Tag: seth godin

Do it for Yourself

William Zinsser working in his Manhattan office.

In his book Drive Daniel Pink writes about two kinds of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Autonomy, mastery and purpose motivate us from within. Money, praise, status and all the rest motivate us from outside. Writing includes both kinds of motivation but I think what motivates us to write more than anything else is the need to be read. Why else would you write? But what happens if we aren’t read as much as we expect to be read, or worse, what if no one reads our work at all?

The danger of unchecked expectations like wanting to be read by so many people a day or to be followed by so many people in the space of a month or two is that, if they go unfulfilled and unnoticed long enough, we quit. It’s hard to stop and consider the possibility that we’re missing something. Maybe people can’t find our work because we haven’t marketed it enough or because we haven’t optimised it enough for Google and other search engines? Or maybe, like Steven Pressfield writes in Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, “It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.”

Also, as Seth Godin writes in The Practice, “people who are fairly satisfied say nothing.” If I like a newsletter or a blog post I don’t usually comment because I assume the author won’t reply and I’m wasting my time but for all I know that comment may just be what they needed.

So if people are busy or they don’t feel the need to comment and you don’t know what to think because no one’s giving you any feedback, why keep writing? I think William Zinsser can console us. He writes in On Writing Well:

“‘Who am I writing for?’ It’s a fundamental question and it has a fundamental answer: you are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualise the great mass audience. There is no such audience – every reader is different person. […] You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.”

As for those troublesome expectations I think the poet Robert Bly can help us too. When Bly asked his mentor, William Stafford, how he was so prolific Stafford replied, “I lower my standards.” I feel we can do the same with our expectations.

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Rejection

Credit: istock

Seth Godin writes in The Practice:

“[…] because there’s far more supply than demand, most of the feedback we receive is rejection. Rejection comes not just from the market, but from self-confident gatekeepers who we perceive as knowing more than we do.”

In my experience the worst thing about a rejection is not that they said no but that they won’t tell me why they said no so, in the absence of an answer, I supply my own answers. Maybe I’m no good? Why else would they say no?

Science tells us that our brains evolved to seek certainty even when the evidence, in a more critical light, is sketchy and unfounded. When confronted with uncertainty, in particular the uncertainty of a rejection without feedback, we scramble for an answer and in our haste we can latch onto beliefs that just aren’t true.

But sometimes there are good reasons for withholding feedback in a rejection. If you’re a magazine editor you can expect abuse if you tell a writer why their work wasn’t accepted because most writers pour themselves heart and soul into their work and any criticism of the work is a criticism of their very being. When a critic gave one of his novels a bad review the writer Richard Ford bought one of her books, blasted it with his shotgun then mailed it to her.

I’m astounded when I read of people being rejected hundreds of times before they finally broke through. For example, the actor Mark Ruffalo was rejected for 600 auditions. Can you fathom the emotional toll of being rejected that many times? We know, in hindsight, that he eventually succeeded but at the time he didn’t know. I applaud anyone who keeps going. Perhaps the only guarantee of success is that we don’t stop.

Og Mandino writes in The Greatest Salesman in the World:

“[…] it is not given to me to know how many steps are necessary in order to reach my goal. Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner.”

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Renewing Confidence in our Writing

In a recent issue of his newsletter Subtle Maneuvers, Mason Curry counsels an anonymous freelancer afraid of failing in his/her new career by quoting the therapist Esther Perel:

[…] Perel has this idea that relationships go through cycles of harmony, disharmony, and repair. And [the writer Sheila] Heti said that she thinks the same thing is true of the writing process: You go through periods of feeling like a freakin’ genius (harmony), and also periods of feeling like your writing is utter garbage (disharmony). And after moving through these two extremes, you eventually end up with something that feels right (repair). And then you start the cycle all over again!

Very true. When I wrote the first draft of this post, which was about a different topic altogether, I felt deflated because it came out so clumsy and a familiar voice said “this is it, you’ve lost it.” But, like I wrote elsewhere, life goes on and there is repair. Because I have a regular writing practice that includes this blog it doesn’t take long for me to prove that familiar voice wrong.

That’s what does the trick: a regular writing practice. Today may have been no good but you’ll be back tomorrow. And the day after that.

Our Abundant Creativity

In section 38 (“Hoarding is Toxic”) of his book The Practice, Seth Godin writes:

“Hoarding your voice is based on the false assumption that you need to conserve your insight and generosity or else you’ll run out of these qualities.”

Scarcity mindset at its finest. I recognise it in myself almost every time I post here. “Could I save this for a book instead?” “What if someone steals this?” Well, as Austin Kleon teaches us, theft goes on all the time in art and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But at the heart of these worries is the fear that if I give away these ideas nothing else will replace them. The well won’t fill back up again. And yet that’s never been the case. Sure, sometimes it’s not as full as I would like, but the well always fills back up. How can it not? I’m alive aren’t I?

Seth again:

“Abundance multiplies. Scarcity subtracts. A vibrant culture creates more than it takes.”

Amen to that.

What’s Our Writing Worth?

Lewis Hyde writes in The Gift that “the artist in the modern world must suffer a constant tension between the gift sphere to which his work pertains and the market society which is his context.” Hyde also writes of a “disquieting sense of triviality” that haunts artists in societies like ours. You know the feeling. Every so often we’re neck deep in doubt and ask ourselves “why bother writing, painting, etc. if I’m not going to be paid for it?”

Even the questions we ask ourselves are framed in terms of their market value. But John McPhee thinks different. The author Tim Ferris studied under McPhee at Princeton and in his class notes he wrote “McPhee never has suggested that the point of writing is to make money, or that the merit of your writing is determined by its market value. ‘A great paragraph is a great paragraph wherever it resides’ he’d say. ‘It could be in your diary.’”

But I think so long as the market exists there will always be a temptation to cater to its demands and become what Seth Godin cautions us not to become in The Practice, a hack.

But what about worth? Again Hyde says “I mean ‘worth’ to refer to those things we prize and yet say ‘you can’t put a price on it.’ We derive value, on the other hand, from the comparison of one thing with another.” When we live in a society where almost everything has a price and we’re bombarded day and night by adverts it’s hard to recognise worth apart from value, especially the worth of one’s art when we also believe time is money.

And it’s Black Friday today. See what I mean?