I remember times while growing up when I’d ask my Mom if I could get a certain hairstyle or buy a certain type of clothes so that I could be more like the other kids in my classes.  

I also vividly remember my Mom’s response going something like this:  “Why, do you want to look like everyone else?”

I also remember desperately wanting to reply, that: “Yes, I’d love to fit in and to look like everyone else.” 

Strangely, as an adult (and quite similar to what most small business advice also suggests), I find that my response has clearly changed.  Now the desire, and the advice, is to find ways to stand out and be unique and to stand for something in a way that differentiates ourselves from everyone else.

Now the stakes seem so much higher, and more maturely, it is no longer about simply being noticed in superficially physical ways, but instead to stand out in “human” ways.

As inspired by “Personal Storytelling” exercises shared by Michael Margolis of GetStoried.com at a recent BlogWorldExpo workshop, I came to a realization that I thought would be worthwhile to share here. 

One exercise went something like this:  if I were given 90 seconds on a stage to say whatever I wanted, to send out one message that I believe was most important for the world to hear, and to say it in a way that showed why I cared about what I cared about in a way that would get others to care about it as well, what would I say?

While I strongly feel the need to be heard, to have a voice, I had to admit to myself that I also knew that if I were to be given my 90 seconds now, I would blow it and completely freeze.  And, I wouldn’t freeze because of stage fright.   

It would be that I have not yet formulated just one message to share with the world, at least not as a honed down, cleanly formulated, version of all the thoughts and feelings that seem to find themselves pushing for an outlet of expression.

At the same time, suprisingly, I’ve also found some peace believing that this is an okay place for me to be right now.  Letting those thoughts and feelings percolate and find their way to the surface so that they can find their way out in a meaningful way may just be what the journey is about for me.  Maybe that is my version of the age-old question: “What is the meaning of life?”… something that I started writing about in my recent “Finding Purpose” series.

I’m starting to realize that just because I don’t have that one message (yet), that doesn’t mean that there isn’t one there lurking somewhere just below the surface.    

Maybe that’s one reason why so many people have that unwritten book that they keep carrying around in their heads.  Perhaps this is not an uncommon human yearning or at least one that anyone who identifies themselves as being or wanting to be a writer can relate to. 

Strangely, the answer doesn’t seem to be to wait with writing, but instead to write in spite of that not knowing (yet) … to let those words have their opportunity to come together … to create that something out of nothing.

As an artist, just because you can’t reach something or don’t see something (yet), that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.  I’d say, keep reaching.  I know I will.

Can you relate? Have you had similar thoughts or yearnings?  I’d love to read your thoughts on this.  Feel free to share below.  And, thank you for stopping by. 

At the recent Inbound Marketing Summit 2011 in Boston, I was impressed to hear the behind-the-scenes stories of author, Ben Mezrich, who is known for creating his own genre of nonfiction.  (Sidebar: other highlights from #IMS2011 were recorded by the Pulse Network.)

As a quick background for anyone who may not know Ben Mezrich, he is known for writing the true-to-life stories behind the MIT blackjack team and the rise of Facebook, The Social Network, i.e., stories, which his website describes as “chronicling the amazing stories of young geniuses making tons of money on the edge of impossibility, ethics, and morality.”  

About  his writing style: 

He explained how he uses the Method form of writing, which I never heard of for writing before.  It is, like in acting, where you “live it…and writing it is like re-living it.”

Among the many stories and learnings Ben shared (and, boy, can he talk, a mile a minute, though riveting all he way), I was most inspired by advice he gave on being confident in your writing. 

For anyone struggling to find their voice in writing, see if this advice rings true for you:

Inspiration for Writers:

To paraphrase, Ben shared:  “..it is okay to be really insecure everywhere else in your life, but as a writer, you need to really believe in your writing.”

But, like the saying goes…I believe he said this saying was from the movie Terminator, but since I never saw the movie and couldn’t find a direct quote in Google, I’ll just get to the essence of it…he goes on to state something like this:

“Write as if writing is ‘all you are and what you do’…feel strongly about what you do because it comes through in your writing.”  

Here is a quote most similar to the essence of what I believe he was trying to say:

“Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.” ~John Jakes quote.

Simple advice.  Maybe easier said that done. 

I can relate to how putting yourself out there is a scary thing to do, but I can see how it has worked for Ben.  He recounted collecting endless copies of rejection letters along the way.  But by keeping on doing what he does, he eventually found his place — an interesting example to follow.

Whose example of confidence do you follow?

Self expression isn’t always easy.  Maybe that’s why I admire those who openly exhibit an apparently unshakable confidence to be themselves. 

It’s easy not to realize that behind outwardly confident people there are probably many encounters with ignorant people than most people are even aware. 

