Introvert Initiative
We often hear that a phone call is much better than email in making an impression. But to make a real impression, we need to find a way to meet with someone face to face. Even if it means researching their favorite restaurant and requesting a booth next to their own for their daily lunch. That’s real initiative! (I didn’t event that idea, either. I have talked to those who have employed this creepy tactic to meet CEOs.)
This spectrum of least personal to most personal is particularly popular within the world of networking advice.
“Nothing beats putting a name to a face. Not to mention it shows initiative and motivation to show up somewhere a person is, and introduce yourself with a nice firm handshake.”
Okay. That is one way of doing it, I suppose. It is not my way of doing it 90% of the time because I am Too XYZ to be comfortable with such encounters merely for networking or information gathering, (or lord forbid, self marketing) purposes. And I am a firm believer in being comfortable when you are doing any of the above.
Think about it. Would you rather be totally at ease when interacting for the first few times with someone that holds potential value in your eyes? Whether that value be to your career, you craft, or just your social presence, does it do you any good to engage them in a manner that is totally unnatural to you? Can you possibly be putting your best foot forward when you are rerouting 50% of your total brain power towards not allowing your palms to sweat before a handshake? Can someone give a good first impression, no matter how cool they are on the outside when in their head they are screaming to themselves: “EYE CONTACT! EYE CONTACT! EYE CONTACT! EYE CONTACT! EYE CONTACT!“
My answer to all of these is, no, one cannot. And should not. At least at first.
Now I have heard the bogus argument before that extroverts run the world, and in order to be a part of it, introverts must essentially become extroverts or get left behind. If you have read this blog at least twice you know by now I don’t buy into that. Introverts can and have been major players in all aspects of life and history even before the digital era.
The key is to be open and honest about our comfort zones. Yes, yes, I can hear many extrovert gurus out there slaughtering their unblemished cyber-lambs at the High Altar of Leaving Your Comfort Zone. The whole notion to such people is not unlike narcotics, and they want to peddle it to anyone and everyone on the street. And as with every approach to life and success, there is some merit to the concept of not being comfortable. Success may in fact require you to be outside of some proverbial comfort zone at some point. But I have yet to hear a solid argument in favor of indiscriminately jumping out of one’s comfort zone just for the sake of being uncomfortable. Oh people do it, and even declare it is necessary, but nobody ever explains why to my satisfaction.
So I offer a different approach to introverts, and others out there that are Too XYZ but want to show initiative in connecting with others:
Tell the new contact the truth about how uncomfortable you are about certain things.
You learn that the founder of a successful local company about which you would love to know more is appearing at a local festival, let’s say. (Maybe she likes organic tomatoes, what do I know?) Many would suggest you go to the festival, introduce yourself with your damned elevator pitch and set up a meeting to learn more. What an extroverted, motivated thing to do! But if person to person contact with new people, and especially those whom you admire makes you nervous, you shouldn’t try to approach this CEO at the festival. Even if the festival is right across the street from your house. Even if a million and one people say you will make a bigger impression if you so do. Even if the blogosphere is flooded with post after post of how someone got their dream job by bugging the piss out of some important CEO at a convention until they relented.
No. It is better to make five more subtle, gradual authentic impressions from a zone of comfort, then one awkward, uncomfortable and not very productive impression right away.
So do your research and send this CEO a brief email explaining that you admire their work and their company, and would like to know more, but are not comfortable with meeting face to face. You tell them among other things that you tend to lose your train of thought out in public sometimes, or in crowded spaces, or wherever. But that if they are willing you have a few questions and ideas that you would like to share with them via a longer email which they can read at their leisure.
If the CEO is willing and understanding of your particular concern as well as interested in your ideas, they should be more than willing to correspond in that way. If they ignore your email, or are otherwise dismissive, saying “I only discuss business in my office before work on Monday mornings. I have a life and can’t take any time for fan mail,” then you probably have not lost anything by not connecting with such a person.
People are people, even if they try to act otherwise. All have positives and negatives as measured against the metric of “social expectations”. But when we allow ourselves to become so myopic as to think there is one precise, effective, proper way to introduce ourselves to others, (or for them to introduce themselves to us) we begin to diminish not only them, but ourselves. Our discomforts, weaknesses, quirks and flaws make us who we are just as much as our strengths and abilities do.
