Archive for the ‘personal’ Category

How to be passionate (when you open your mouth)

Vijay recently asked in the comments on a recent talk:

Thank you for a great presentation.  I noticed that your energy was explosive and  there was absolutely no point in the presentation where I could detect a lull. I am interested in learning if you have any secrets or techniques in  maintaining the focus of not just the audience, but also  yourself as I often space out even when I am working on something that I am passionate about.

Explosive energy makes me think of being a drummer in Spinal Tap. Perhaps I should tone it down.

There are four things going on.

  1. My life is at stake.  I have bet I can make a living on my ideas and my ability to express them. I have no guarantees, no salary and no pension. Every time I write a blog post, a book or a give a talk I’m basically an entrepreneur. I’m not half invested. This isn’t a side project. THIS IS IT. I need people to buy my books, hire me to speak, and to tell others about me. When you’ve invested your heart in something, it’s much easier to appear passionate about it, because you are.
  2. I believe what I say . I really hate phony people. I hate people who water things down, intentionally mislead, or pretend they care about things they don’t. How much of what is said at work do people truly believe or care about? I think very carefully, and long, about most of what I create, and so when the time comes to give a presentation, or write a book, my points are things I truly believe.  And I’ve worked hard to make them concise. I’m not holding much back because I know it’s easier to get excited about things you deeply believe, especially if they’ve been boiled down to their essence. If you asked me to talk about my favorite tax software, or which 401k forms I liked the most, passion would be hard to find.
  3. I’ve extended my range.  If you can only play one note on your guitar, you can’t do very much. Musicians, especially singers, practice to extend their range. Most speakers have a narrow range. They only know how to get from volume level 4 to 5. If you practice, and listen to other great speakers carefully, you’ll notice how wide their range is. They can whisper (volume level 2) or almost holler (volume level 7).  You also have a range of gestures, and postures, and facial expressions. The wider your range the more tools you have to express passion, or curiosity, or humor, or anything. You extend your range through practice and coaching. I never want to be too passionate, as it’s easy to sound like a preacher on cocaine or Billy Mays. Instead my goal is to be at high level of enthusiasm  without crossing over into annoying.
  4. I have great respect for anyone who voluntarily listens to me. Speaking and writing are very subjective, and I know that reasonable people might not like me, or what I have to say. But their sense of how much energy and effort I put in is something undeniable. I never want to be dismissed by people for not being sincere. They can hate me, prove me wrong, heckle me, whatever, but at the end of the day I don’t want anyone leaving the room, or finishing one of my books, feeling like I gave half an effort.  Frankly any speaker is burning way more calories per second than any listener, but that’s often forgotten by most listeners, it’s a consumer’s market when it comes to things to consume.

Hope that helps. Let me know if it doesn’t.

For reference, here’s me speaking at Ignite:

  • By Scott Berkun on December 20th, 2009
  • 6 Comments »
  • On writing

What my office looks like right now

In a desperate fit of end of year holiday boredom, as I’m self employed and don’t quite long for these weeks off as I used to, I decided it’s time to fix up my office.

If I’m actively writing a book, over time my research methods create piles of books all over the place. I did heavy research for Confessions, and there were papers, books, journals, and articles just about everywhere.

When a book is done, there are several weeks of promotion, and it’s only now, about 8 weeks in, that I finally get around to fixing up the disaster area that is my office.

In the photo below, I’m 30% of the way in to sorting things out, and things are complete chaos. Hopefully I’ll post another photo this week with everything nice and fixed up.

That’s my knee on the right, and my desk above it.

I dare you to post a picture of what your desk/office looks like right now.

Buy nothing for Christmas

I rarely follow it 100%, but I do believe what people want for Christmas, or as gifts in general, are not consumer objects, but experiences and acts that require the giving of our time, not our money.

Here’s my post from last year about some rules I made up for gifts:

So this year I made two rules:

  1. To buy only experiences. Tickets to plays, events, massages, meals, things that they’ll experience and own as a memory instead of as a thing. Perhaps I can baby or pet sit for friends, gifts that really could be useful to them. This also has the benefit of low environmental impact if you’re into that sort of thing.
  2. To make things for people. If I make it with my own hands then it’s impossible to get at the GAP, or at their local mall and as ugly or fragile as it might be, it will be personal. It will will represent more of the the most precious thing i have, my time, than anything I could buy.

I’m actually thinking this year to write a letter – not an email, but a letter, to various folks I care about.  Will be more personal than anything else I suspect they’ll get this year.

Full post here.

I need your help: important

There is something important I don’t say very often.

I need you.

Yes you. Not the guy in the cubicle behind you, but you.

What I rarely talk about is I’m on my own – I’m flying solo in most of my work – and the only thing that keeps all this going are the comments, links, tweets, recommendations all of you guys do on my behalf to spread the word about my work.

Since I’m several light years away from being a household name, and no billionaire benefactor has come forth yet to bankroll what I do, whatever fame I have comes from people who like my work. And unless you wandered here looking for Shmott Shermkun or Fott Ferkun, that’s you.