It seems that in life, it’s almost impossible to escape criticism entirely.  The schoolyard “Sticks and Stones” saying and the online advice of “Don’t feed the trolls” is only a small part of the story.

Sometimes scarier that just the verbal assault of a bully or an online troll is the scarier form of this which is extremist ideologues, a.k.a. people that are on a mission to push their own agenda as being the only correct agenda and will use any means available to acheive their outcomes.

Granted, it is not easy for some people to be tolerant of points-of-view that are diametrically opposed to their own, especially when it comes to political, religious, economic ideologies, or any ideology for that matter.

Let me clarify that I’m not saying that all ideologues are bullies, because there is a huge difference between an ideologue who is mature and tolerant and one who is an irrational extremist.

Conventional wisdom is to not even bother fighting the sorts of battles that you’ll never win. It sucks to hear that sometimes the bad guys win, especially when things escalate beyond just name-calling.

Optimists may point out that losing the battle isn’t the same as losing the war.  But to those lost in the battle, unfortunately the outcome of the war does become rather irrelevant. 

Everyone has a right to choose where their loyalties lie. There will be people on both sides of almost every argument who will never give up their loyalties. 

And, different ideologues have different ideas about what they are fighting for.  Some simply seek support for their ideas, while others seek apologies, and others want you to join or leave their group, to just name a few.  But there are also those that seek more extreme outcomes as well.

There are tribes on all sides of every argument.  It’s great to have a tribe on your side.  But that’s where I see is an ugly side of tribes, too. It’s scary to know that the enemy has a tribe on his side, too.

New technologies allow for the easy expression of many different points of view, many that may not align with our own. 

People will believe who and what they want to believe.  Yet I feel that it is still important to get our unique stories out.  Giving both or all sides of the story allows people to decide for themselves who or what they want to believe, especially those people who want or need to understand others sides of an argument, too. 

Isn’t that how we work to encourage tolerance, e.g., how advocacy against bullying and acceptance is growing through movements like the “It Gets Better Project”?

It is unfortunate how it is often easier to find the negative one-sided stories than to find the  more balanced or first-hand accounts of a story.

But there are stories to be told about all sides of situations.  And, there are people that want to hear the other side of the story, too.

Maybe it’s easier to tell a story than to fight a fight?  Maybe story telling is how we fight some fights.  Maybe we can only know what value our stories provide by telling them? Maybe the recent movie, “The Help”, is one example of this? 

What other stories still need telling?  That’s something that I’m going to give some more thought to. What about you?

As I work towards developing a more consistent writing habit, I absolutely agree with the reigning advice which is to always have a few ideas ”in the works” to keep the development process flowing and to avoid writer’s block, e.g., always have a couple of articles started; topics/keywords mapped out;  titles/ideas scheduled; thought-starters handy, etc.

According to plan, I had a couple blog posts in the works, in draft, which I thought were ready to simply clean up and post.

As I was re-reading one of those posts, to make sure I was making a valid supported point, etc., etc.,  I realized I was violating one of the key points of advice I was trying to make in that post. 

Of the two posts I was working on, one was a “12 Tips” post and the other was a “How I Write” post. 

In the “How I Write” post, I had written that: “Anything trite or repetitive gets removed or remaindered.”  With that I realized that my “12 Tips” post mostly fell into that category.  Since that “Tips” post was a wrap-up of a multi-part series of posts, it kind of made sense that it would be a bit repetitive of prior post topics, but the triteness of the summary wasn’t sitting well with me.

As I contemplated ditching the entire “12 Tips post” (which I may still resurrect later in another context or format), I decided there was one tip of the bunch that was worth highlighting and which would actually be the perfect segue to my next area of focus for this blog.

So, here is my new one bullet list that I found in that pile of words that I’ve left on the cutting room floor…

1.  Learn To Trust Yourself.

As we explore to find our life’s purpose, to find that key message we want to deliver to the world around us, it can be both scary and exciting to realize that the answer(s) can only be found within ourselves.  For that, we need to learn to know ourselves, trust our own judgement, and to be true to ourselves.

It is true that outside influences are very strong and powerful.  Yet, still it is an individual choice for whatever we decide to do or not to do.  Once we decide what we want to do, then the journey takes on a new light. 

For me, once a purpose become clear, the next choices are related to how we deliver our message to the world around us, i.e., it is about self-expression.   That is the topic that I will explore next in my journey.  Hopefully you will find interest in this topic as well.

Would you agree that how you express yourself and your life purpose to the world is a vital element to getting your message across?

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For a list of all posts in this series go to: Finding Purpose (actual links will be posted as each post becomes live.)