Of course we need to be sure we are not suffering from some crippling mental disorder, and that we are not violating someone’s privacy or safety when we approach them in our own fashion. Yet we can go a long way in truly promoting ourselves to the movers and shakers if we just accept, and ask them to accept, what we can and cannot do. It may take some extra creativity and time, but being Too XYZ should not isolate you from the power brokers and influentials.
Have you ever tried to share an idea or introduce yourself to someone in a way that made you uncomfortable just because you were told it would be “more effective”? How did it turn out?
No, I’m Not Happy for Jane.
I am Too XYZ to be inspired by the success of my peers.
The easy explanation would be jealousy. I want what they have. I cannot deny some of that may be at work. To some, being jealous of other people is a sin. To others it is a motivation. To me, however, it is neither. It just sits there, in whatever quantity it decides to show up in for any given person or situation. It has zero effect on what I am capable of doing, one way or the other. It neither holds me back nor spurs me forward. My movement is my movement.
The bigger part of it is frustration and/or confusion. I see people who started blogging after I did, who are now making money doing so. People are are getting noticed and becoming quasi-famous. The social expectation is that I rejoice.
“Jane, I am so happy for you! You started off, worked hard, paid your dues, and now you are finally being rewarded for it!”
And sometimes I really do feel that happy for someone getting somewhere. Especially if it is somewhere I am not trying to go. But as often as not, I silently shake my head and say, “Here we go again.”
Here we go again with someone else I know making good with a formula I busted my ass over to no avail. Here we go with the endless congratulatory tweets flooding our mutual Twitter feed. Here come the guest posts, the notoriety, the money. And worst of them all, the “you can do it too!” affirmations and the “aren’t you so happy for Jane?” gushings that come from our mutual connections.
No, I am not happy for Jane. Why should I be happy for Jane, exactly? Her success does not bring me any success. Nothing I did was in any way related to her attaining her success. And frankly, if my history over the last two years in social media is any indication, Jane will very quickly find little time to speak to me, or return my emails anymore because she has gotten really busy with all of the phone calls and new work that has just flooded in her direction since her blog was mentioned on BigImportant.Com.
In other words, a cost/benefit analysis of me has dropped my value in Jane’s eyes significantly because I am still sitting here struggling with an average of 30 views per post. (On a good day.) I sometimes express doubt and fear on top of that. I am therefore not a positive energy flow for her, and should be avoided.
Or perhaps I am not kissing her ass enough, I don’t know. It may amount to the same thing.
No, I don’t especially feel happy for Jane. Nor am I in the mood to be told that I should. That her success doesn’t mean I cannot also succeed if I do what she did.
That’s part of the problem. I don’t want to do what Jane did. I am not built to do it Jane’s way, or your way. And though Jane and a lot of other people would rather cut their own throats on a live web-feed than admit this, they are lucky. At least at some point in time they got flat out stupid lucky, and nothing you say will ever convince me otherwise. And no matter how XYZ you are, you cannot replicate somebody elses luck.
I’m a student of history, so I am 23 steps ahead of all of you readers who are about to quote Thomas Jefferson’s view of luck to me. The fact is, I do work at things. Hard. And I think it is the impression the Jane worked hard, and I do not which really makes it most difficult for me to celebrate along with the whole world as Jane sails. The impression that her advancement is due to work and positive thinking, so my stagnation must be due to me negativitiy and laziness. I have few trophies, so there is little reason for Twitter to be all aglow about how much work I have done to keep my head above water, or do the things with which I am uncomfortable.
My hard work may not be your hard work, but for the resources I have, it is just as hard if not harder, because the fruits of my labor are much smaller. Yet my hard work is easily dismissed by the vast majority of Janes out there, along with her cyber-sycophants. They refuse to believe that a person can be Too XYZ for cocktail parties and blog conventions and business card exchanges. They are literally under the impression that with a few select tough love stances they can reverse within me an entire lifetime worth of introversion and poor luck. They feel they can make me a superstar just by telling me to get out there, read a million books (all of which are the same), and start living. And yes, the first step is being happy for Jane when she makes it by doing half as much as I have done. To do otherwise is to be bitter, and bitter people never succeed.
What I am doing is my best at writing good content, marketing that content, meeting as many new people as I can in the manner that I am capable, asking people for help, offering mine, being persistent, and…getting absolutely nowhere in the process.
