We’re all inferior (or maybe none of us are)
Filed under: Inspiration & motivation, Life of Johnny, Online biz
The other day, I got an email that really bummed me out.
Just recently, I was part of an affiliate promotion. I did pretty well with it. It was a really cool program and I was proud to spread the word, and I was pleasantly surprised that a fair number of my people agreed that it was cool and signed up, despite it being very different from anything I’d been a part of before. It was nice. I’d again used that win/win/win principle I talk about so often, and everyone was benefitting, and I’d made some nice coin without a ton of effort, and all was well with the world.
Except that I wasn’t good enough. I was good, but not good enough. This email proved it.
The email I’m talking about ranked the top affiliates for the promotion, and I came in seventh overall. The first place person referred almost four times as many as I did. I stopped thinking about win/win/win and pleasant surprise and started thinking about seventh place. Suddenly, I didn’t feel all that successful.
Right now, nobody is feeling sorry for me. In fact, probably some of you or most of you are all angry at me, thinking, “Boo fucking hoo — Johnny only made X amount of money and not four times X, whereas I’m still struggling to make my first hundred online. I feel so BAD for him.”
But the fact that I was bummed out about something like this is exactly my point. It’s like complaining about having too many supermodels after you. Or not having enough time to be able to drink all of your fine wine. Should that email have bugged me? Of course not. And that’s exactly why I decided to write this post.
Why did it bother me? Because it told me that someone was better than I was. Six people, actually… and in the universe of this one event, they were a LOT better than I was.
So: Are YOU feeling beaten up? Are you feeling inferior?
Well, join the club.
You’ll never be good enough
The pain in the ass about life is that at least as far as I’ve experienced — and as far as I’ve seen in everyone I’ve known — you’ll never really outrun your insecurities.
If you become rich, there will always be someone richer than you are, and you’ll envy them. And if you used to be poor, it’ll take a lot of self work for you to ever not feel destitute, even while rubbing yourself with thousand dollar bills.
If you used to be a scrawny kid who got bullied all the time and you bulk up, you’ll still feel intimidated when you go back to high school reunions, and you’ll always notice when someone is stronger than you are, no matter how irrelevant the context.
Personally, I can’t talk to an attorney or lawyer without thinking that these people must wonder why they should take this young kid seriously. And I’m 34.
I wasn’t on the football team in high school and I never got invited to the cool kids’ parties. (In fact, the reason I almost never drink is thanks to negative associations I have to those cool parties.) I defined myself by academic success. I was always the smartest kid, and if I thought someone was challenging my position at the top of the nerd pack, I’d work as hard as it took to beat them. The grades and accolades didn’t matter. What mattered was finishing first, because that’s who I’d decided I was.
The good thing about the world is that it’s big enough that someone will always give you something to strive toward, to force you to stretch and be better. And the shitty thing about the world is that if you always do that — if you always define success by comparing yourself to others instead of comparing yourself to where you used to be and where you’d like to be — there’s always a ton reasons to feel like a big, fat loser. Like, all the time.
I’m doing pretty well, right? Built a business from scratch in well under a year, got up to six figures, built a great base of readers and customers, closing in on my own rock star life and have like a quarter million mentions on the web according to Google.
Yeah, but six people were better than me recently.
And also, I listened to Brian Clark’s interview with Glen Allsopp and realized that what I’ve done, Glen did before age 21.
Oh, and I haven’t caught up with my mentors. Never mind that it’s only been a bit over a year… they remain better than me.
I look at other popular blogs, and unless they’re lying, they all have many times the number of RSS subscribers as I have. And person X just accomplished this. And person Y just started this new thing, and it’s making Z dollars, and everyone loves it.
You can’t win this way. If success in anything (or everything) is defined as something you’re always striving for, then that means you’ll never actually have it.
If you’re feeling beat up, more success won’t make that feeling go away.
There will always be someone better than you, whether you’re at the bottom of the barrel or the top of the heap. It’s like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is trying and failing to compete with the invention record of Thomas Edison, and he realizes at the end that Edison was just trying and failing to keep up with Leonardo DaVinci. If we insist on living in someone else’s shadow, there are plenty of tall folks out there to feel small next to.
I listen to a ton of personal development material. (I go way back. Remember those giant folding plastic things filled with Tony Robbins cassettes that snapped closed like a big flat Tupperware container?) One from way back that I still listen to on my iPod is Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, and in it, he talks about the concepts of “self referral” and “object referral.”