If you’re so inspired, here’s how you can help me and my career:

  • Buy some of my books if you’ve only read the blog
  • Write an amazon.com review of my books you enjoyed (Myths / MTH)
  • Email / tweet / Facebook my blog posts to others (Use ‘ Share’ button at bottom of posts) – Comments are great too so I know I did well, or not.
  • Recommend my books, and this blog, to coworkers & friends, especially that they subscribe via RSS
  • Help get the word out about the new book, and the sample chapter / video on amazon.

I’m grateful to all of you who have done this stuff in the past. Every little mention makes a difference.

I’m six years into this adventure now thanks to your support. And with the new book coming soon it’s a key moment in my career – over the next few weeks the more attention I can get for the site, the more I can help the book, and if the new book does well my life goal to write until I die is increasingly possible.

Just wanted to let you know I depend on you and appreciate the help, and if you’re not sure if it matters, I can tell you for sure that it does.

Hating vs. Loving: a personal note

A book that changed my life in 2002 is Living, Loving and Learning, by Leo Buscaglia, which taught my hard-ass, repressed tough guy soul that I was doing many things that made me, and those around me, unhappy. And one of the big crimes was being more comfortable hating than loving.

Any time you hate something there is a choice. You can focus on the hate, and outrage, and self-righteousness, or you can find the opposite of the thing you hate, and focus on loving that more.

If you betray me as a friend, I can fixate on how much I hate you, or I can think about all the friends I have who have never betrayed me, and go thank and honor them. Why focus on how much you hate a book, when you can just as easily go back and remember and share other books that you love? If the friend or book disappointed you so much, why are aren’t using that as fuel to go back and appreciate the good you now realize you’re lucky to have? (As a gripe on amazon.com reviews, it’s fine if you hate my book, but please at least mention a better one so people can get what they were looking for).

Hate is easy. Destroying things takes much less work than making them, always has and always will. Hate is also less fulfilling and isolating than love, since all it says is what someone or something is not, instead of what it is or could be. Boycotting and banning are attempts to stop something, and stopping bad things is good – but these activities always make me think why not use that energy to go support and promote something good that deserves move love?

In many cultures hate, and angry criticism, is safer to express than love (e.g. American men prove we’re close friends by finding funny/mean insults for each other, rarely ever saying how much we care about each other). It’s common in repressed, dysfunctional families or organizations for hate and criticism to be confused with love when it’s the only thing that the parents or leaders provide – Hating is still a kind of attention. Kids are genetically programmed to believe their parents love them, so if all they get is hate when young, they equate that hate with what should have been love (and often wander through life confused as to what it is a healthy relationship looks and feels like). In some workplaces the dynamics are not that different. If all you know is hate, that’s all you express even when you’re trying to love, and on it goes.

What I got from Leo’s book, which I’d never believed before, was that people who can love more openly, especially in the face of those quick and strong with anger like snarky cynics like myself, are the bravest and most positive forces our species probably has. You’ll always find many people happy to hate in the open, but you can’t negate hate with hate. But every now and then you can turn it around, or slow hate down, with the genuine non-saccharin expression of positive love. Only when hate is out of the way can progress start to happen.

I’m not saying not to express hate. I’m still a hateful bastard now and then. It’s therapeutic, it’s fun and can be a way to bond with someone for the first time – but I’m careful not to let myself off the hook with hate alone. If I hate something, once I’m done tearing it to shreds, I force myself to look for something with the opposite traits of the thing I hated and show it some love. I can’t express how profoundly this has changed my life for the better.

The real work of writing

I’ve had a lousy January. I hope yours has been better than mine.

Recently I’ve rediscovered, during a week of deathmatch cage battles with the next book, that working through this feeling is where the real work is. When a week of writing sessions have gone poorly and faith is low, that’s when my spine, if I still have one, is revealed. To choose to keep working anyway even when it’s not going well. If I pick projects that are always easy, I’m not learning anything. If I don’t hit some walls on a project, I’m not sure I want to be doing them at all. This is a platitude at the beginning, easy to say and believe that you believe. But then you hit a rough patch, and life is all question marks.

For years I’ve collected pithy quotes about how to handle moments like this. They take up half a whiteboard in my office. Little sayings, some mine, some borrowed, for how to get over the various bumps that come with a writing life. But those quotes just sit on their ass. There is always still a choice: do I sit down again and try one more time, believing I’ll get further than the day before, or go watch TV? Play with the dogs? A thousand things seem suddenly seem all so inviting.

When things are going well the choice is easier. Writing wins cause it’s fun, personal, often therapeutic and rewarding. There’s no magic in that choice on the easy days. But on bad days like this one, when you can hear the blank page laughing from the other room, when the memories of writing a chapter, much less a book, feel like they must belong to someone else, what will I choose?

For big goals the bad days matter more than the good. Anyone can work on the good, easy, fun days, but the bad? Well, that’s the question. To believe I’m committed to the work, I have to show up on all days. Every day. And feel my feelings but not let them stop me from showing up at the desk and taking my swings. I’d rather strike out than not show up at the plate. If I’m not willing to strike out, then it’s time to find something else to do.

Using one of my old tricks, this missive has let me cheat my demons by writing about them, and perhaps now I can get back to work. Wish me luck.

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