I just read an article by Barry Morris that really struck home with me. Sure it’s about writing only but it’s applicable to all creative endeavors, I think. While he goes on at length about the fog, reminding us again of how near the gorgeous California coast he lives, when he gets to the point he’s going to drive he hits a grand slam. He does this frequently and his ezine is one of the few that I actually take time to read over a cup of coffee.
While I won’t relate the entire article here (that’s called infringement and besides, you came to read my thoughts, yes?) here’s the sentence that pretty much slammed into me like a sledgehammer:
My most valuable marketing asset, isn’t what I write, or what I sell, it’s who I am inside.
There it is. In one sentence the man gives you the answer and the dilemma. It dawned on me as I absorbed that statement that what lies within those 18 words is the reason I’m nervous whenever I talk to someone about my services. It’s about me, ultimately. When I try to be what others tell me I should be, or make me think I should be, I lose the essential me in the process.
Now, not everyone is going to like “me.” That’s okay. See, I can only deliver consistantly what I have to deliver and no matter how you slice, dice, or mince it, that will end up being “me!”
So who am I? I’m Char. I have a sense of humor, a sense of “real” and a sense of anchored. I have good instincts and each time I trust them I do neat things. It’s when I start second-guessing myself that things go south. When I try to write like someone else. When I try to design like someone else. When I leave Char at the curb-that’s when things start to feel awkward and difficult. Writing that should flow smoothly now becomes ragged and hollow. It’s difficult to construct a sentence, much less a paragraph or whole article/brochure. the design I had in mind gets replaced and the replacement doesn’t have the clean lines or color palette I would have normally chosen. Being something you aren’t or someone you aren’t makes things much more difficult and we usually only do it when we think, for whatever reasons, we don’t quite measure up to another.
Why do we do this? Because we have moments of being unsure. Not insecure. Unsure. When confronted with the success of others in our fields of endeavors we assume they are better, more talented, higher-trained and we tend to ignore the possibility that maybe … just maybe … they were merely lucky along the way in getting the right break at the right time so that the skills, talents, and opportunity all coalesced into a perfect storm, so to speak. So we think, maybe for only a moment, that their voice is more authoritative, more valid, more valuable than our own. We tend to put successful people on pedestals and we rarely put ourselves up there with them.
The really interesting thing here is that I like Char. I like her sense of style. I like her voice. I like how she can write and still sound like she will in a face-to-face conversation (even if people don’t believe she uses all those words she writes — psst! she does! lol). I like how she does layout and her eye for color and balance. I love her passion for books, her joy in typography, and her willingness to keep tweaking things until they are right!
Barry is quite correct — Y’gotta work from the heart. Anything else is going to leave you sitting on a curb and trust me, the curb gets cold, lonely and damned uncomfortable after a while!
Barry hosts selected articles from his ezine on his site but if you are a writer I would strongly recommend subscribing — http://barrymorris.com/ezine.html — so you get them all, not just the selected specials. There are untold nuggets in each issue. (And no, he’s not paying me so I’m not pimping him … I just like sharing quality when I find it!)
Thanks, again Dr. Morris. ;)
Char