In object referral, the point of reference is in the external world, and worth and accomplishment are defined by looking at other people and outside circumstances. This is the reference point of the ego.
In self referral, the reference point is yourself. You don’t look outside to see how you’re doing. Instead, you look within.
I still struggle with this because we’re trained to look to others, to keep up with the Joneses. Hell, that rock star life post that people seemed to like so much? It’s all this same stuff. If you’re doing what you think you’re supposed to do and wanting what you think you’re supposed to want, you won’t see that if you look inside, you may already be doing what you want to do and achieving what really matters.
If you’re feeling inferior, like you could never do what Naomi Dunford has done, I get it. A year ago, what she’d done intimidated the hell out of me despite the fact that a few years before, she was a wage slave like the rest of the world, and that a few years before that, she was living in a homeless shelter. Despite the fact that she has plenty of her own well-publicized neuroses. Despite the fact that she and I both now feel inferior to any number of people who are more successful, better liked, more stable, or whatever than we are.
You don’t need to become more successful in objective terms. You need to train yourself to watch only your internal compass to see where you’re going relative to where you want to be. If you do that, you can improve and actually feel the improvement instead of remaining just as far away from newer, bigger objects of envy.
Deep down, I’m still the twelve-year-old kid who wasn’t good at sports and who had to score well on objective tests if he was to establish his worth. I try to not be that kid, and to instead be who I am today. I usually succeed, but not always.
Who are you? Are you your past, or do you allow yourself, in every self-referring moment, to be your present?
That “live in the moment” thing? Yeah, I think there might be something to it.
5 Tips for Disruptive Thinking (Or, How to Get a Pompous Classist Like Johnny B. Truant to Feature You on His Blog)
What Sam Rosen says in the intro to his guest post below is true… I’m really not so into accepting guest posts because this isn’t so much a “business blog” as it’s “that one asshole’s blog.” When that one asshole isn’t the person writing, it feels strange. (Drew Kime holds some incriminating info on me, which is why I ran his post recently. But hopefully those hearings will be over soon and the statute of limitations will expire.)
So the reasons I’m running today’s guest post by Sam Rosen are twofold:
1. Sam is doing this really interesting thing that I’ve never seen before — 60 speakers in 60 minutes giving their best tips on online influence — and you all will like it. (I’m planning to like it myself, actually.) It’s totally and completely free, so there’s no reason not to do it. I also don’t stand to benefit from it at all, which both irks me and makes me feel like Mother Theresa.
2. I needed a post, and it made sense to talk about Sam’s thing (because naturally, I’m in it… since I’m a whore). However, I had the choice of doing the hard work myself or saying, “Yeah, Sam, why don’t you write it because I’m going on vacation in a bit and don’t want to write it myself? Have it on my desk by 9am tomorrow. And by ‘my desk,’ I mean to tie it around a rock and throw it through my window. And by ‘window,’ I mean my email account. And by ‘rock,’ I mean virus.”
So what follows is Sam working and doing my job for me. Enjoy.
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Recently, Johnny wrote that he rarely accepts guest posts. That’s not because he’s a cold-hearted, zombie-obsessed misanthrope who prefers hilarious chickens over fellow humans. It’s because he’s a pompous classist who only associates with Ivy League professors and captains of industry.
Okay, maybe not. If I added that biographical hue to Johnny’s non-existent Wikipedia page, I’d probably have at least 42 Truantians attempt to sue me for slander, including his biggest fan, Ann Coulter.
So why did he let me do a blog post?
It’s not because he has a penchant for Jewish entrepreneurs (JOHNNY’S NOTE: It’s not JUST because I have a penchant for Jewish entrepreneurs). I think it’s because my company, ThoughtLead, is doing something slightly unusual:
We’re putting on the shortest marketing conference ever. 60 of the web’s leading thinkers and doers (including Mr. Truant himself) will speak for 60 seconds each about how to increase your digital influence. On July 6th, at 6pm ET. It’s called the Influencer Project, and it’s sponsored by big companies (like HubSpot, Rackspace, and MarketingProfs).
How’d we think of the idea…and get so many people to join in on the fun?
We Questioned the Rules (Hmm… I like the sound of that. Maybe I’ll create an online course of the same title soon. Damn you, Truant! You win this time.)
You see, not too long ago, we launched another speaker series, called The Purposeful Product (which Johnny, Dave Navarro, and Chris Brogan are actually all speaking on this week). It got rave reviews. But it fell short of the buzz we had hoped for.