And then, when Jane and all of the others like her have exhausted all of their advice (assuming they bother to give me any), they eventually do one of two things. They tell me, “well, you are just going to have to change. I don’t know what to tell you.” Or they flat out dismiss me as some sort of log thrown in the way of their happy road to stardom which they think will taint their new road to success if approached. Fuck you too, Jane.
Let Jane continue to win by doing all of the ass kissing, story telling, cookie cutting life style choices she wants to make. That’s all marketing, and that it works as often as it does is a testament to how dull and pointless much of the online world is. Where originality is punished and caution is seen as weakness. Where bad luck is a heresy and being in poverty is impossible. Let her and others like her soar to the heights that so many others “friends” of mine have soared due to knowing the right person, or being a pain in the ass long enough to get a guest post somewhere or just otherwise whoring themselves up online. If they can live with themselves, so can I. But I will be damned if I am going to go out of my way and pretend that I am happy for them, just so that I can attract the allegedly helpful people out there who respond most to “hard working, positive thinkers.”
Do I not believe that honest, hard working people, who do not sell themselves in the way I have described can get ahead? I do think it happens sometimes. If I am permitted to believe in a lucky break then yes, sometimes very agreeable, honest, and most of all authentic people do get to where they want to get, and beyond. I do believe their hard work can bring them some of those breaks. However if I must dismiss dumb luck from the equation 100%, then no, I don’t believe such success stories exist, even for people I like.
But in the end, whether it be luck, or skill, good people or bad ones, authentic folks or media whores, my reaction is the same; their stories do not inspire me. They do not make me think that I can do it, and they do not give me a better view of the world simply because someone who deserved it got someplace they wanted to be. Maybe it is because I am spinning my wheels. Maybe it is because the nature of such people’s lives and personalities are so far removed from my own that I simply cannot relate. But the moral of the story is that it can get really difficult hearing all of these success stories on all of these blogs and in all of these Twitter feeds. They serve as a discouragement to me, not an encouragement. And they are everywhere.
Do you in your heart and soul truly feel that happy for colleagues and friends when they succeed while you struggle? Or are your congratulations just the lip service you feel society and the internet expect you to pay in order to make you more apt to receive a bone of your own some day? If you can’t answer that here, take some time and answer the question for yourself. Will the answer be what you think it is?
The Death of Bin Laden and Our Reactions to Reactions
Last night was a big night for America in many ways. At least a big night for many Americans, and indeed those throughout the world. Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was killed by American special forces Pakistan. Crowds gathered outside the White House, at Ground Zero, and several other places to celebrate this fact. (Though from the footage it seems most of the crowd started to deteriorate into drunken debauchery after an hour or so in most locations.)
I, like I imagine everyone else, am still processing this. I don’t know exactly how I feel now, and I may never. But I know for certainty that not everyone is celebrating this. And I don’t refer to Al-Qaeda.
Yes, there are many reasons that good people have for not being happy about last night’s celebrations of news that the most wanted man on Earth had been shot through the head and killed. I don’t yet know if I share any of those concerns or not, but the point is that is we are not careful, we can lose sight of the truth about people. That they are very complex creatures.
Between the chants of “USA!” at baseball stadiums, spontaneous performances of The Star Spangled Banner in Times Square, and the eerie solemnity of the echoed voice of the President of the United States in an empty East Room that announced this death to the world, we must remember that the exuberance is not universal among decent people.
In the coming weeks much will be said about those who were quiet in the bars. Those who didn’t post anything on Facebook, or more “dangerously”, posted thoughts of sadness and mercy. Thoughts and emotions unfairly deemed by the masses as almost seditious. We must remain vigilant against this just as much as we must remain vigilant against a retaliatory strike against us.
My point does not apply only to the Bin Laden news, however. But the story serves as a stark reminder that each of us must not judge anyone by the nature of their visible reactions to something. No matter how universal a particular sentiment may seem, we cannot allow ourselves to forget, as we go about our day and our lives that each person deserves to be evaluated by their individual, inward motivations and moral compass, and not necessarily by their outward expressions and projections. Evil people exist. But do we dare make that determination based on a few moments observing their outward behavior?
The majority, and even the vast majority of sentiments about an event does not determine de facto appropriateness anymore than the rarity of a response determines de facto inappropriateness. Look deep into people when you can, and if you cannot, don’t assign motivations to them. You’re a better person than that.