Dear Blog,

I want you to know that I’ve missed you so.  I know you won’t write yourself, so I’m glad to be back to try and breathe some life back into you once again. 

There’s a whole lot of life out there, so we can’t keep letting it slip by without us.  Let’s capture those thoughts and feelings that we uniquely experience and put them down in black and white once and for all.

I hope there are no hard feelings between us.  I want you to know that I didn’t plan on leaving you alone for so long.  Life just got in the way.  Or, I must admit, I let live get in the way.  It was a mistake of me to let you slip off of my priority list.  My relationship with you truly is important to me.

I’m surprised how quickly time has passed though.  I didn’t expect to be away from you at all, and definitely not for this long.

In this case though, I can attest that: absence has made my heart grow fonder.  I’m glad I missed you.  I’m glad to be back.

So, now that we’re back together.  Let’s figure out where we want to go and what we want to be…..

Let’s pack our bags and travel light on this journey we begin again together today. 

Looking forward to seeing where life will take us all.

All the best,

Helen

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For a list of all posts in this series go to: Finding Purpose (actual links will be posted as each post becomes live.)

From a Facebook group, and as a subscriber to its accompanying paid weekly newsletter (both of which I’ll tell you more about at the end of this post*), I recently came across two questions that might be helpful to other bloggers/writers, or anyone else, who is searching for their purpose.  If this is you, consider these two questions: 

1. “What Magazine Would You Be?”
2. “What if <Blank> Wasn’t an Issue?”
   (i.e., where you fill in the blank with a constraint that is limiting you.)  

For the first question, I literally went to the magazine section of my local bookstore and sorted through their four front-to-back rows of magazines.  There I was surprised to find that I had never really heard of (and had never read) the magazine that I would most be like, i.e., “The American Scholar”, which I would describe as being a much more intellectual version of “Readers’ Digest”.  

At first I thought, “well, just because I didn’t read it, doesn’t mean others don’t read it”, but then again maybe this wasn’t the ideal approach.  Either way, I was glad to then come across the second question I listed above.

On this second question, my first thought was to fill in the blank with the word, “Money”, i.e., “what if Money didn’t matter?” 

But then I realized, to me, as a writer, more important than Money was Readership.  Often you need readers so you’ll have people that will buy stuff from you.  But if you didn’t need the money, what satisfaction would there be in writing something that no one read? 

Good press can get people to buy your book, but that doesn’t mean those buyers are going to take the time to read, or do anything else with, your book other than add it to their bed-side book pile or make another door stop or dust collector with it.

But let’s go with this question anyway, “What if Readership didn’t Matter?”  If that were the case, I know I would definitely write differently.  And, I truly believe I would still enjoy the process of getting thoughts down on paper and watching the ideas morph as I wrote.  Besides, I’m sure I could find at least a few readers to read my stuff eventually. Then, how can those people not be influenced once exposed to new ideas (if even just a handful of readers)? 

Maybe that’s what passion is about, doing something whether you see a payoff in it or not.    Maybe that’s what I need to do. Write for the sake of writing.  Experiment while the stakes are still low.  Why not approach this with full awareness that “build it and they will come” might not happen, but also knowing that it could happen, too.

What would you do if what you thought mattered most didn’t?

*For more ideas for bloggers/writers consider subscribing to Chris Brogan’s “Blog topics” Newsletter and/or joining their free Blog Topics Facebook Page.  I’m a member of both.  And, neither of these links are affiliate links.
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For a list of all posts in this series go to: Finding Purpose (actual links will be posted as each post becomes live.)

A recent #BlogChat on Twitter spurred me to contemplate the value of writing short pieces.  During the Twitter Chat, I was challenged to write a Series of posts to break up my usual style of writing longer blog posts.

As an analyst, I naturally started weighing the pros and cons of writing short pieces.  I even considered writing a Blog Series about that.  That was until it later occurred to me that it didn’t really make sense to write a lot about writing a little.

So, I decided to condense my now defunct series on “Being Concise” into the following:

Let’s first consider the two writers whom I most aspire to be like: one writes very brief thought-provoking pieces (namely, Seth Godin); the other writes thought-provoking pieces with lots of narrative and supporting research (namely, Malcolm Gladwell).  For me, both are equally thought-provoking.  I wouldn’t say either one is “better” than the other, as each is effective in his own style.

To use terminology from the marketing world, in our time-starved world, we are competing as much for “share of mind” as for “share of wallet”, so whatever our writing style, we need to attract then hold our readers’ attention as long as possible.  This is quite different from what some would call a “dumbing-down” approach to writing (though that could be a potential result of some attempts at writing concisely.)