That’s because it wasn’t a disruptive idea. Despite the awesome speakers and content, the overall messaging was pretty standard. And, not surprisingly, it didn’t fly like we wanted it to (kind of like Truant’s chickens).
The Influencer Project, on the other hand, is different. It’s already spreading on Twitter, and people we don’t even know are blogging about it.
“A-listers” like Brian Clark, our Third Tribe fave, as well as Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble, Gary Vaynerchuk, Brian Solis, and John Jantsch are all speaking.
Frankly, we’re all a bit stunned, and that’s not just because Truant mailed us one of his chickens last night with the mysterious note, “She’s yours. Good luck.”
How to Think Disruptively
Truth is, we were tired of all the “me too” product launches, conferences, e-books, and blogs, and we wanted to do something radically different, something that created a lot of hoopla in a hurry.
So we questioned the rules, just like Johnny told us to (as well as getting a JBT apple-eating tattoo on our left ankles, which our parents weren’t too psyched about).
After recovering from the trauma of “inking” our ankles with Johnny’s admittedly dashing image, we endeavored to isolate five attributes of disruptive thinking. Here they are:
1. Think in terms of memes. “Question the Rules”; “Third Tribe”; and “Shortest Marketing Conference Ever” are all “repeatable” ideas that upend convention. They take schemas (rules, tribes, conferences) in the cultural zeitgeist and give them a twist. Think about Apple’s 1984 Superbowl commercial. It was 1984. The book 1984 represented all of the suits, the corporate meanies, the stodgy, uncreative bastards. They took that and turned it on its head.
So ask yourself: “Is this meme-worthy? Is this something that could spread?” If the answer’s “no,” you might be in trouble. If it’s “yes,” then keep going.
2. Create a collective ethos. If it’s just “your thing,” who cares? But if it’s about the community, if it’s an idea driven by people coming together and rallying around a cause, then you release a different kind of energy. We’re not lone warriors. We’re intersubjectively inclined human beings who, no matter how “big” we are, want to accomplish incredible things with others.
So ask yourself: are you facilitating a collective platform, or just worried about your own product, service, or idea?
3. Get other disruptors on board. The “influencers,” the people who are already in the public eye, are usually disruptors by nature. They think in different ways. They have styles that set them apart from others. They create memes. By making it easy for them to say “yes” (read: 60-second interview, plus a collective ethos, plus a meme), you not only begin to adopt their thinking—you become their partner in crime. (JOHNNY’S NOTE: I’ve had to decline a lot of interviews lately. “60 seconds” is EXACTLY what made me do this one — they made it easy to say yes.)
So ask yourself: are you making it easy and attractive for other disruptors to join you in the cause of innovation, and maybe even the creation of a new internet shoe empire?
4. Use language—creatively and memorably. When we were inviting A-listers, we used the sentence: “60 of the web’s leading thinkers speak for 60 seconds each about how to increase your digital influence for good and profit in the next 60 days, on July 6th at 6pm ET.” That grabs attention. We intentionally created a sense of rhythm, repetition, and repeatability (you might notice that I’m kind of into alliteration; like Johnny’s zombies, it’s an unhealthy obsession) so that it would “stick” in people’s minds.
So ask yourself: is your language memorable? Do you sound like a white heterosexual middle class religiously unremarkable man living in America, or does your idea have stickiness, repeatability, “memetic” mojo?
5. Create a pattern interrupt. For a long time, everyone selling information products online was using long-form sales letters. Then, one day, Frank Kern did one big video with a huge “Add to Cart” button underneath. Many others followed suit, but he was the disruptor. For a long time, everyone was blogging, and then Twitter made you turn your “logs” (ahem) into 140 characters each. Now there are “corporate micro-blogging platforms,” but Twitter was the disruptor. What do these examples have in common? They took a pattern we were familiar with, and interrupted it.
So ask yourself: are you just following the same pattern, or are you interrupting—disrupting—it, like Tony Robbins does at his seminars when he bucks the “cheerleader” image and starts swearing?
Okay, so by now, you’re probably starting to get an idea of the “disruptive thinking” mindset. And if you’re not, it’s probably hopeless. (Just kidding. I heard that it took Johnny like 10 years to have his first good idea.)
So here’s a question I’d like you to answer in the comments: How can you be more disruptive in your own thinking, without stealing my idea (I know a lawyer, Truant)? What examples of disruptive marketing have inspired you lately?
(JOHNNY’S NOTE: And also sign up to listen to the Influencer Project. It’s free, and it’s the only project of it’s kind. Fo real, yo.)
