense of inner knowing. I was constantly questioning and second-guessing myself. I had spent too much time listening to certain people tell me what was wrong with me and invested too much authority in their opinions. Whenever my inner voice rose up to suggest a different perspective, I would discount it and switch it off.

This happens to so many of us. As kids, growing up, we learn strategies for getting the attention and the love that we need to survive. So often our strategies involve emphasizing this part of our personality while banishing that part into the shadows. Certain adults hold a godlike power over us, and they define our reality. If they say one thing – but on a gut level we know something else to be true – we’ll tell that inner voice to shut up. We’ll send it packing. It’s easier and safer that way. Who are we to challenge a freaking god?

As a child, this is basic survival.

As an adult, this turns into something else, called denial.

If you’re raised to be a nice girl, or boy, you learn to be polite and respectful and fair instead of being honest with yourself: you’ll override your intuition when it seems inconsiderate. Better to try and see things from the other person’s perspective and find ways to excuse his (or her) behaviour, even when that inner voice is telling you to get the fuck away.

It doesn’t help that for so long our culture has derided emotion and intuition. If someone calls you emotional, they generally don’t mean it as a compliment; and often words like ‘hysterical’ and ‘crazy’ aren’t far behind. Intuition, meanwhile, gets lumped in with New Age notions of being psychic. Both ‘emotional’ and ‘intuitive’ are regarded as feminine traits. To grow up in this culture means to absorb lots of big and little, covert and overt, conscious and unconscious messages that feminine equals weak and inferior — so much so that many women will scorn so-called feminine things in order to imply that no, they do not belong to that club.

But as it turns out, emotions don’t interfere with rationality — they enable it. It’s people who don’t have emotions (at least as we understand them) who make decisions that strike other people as irrational. When our brain creates memories, it lays down both the memory of the event and the way the event made us feel. Our brain’s biggest priority is physical survival. It uses memory as a kind of GPS, guiding us away from potential danger and pain (like being eaten) and toward safety and pleasure (like not being eaten).

Emotion and reason work together to help us determine what is happening, what that means to us, and what kind of outcome we would like to make happen.

When we do a gut check, or rely on so-called ‘female’ intuition, we are accessing a powerful form of nonverbal intelligence. Our subconscious is constantly absorbing the million little bits of information that bombard our senses at any given time and processing, processing, processing. Because it is not hooked up to the verbal part of our brain, intuition operates outside of language, communicating with us through symbol, hunches, dreams – and feelings.

To ignore what you feel is to shut down a big part of your brain, which makes it a lot easier for the world to take advantage of you. You have to rely on what other people tell you is true. You take what they say at face value, since you have no way of sensing what’s going on beneath their words.

This is what it means to be gullible.

Recently I read a book called THE VIRGIN’S PROMISE, which looked at the female archetypal equivalent of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. (Keep in mind that both the ‘virgin’ and the ‘hero’ can be of either sex.) The Virgin’s quest is to resist the urge to conform to the values and standards set by others that conflict with her true self:

The Virgin takes on the task of claiming her personal authority, even against the wishes of others. A big part of her story therefore is how she is viewed by society. Initially she is a valued commodity for being pure, untouched, good, kind, nice, compliant, agreeable, or helpful. She carries the hope for continuation of the virtues of a society. Through her journey she learns to redefine her values and bring her true self into being.

Because she is the “continuation of the virtues of a society”, by redefining those virtues she works to redefine society itself. She asserts herself against the status quo. She becomes a cultural activist. Instead of living out the life that others have handed to her, and would dictate, she creates it by connecting with her true self and finding effective ways to manifest that self in the world. And since truth has a way of resonating with others, her actions ripple outward to alter the world around her.

Instead of trimming and chopping and editing her personality to fit herself to her environment, she forces the environment to fit itself to her.

There is always some kind of price for this. A quest would not be a quest if there weren’t any dragons to slay (which is a slightly more poetic way of saying hey, if it was easy, everybody would do it).

When you become your own rebellion, you establish psychological independence.

Going with your head makes it arbitrary, Twyla writes. That’s because our conscious mind is the ultimate spin doctor. It deals in language and narrative. Language is not reality, but our best attempt to explain reality. We can edit it any way we want in order to rationalize or justify ourselves (otherwise known as “confirmation bias”). We put a certain spin on things. Or we allow other people to spin them for us, and absorb those distortions as truths.

But when you go deeper inside yourself, you move beyond words. Your body has its own language. It’s interesting that when we refer to a person’s authenticity or sincerity, we talk about who they are in their heart or at their core: words that locate the ‘self’ in the body. You may spin a decision however you want, but it either feels good — or not. It makes you feel light – or the opposite. It might even make you feel ill.

But it is what it is, and it can’t be argued with. Your truth is truth. You can move toward it, or let your head lead you away. But you can’t change its essential message — or the fact that it knows what you need better than you do (especially when what you need isn’t exactly what you want. )

Twyla chose the hard, uncertain life of a dancer. It was not the rational choice to make. It’s hell on the body, and poorly paid, and a difficult art to preserve (if the dancer is the dance, then the dance disappears with the dancer). I admire her for her discipline – dancers are the most disciplined people I know – and her sense of self that manifested at such a young age.

And now, when change is happening so rapidly in our world, when the old models no longer work and we’re forced to improvise new ones, it’s more essential than ever that we take the time to turn inward. We need to think and feel our way forward. Otherwise we’ll be lost.

I suspect that becoming your own rebellion isn’t something that happens only once. It’s a choice you make every time your quest offers up another dragon. You can always run away. Except when you know you’re on your true path, your only real option is to slay it.

Which is why you’ll have no regrets.

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