What does matters, similar to what Jonathan Fields points out in his post, “Fiction or Nonfiction: Who Cares?”, is that our writing style might just need to evolve with the times because we do care, i.e., we, as readers, want to leave our reading experience “different from when we began.” 

To me, what and how we write comes down to one short question: “For what purpose are we writing/reading?”

Getting someone to think or feel differently about something can be achieved in more than one way. In some cases, it might only take a tight, clearly-focused op-ed or commentary (see:  “Good Press: 6 Steps to Writing Killer Op-Eds and Commentaries”). In other cases, we might need a 550-page book that explains to us how to achieve “The 4-Hour Body” (p.s. I’m really enjoying this new book by Tim Ferriss).

Either way, how long or short our writing is, more than likely, isn’t as important as how effective we are in what we are trying to achieve with our writing.

Doing things differently every once in a while is a good thing.

The more options you have for doing something, the more paths/choices you are aware you have when or if obstacles get in your way.

I’m not just stating these two points to philosophize to you, but more as a segue to sharing two things I unexpectedly learned about today.

Let me back up a bit. I’m taking a mini-MBA program in Digital Marketing at Rutgers Center for Management Development. While I probably should blog about the awesome instructors we have each week, or about the perfectly relevant topics we cover each week, I’m not going to do that because that’s not what this blog is about (though I couldn’t exactly define what I do write about either, but that’s beside the point for now.)

Anyway, in today’s class, in addition to learning about SEO and website design from Matt Bailey of SiteLogic (who is a very engaging presenter), I learned:

(1) an intriguing word that we can all relate to, used in the context of goal-setting: “Velleity” is “the intent to take action, but no intent to actually take that action.” According to Merriam-Webster, it is: “the lowest form of volition.” *ouch*

…and, I learned that…

(2) it is possible to be entirely mobile using an iPad, as Matt Bailey successfully manages to do; no need to carry a laptop in addition when traveling.

So, today, I hereby defy any velleity to write about doing things differently. I’m writing this post entirely on an iPad for the first time. And, I’m writing about a Digital Marketing program without actually writing about Digital Marketing per se.

Doing things differently might actually be something I do more often than just once in a while…

What about you? How often do you do things differently from usual?

Here’s an interesting approach to writing (as in this article:  Why Albums Are Released on Tuesdays in the U.S.):

(1) You ask why something is the way it is.

(2) You list the possible reasons why.

(3) When you don’t find any conclusive proof on any one theory, you end your article by asking your readers if they have any theories of their own.

I guess that’s better than stating something as a fact when you know that is not the case.

There is no shortage of quotes posted on Twitter every minute of every day. 

Many are the motivational kind.  The kind of quote that is easy for Tweeters to find, post, and re-Tweet.  The kind that people can instantly feel inspired by regardless of how helpful it actually is or isn’t.

[I don’t want to digress too much, but the following sidebar might be worth considering in this context.  Consider this post that points out how overemphasizing motivation, and ignoring ability and triggers, is what makes Facebook Behavior Change Apps ineffective: “5 Reason Facebook Behavior Change Apps Aren’t Working”.] 

But I digress a bit with that.  Getting back to my point….

Sometimes I, too, enjoy the clever words in motivational quotes. 

However, more often than not, these quotes also just make me want to point out the non-universality of their contrite claims.

I don’t know why, but I often feel compelled to want to reply to those quotes with a “Yes, but…” answer.  I rarely do, publicly, but, if thoughts could talk….

Here’s an example of the type of quote I’m talking about here.  This one came across my Twitterstream earlier today: 

“No farmer ever plowed a field by running it over in his mind” ~ George E. Woodbury. 

Ok. I get it.  Thinking about something isn’t going to get that something done.  That makes sense.

However, instead, my first reaction would be to reply to this apparent bashing of the thinking process with something like this:  “Maybe there is a good reason why the farmer didn’t want to plow the field right away.”

Maybe I should instead be asking myself, why do I even bother arguing with myself over quotes anyway? But that’s probably a question for another day.

Maybe it’s just that I believe “thinking” and “restraint” have served me well over time. Though maybe this  is why I find it harder to write more often than I currently do, too.

At the same time, I believe I’m open enough to consider a possible self-contradiction here.  Today I also came across a blog post which happened to have a very similar concept to the quote I wanted to argue with above.  Same concept, but this post instead strikes an emotional chord with me that I can relate to on a more specific level.  Consider this post by Ken Robert, @MildlyCreative: “An Angry Letter from Your Big Idea.”

Maybe I just seem to prefer more words, details, and explanations (e.g., the Who, What, Where, When and Whys of a concept) rather than over-generalizations and over-simplifications.   Maybe it’s more about how those words are expressed rather than their bottom line anyway.  

But that’s what motivates me.  What about you?