What I’m doing about launch fatigue
NOTE: Charlie Gilkey, Marissa Bracke (author of the infamous “Launch Fatigue” post) and I actually did a really cool and thorough discussion of launch fatigue in our latest Jam Session, which features music by Journey. No, I’m not kidding about the Journey. It was Charlie’s fault.
What do you mean you’re not signed up for the Jam Sessions? Were you in a plane crash in the desert and have been wandering the dunes for months, forced to subsist on live scorpions and drink moisture squeezed out of your own pants? Is that what has kept you away? Either way, you should join us now that you’re back and your sun blisters have stopped festering. Studies show that Jam Sessions members are smarter, more attractive, and better at Chutes and Ladders than the general population. Truth*.
* Not truth
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If you’re in this little blogging space of ours (“part of our dysfunctional family,” as I think of it), then chances are good that you’ve heard some of the discussion over launch fatigue.
If you haven’t heard about it, the whole launch fatigue discussion started here, and you’ll want to read that post prior to reading this post, or else what I’m going to write about won’t make any sense. (Be sure to read all of the comments if you want your eyes to bleed, and if you want to feel really bad about yourself and whatever it is that you’re doing.)
After that post, the blogosphere promptly blew up like Oprah after announcing her weight loss. This post by Dave Navarro is the other post I read about it, but there were many more and a lot of backchannel discussion about it. Dave’s post made me feel a little better, but not much.
It’s a good discussion to think about, but it’s also a no-win discussion. It’s like what the WOPR said about nuclear war: The only winning move is not to play.
Except that if you “don’t play” in business, you almost never make any money. Which has its downsides.
Let’s put it this way: The message I got out of the whole “launch fatigue” discussion, which included comments, Twitter, private conversations, posts on other blogs, etc., was this: No matter what it is you’re doing, how you’re approaching your business, or how ethically and “Third Tribe-like” you think you’re being, you’re a total jerk and a large group of people absolutely think you’re a shitbag.
The title of this post is “What I’m doing about launch fatigue.” And in case you’re short on time and just want me to cut to the chase and tell you what it is I’m going to do in my business in light of the discussion (because I’m that important), here’s my answer:
Nothing.
I’m going to stick my head in the sand. I’m going to ignore further discussion. I’m not going to keep reading comments about it. I’m going to do nothing in light of concerns about launch fatigue. I trust myself and my instincts, and I personally do not think I’m a shitbag or employing generally shitbaggy tactics. So I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, and if that’s uncool with someone, so be it.
The problem for any creator is that you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. If you sell stuff at all, some people are going to think you’re pushing too hard. If you hold yourself back from launching something because there have been a lot of launches recently, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face and are, frankly, depriving the world of good stuff, assuming you don’t produce crap.
A lot of new people are going to see this discussion, picture a wary, angry customer base who is tired of being promoted to all of the time, and use that picture as an excuse for their own inaction. They haven’t done anything yet, so why bother to do it now? People will only get mad at them.
Well, guess what? You can’t please everyone, and that goes for everything that ever ends up having any degree of success whatsoever. So the best course of action IMO is to just do your best to not be an asshole. Do that, and most of you will be fine.
“Be reasonable.” “Be cool.” “Be respectful.” Those work as well.
In case you haven’t headed over to check out that Jam Session yet, I’ll just mention that Marissa says very clearly that her intention in talking about launch fatigue was not to convey the message “stop creating and selling products and services.” It was “stop ONLY pimping stuff and stopping with original content and connection.”
It wasn’t “don’t launch” or even “don’t launch using the same formulaic steps as everyone else.” It was “don’t be a whore.”
Really: Are you promoting a ton of stuff (your own and that of others) purely for monetary reasons, ignoring the real needs and desires of your customers? Are you promoting things you don’t totally believe will help the people who buy them? Have you stopped creating meaningful free content, stopped using Twitter to be personable, stopped participating in comment threads, forums, email from customers and prospects, and so on? Are you a non-stop pimping machine?
If you are, stop it.
If you aren’t, then file this whole discussion in your mind as background info, but then keep going.
And also, “Non-Stop Pimping Machine” would make a really good name for a RUN-DMC era old-school hip-hop group.
P.S: Here’s some miscellany. I’m tossing it in mainly because I’m at Borders and there’s some incredibly shitty cover version of the Righteous Brothers “Unchained Melody” playing on the speakers here, and continuing to type is the only way I can kind of ignore it.
