It’s pretty easy to infuriate people in order to get their attention. The professional troll, the shock jock, the provocateur. There have always been some who try to create success by making themselves highly, visibly obnoxious. A word or two about honesty and outrageousness And no one likes the weird kid who reads too much and spends all that time by herself. So we make ourselves palatable and convenient. We knock all of the weird edges off one another. Parents do it, teachers do it, and maybe more than anyone else, other kids do it. “We don’t spend time with people like that.” When you get bigger, you’ll choose a real job.” “ Being an artist (writer, cowboy, ballerina, musician, astronaut) is really hard. “I’m sure you don’t really mean that word.” Potty training and learning to eat without throwing your food are wonderful developments for everyone.īut the insidious messages always ride alongside. Now, the process of teaching kids how to be good members of our culture is a good thing. They don’t know that it isn’t okay to be who they are.They care bizarrely deeply about things.But their thoughts, their expressions, their points of view, their wild passions - these are not boring people.) (Parenting reality moment: Spending a lot of time with little kids can be excruciatingly boring, especially if you can’t muster enthusiasm for their weird obsessions. If you ever get the chance to spend time with very small children, you’ll notice something. You’ve been in hiding so long, you’ve forgotten what it was like to be truthful. No one gets angry at you … and no one particularly wants to spend any time with you, either. When you make yourself bland and inoffensive, you appeal to no one. Nothing will kill your business faster than dull conformity. The sad irony is, it’s conformity that’s dangerous. We can only conform, because that’s the only way to be safe. We definitely can’t tell the truth about the way we’re weird, or different, or vulnerable. We don’t want to uncover a thorny problem or controversial issue, because someone won’t like it. We don’t want to use an unusual word, because someone won’t like it. Why put hours into writing content that melts into the vast, indistinguishable mass of Meh?įrom my observation, there is one underlying reason there’s so much boring content being published: We’re afraid someone won’t like it Why do we do it? Why do we launch a new site, when there are already hundreds of sites exactly like it? Nobody has the time or attention span to read a boring website. But not when writers forget the most important thing: The blogger has been studying, and that’s excellent. The careful, even painstaking articles, describing 7 Ways to Do the Thing. Because by now, I know what I’m going to find. I put a lot of time and effort into it, but it’s just not getting any traction. “I’ve been working really hard on my site.
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