“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the
troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see
things differently …” — Steve Jobs
Crazy people make better bloggers.
Heather Armstrong parlayed postpartum depression and a stint in a mental institution into a
cash cow blog.
Penelope Trunk grew her blog to over 750,000 page views last month as someone willing to write about
stabbing herself in the head,
smashing herself in the head with a lamp, and
having a miscarriage during a board meeting while dispensing career advice.
James Altucher shares with his blog readers a history of
suicidal ideation,
depression, and
going broke with a manic frenzy that inspires others to buy his books.
In the
Forever Recession, we are all entrepreneurs, and everybody knows the best
entrepreneurs are crazy.
1. We’ll say what you won’t.
I started blogging in 2002. Over the years, as a blogger and journalist, I’ve written about
developing PTSD, the time
I wanted to kill myself, and why I loved writing about the
adult movie industry. After I got
downsized, anyone who Googled me about a job I had applied for could find these stories online. This probably didn’t help my chances of
getting a job. It’s probably part of what led me to conclude
I’m unemployable.
But that I had been working and living outside of the box for so long
— bending the rules or refusing to admit they existed — is what helped
me go from
unemployed to self-employed in a matter of months.
I used to be on TV. Being on TV can be stressful. You have no idea
what’s going to happen, and there are cameras recording whatever does.
After one of my first TV gigs, I was driving home on a Los Angeles
freeway. I was vibrating from the stress of what I had done, and I
wasn’t sure what to make of it. Was what I had done good or bad? That’s
when I decided it didn’t matter. I decided what did matter was that I
was brave. I hold that true to this day. I don’t want to be a coward.
Crazy people are willing to fail embarrassingly publicly to risk succeeding epically.
2. We speak the truth.
Crazy people are constantly in conflict: with themselves, with the world, with the voices in their heads. Want to know
why no one reads your blog?
You’re boring. You’re not in conflict, or you have no ability to
articulate your conflict, or, more likely, you’re unwilling to share
your conflict. That makes you boring and cowardly. A blog isn’t
something you write when you feel like it. It’s the digital
representation of
who you really are. No one wants to read a blog by a boring coward. Because no one wants to
be a boring coward.
What is heroic? What is great? What matters? Page views? Readers? What others think of you? I think heroism is
trying.
It’s not succeeding or failing. It’s prying yourself open and showing
yourself to the world in hopes that someone else may learn something
from what’s inside of you.
3. We’re more entertaining.
Armstrong danced on her roof for
free shingles. Trunk wrote about
what it’s like to have sex with someone who has Asperger’s. Altucher threatened to drive a
rental car off a cliff.
When I went to graduate school, part of the deal was that I didn’t
have to pay tuition if I taught two classes of freshman English every
semester. The school spent a semester trying to teach us how to teach,
but mostly I thought everything they were telling us about teaching was
crap. They seemed to think the student body was composed of mentally
disabled people, or people who had had hard lives so we should make it
easy on them, or people who were just dumb so our classes should be
dumb.
I didn’t agree with this way of teaching. In my classes, for the most
part, I did what I wanted. We weren’t supposed to teach the students to
read whole books — only bits of books or essay excerpted in anthologies
— so one semester I assigned only books — including William Burroughs’
Naked Lunch,
which includes an episode about a talking butt — and for this I was
called into the director’s office and reprimanded. The students were
fascinated by the fictional worlds they entered through the pages.
People like to say the internet makes us stupider. It doesn’t. It
makes us all writers. What people chronically fail to understand is that
writing is entertainment. We are 21st century entertainers, endlessly
tap dancing for an audience we can neither see nor touch, all in hopes
of getting something that used to sound like applause.
Only crazy people are willing to play this game, to keep dancing,
praying for a fleeting moment they will be seen as they truly are,
warped minds and all.