About using the same old tactics and formulas: So what if you’re following a typical launch prescription? So what if your prices all end in 7? Is the product good? If it is, then I could care less if people notice that a formula is being followed. Just because something is common doesn’t mean it’s underhanded, even though people tend to imply it.
About Smurfs: They were pretty cool. But I’ll bet you couldn’t actually make gold out of them.
Nepotism For the Win!
NOTE:This is a guest post from Drew Kime of Cook Like Your Grandmother. I’ve largely decided that guest posts feel odd to me on this site and almost never accept them (though I do appreciate the thought), but I’m making an exception because:
1. Drew’s other guest post got a pretty good response, and
2. I think it’s hilarious to have a guest post on business and networking coming from a cooking blog. Perhaps I should accept one from a cattle rancher next.
Anyway:
——————————–
The lonesome stranger.
The lone gunman.
The Lone Ranger.
Lone wolf.
Lone survivor.
We’ve got this fascination with the heroic solitary hero. It’s a romantic ideal, the guy who makes it on his own … against all odds … without help or comfort from any quarter.
And it’s bullshit. Which isn’t surprising when you think about what “romantic ideal” generally means. It’s a mythic story that has power specifically because it doesn’t work that way in the real world.
Ewww, favoritism
Going it alone is a myth we like so much that we even demonize the converse. Quick quiz: What’s your first reaction to the word “nepotism”? Without being too specific I’m betting it wasn’t a really positive response. The idea that someone gets ahead based on family connections rather than innate talent offends our sense of fairness. It just seems wrong.
We don’t just hate the people using family connections, though. Use your friends and it’s the “good old boys network”. You might even be qualified, but if you got the job because of “connections” suddenly your whole background becomes suspect. Maybe you only got into college because you were a legacy. Maybe your father plays golf with the dean and he helped with your grades.
Even the people with connections know better than to admit it. Tori Spelling says that when she auditioned for Beverly Hills: 90210 she didn’t use her real name, so that she wouldn’t get the job just because her father was producing it. And I am so sure there wasn’t anybody working on the show who recognized her. [wink]
So if everyone with connections is using them (but denying it), and everyone without connections distrusts anyone with connections, what’s really going on here?
The dirty little (not so) secret
Here’s the deal. What if it’s your company, and your son looking for a job. Don’t you put him on the management track? Don’t you groom him to take over the company some day? Haven’t you worked all those years specifically so that you could provide for your kids?
Of course people with connections use them. We all like helping our friends and family when we can. It’s human nature. It’s also human nature to resent the “in group” when you’re the outsider.
Wait … “outsider”. That sounds cool. I’m an “outsider”. I’ll bet there are lots of other outsiders just like me. Maybe we can be a group! I’ll focus-group that, have my media team do some commercials calling my opponent a “Beltway Insider”, and make it sound like a bad thing.
Oops, a political reference. Why did I do that? Because it makes the point that the most connected, most “inside” people know enough to position themselves as outsiders … “Just like you.” To build affinity. They deny they’re using connections while trying to connect with you. Ooh, irony.
Besides, interviewing sucks
There’s no way someone can fairly evaluate you in an hour. But guess what? The hiring manager hates it as much as you do. So if he knows someone, or a colleague knows someone, who is at least minimally capable of doing the job, guess who’s going to get it?
But don’t go thinking you should aim for “minimally capable”. I hear of openings all the time, and I know people who are looking. And if there’s a match of course I’ll recommend them. But I’m not going to recommend someone who I think is going to fall on their face.
Lizard brain vs. human brain
If you’re looking for a reason to be angry, to feel left out and mistreated, to complain about the unfairness of it all, go ahead and listen to the lizard brain. The part of you that hates any group you’re not a part of.
Or you can use that big lump of gray matter wrapped around the brain stem — you know, the rest of your brain — and realize that you really want to join that group. You want to be a member of the group of “successful people”.
Maybe you can hold both ideas in your head at once: “I don’t like them” and “I want to be like them”. I can’t. [WARNING: Obscure reference alert!] I’m not Walt Whitman.
So instead of looking at people who have what I want and criticizing the connections they use to get it, I look at what I have that they might want. How can I convince them to let me into that circle. Why would they want to partner with me.
Everyone has connections. Everyone has an in. Everyone has opportunities, or can create them. Everyone can find the right people to help them.
Sometimes getting into the club isn’t the hard part. The hard part is deciding that it’s okay to want to be in the club.
Drew Kime writes about food at How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, and blames his wife for watching the “Inside Hollywood” episode where he got that Tori Spelling anecdote.