Our Mental Tornadoes and Positive Thinking
For several hours this morning my county was hit with a rolling collection of severe storms, each of which had pretty good potential to produce a tornado. (And a few of them did.) That means we were under a “tornado warning” (one is imminent or has been spotted) from 4:30AM until about 10:00AM. Nothing as bad as the one that hit Alabama over the last few days, but nonetheless we were all encouraged to seek shelter, or to at least be ready to do so on a moment’s notice if we were in the path of this seemingly endless line of storms.
Meteorologists can at best predict when conditions will be favorable for tornadoes, but unless a funnel has actually touched down, they cannot ever be sure one will exist. And even once there is a funnel, there is little predictability to what the hell it is going to do. I hate the unpredictability of such storms.
It got me thinking that I hate unpredictability in obstacles in general. Nothing I go through mentally is as dangerous as people having to face a tornado of course, but the whole thing brought to mind something I have felt for a while. And that is how often career or personal success advice tends to ignore, or dismiss the unpredictable and the unstoppable.
When there is a tornado warning in your area, the first thing the authorities advise you to do is to take shelter. Do not drive, do not try to out run it, and do not stop to take picture or video of a fully formed funnel. Get to a basement or ditch or something and hit the dirt. In essence, the advice is to keep still, and wait (hope) for it to pass you by. And though you won’t hear the people on the Weather Channel put it in this fashion, what they are all basically saying is, “You can’t do a damn thing about it, so don’t be a fool and act like you can.”
We have tornado watches and tornado warnings mentally as well. Things that we know are on the horizon, or fear may be destructive, that we are powerless to stop, out run, or in some cases even define. We just know that the conditions in our lives are right for a specific problem. Or that the problem, like a night tornado, is out there somewhere, unseen, but tearing its way towards us. We can do nothing about it. Yet many people try to act as though we can.
Overselling the notion of “positive thinking”, optimism, getting up in the morning ready to “tackle any problem” has long frustrated or even angered many a pessimist or realist. Because while the notion of being more upbeat and viewing our situations in a more positive light is certainly appealing and productive, we can’t help but heed the tornado warning. Many positive thinking gurus out there tend to think that being optimistic entails defying the storm. In reality, in some cases optimism is simply being able and willing to jump into a ditch and hang on until it’s all over. The potential risk is not worth the possible reward for the realist.
I don’t doubt many out there will object to my conflation of weather to mental or spiritual obstacles. Yet why? If the issue is an unpredictable and virtually non-trackable obstacle that stands in our way of success, one that moves and pivots seemingly at random and cuts in front of us no matter what we do, is a tornado not a fair metaphor? Why is it so hard to believe that we can be trapped, paralyzed, or otherwise cornered by unpredictable and wily intangibles just as much as by a funnel cloud?
There are, in other words, things that we cannot explain, nor control that hold us back. And sometimes they hold us back so much that the best we can do is remain still. Sure a few foolish “heroes” will go out with their camera and their pick up trucks, follow the twister, and nearly get killed or maimed snapping the next shot that will be featured on television. But in the end you have to wonder if such people are doing it in order to make themselves or people around them safer, or just so they can say, “hey tornado, I lived, so fuck you,” and wait for the applause.
Pessimists are not the way they are because they think it is funny. They have their reasons. Yes it can be over done, and if you are jumping into a ditch in the middle of a sunny day, you probably need to chill. But the reasons for being a pessimist are usually valid on some level. Maybe they are not your reasons, and maybe you, as an eternal optimist have no storm activity you need to worry about with your clear skies and light breezes, but that doesn’t mean there are not indications of funnel cloud activity in the lives of others.
But maybe, just maybe you are actually standing out at midnight in the middle of a field totally oblivious to any tornado warnings that have been issued, because you woke up this morning convinced that you can conquer anything. Maybe you need a realist to wake you up and say, “You dumb ass, go find a basement before you get killed.”
My positive thinking has never stopped a storm beyond my control. Has yours? (Photo courtesy of the NSSL.)
Cross Post from Always Off Book: Happy Birthday Shakespeare
This is a first for me, but I am cross posting, or at least cross referencing my latest Always Off Book post here on Too XYZ. I am doing so because I am excited to be a part of a week long blogosphere celebration of William Shakespeare’s birthday. I am quite proud of this post, and I hope those of you that frequent this blog but have not checked out Always Off Book will take a chance to go there now.
I also hope you will check out the many other entries from bloggers around the world who are also this week posting their thoughts on the Bard.
Ty Unglebower 