Category — i couldn't help but wonder

I got tagged! Now you’re it. Talk to me.

1. I am a cat person.

2. I was the Chapter Leader of the Boston Guardian Angels when I was 19 years old. I was a tough girl.

3. If you’re in a crisis, I make an incredibly good friend. I’m not such a good friend when everything is normal. I sort of disappear on people. I feel desperately bad about this.

4. I’m a gadget geek.

5. I’m incredibly introverted and shy. No one believes me about this.

6. I could teach you the Enneagram. I don’t care if you want to learn it or not. I feel maniacally compelled to inform everyone on earth about this system and believe that learning it could lead to world peace. I’m sort of not even kidding.

7. Out of the blue, about 8 years ago, I became a full-blown claustrophobe. I have no idea why. Airplanes and elevators are not my friends.

8. The more I love a piece of music, the harder I find it to listen. I become overwhelmed. If I knew the musician and they have since died, I almost can’t even bear to hear their name.

9. In high school, I was a gymnast and could throw three back handsprings in a row. I can still stand on my head indefinitely, walk on my hands, and do many cartwheels.

10. I think “developing a personal brand” is insane. Just be yourself, for god’s sake.

11. Currently, this is my favorite quote:
“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hold on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.” –Chogyam Trungpa

12. I sat on Hubert Sumlin’s lap.

13. I could live a monastic life.

14. I’ve been a Buddhist all my life, only I didn’t know that’s what it was called until about 15 years ago.

15. I seriously almost died in a car wreck. I was in the hospital for 2 months. I have many, many scars. I kind of like them.

16. My sister, father, nephew, and I all have moon in Pisces. My dad and I also have Pisces rising. This means something to me.

17. I am seriously a kinesthetic learner. I literally cannot understand what people are saying when I’m one of many in a group. I can’t follow movie plots very well.

18. NYC is my boyfriend.

19. I believe that good can come from looking into darkness.

20. I would rather live in an apartment than a house. I sleep really, really well in hotels. I like knowing other people are around when I’m not expected to interact with them.

21. My husband can almost always cheer me up.

22. I flunked the 8th grade.

23. I am completely in love with Bruce Springsteen.

24. I hate talking on the telephone.

25. I believe that the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are here.

Hello book publishers. You’re starting to scare me.

I work in publishing but was a record label executive from 1990-2001 and am fascinated by parallels between the two industries. When it comes to the digitization of product and attempts to master/mangle the phenomenon of social media, the publishing business is where the music business was about 10 years ago. And although publishing probably sets its collective IQ (not to mention good manners) as superior to the music business, I can’t find evidence that their reactions to industry sea change are substantially different.

While attending this week’s O’Reilly’s Tools of Change in Publishing conference, I heard a lot of this:

There is still time to change course and we’ve got to do something now—but we don’t know what.

In the meantime, let’s co-opt whatever new trends we see out there by assigning some low-level marketing person to troll Twitter or hiring a social media consultant.

Please, please don’t let us end up like the record business.

If there’s anything to be learned from the recent past, it’s that none of these thoughts are worth pursuing. The “somebody do something” mentality duplicates the kind of hoping-for-the-best attitude espoused by long-time executives in music who simply could not or would not question the viability of the professional cocoons they’d built for themselves. And who can blame them—corporate mega structures are schooled in consolidation as the primary means of growth, not fleet-footed, shape-shifting responsiveness to change. But now we’re in a world where getting bigger is not the answer, getting smaller is.

The question I hoped would be addressed at the conference was: How will publishing avoid being trapped by its own environment? But it never was. Instead, I noticed a lot of talk of waiting and seeing how things are going to work out before making any earth-shaking, world-class responses to a world that has already changed.

At the conference, I was excited for a keynote aimed at comparing the music and publishing industries. Although entertaining, it lacked vision. The speaker talked about how only wimps fear the freedoms of the digital marketplace and attempt to control intellectual property rights and that at least we’re not going to start arresting people like those thugs over at the RIAA. I was disappointed not to hear a more sophisticated dissection, beginning with debunking the idea that digital downloads killed the music business, or could kill publishing.

Downloads did not kill the music business. Shortsightedness and turf-protection on the part of music business executives did. Piracy and changing distribution schema will not kill the publishing industry. Shortsighted infrastructure-protection on the part of publishing houses will.

What offed the music business—and what the publishing industry is facing—is a corporate structure built to churn out hits to subsidize an entire product line. (For more detail on how this happened–boring to everyone but me–see this 2007 post.) Rather than developing artists, exploiting regional marketplaces, and building financial models that can support a mid-range list, both industries sold their souls out to entertainment at the expense of art and expression. Both are in the business of selling many copies of a few items, not a few copies of many items—the kind of product that can be shot out of a cannon, dominate the retail market, and then basically disappear—because anything else is simply too complicated for a similarly bulked up corporate retail environment to track. The appearance of downloads and file sharing could almost be seen as a desperate measure on the part of consumers to listen and read in an un-mandated manner.

Commodification of bookselling is the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room, not e-books or DRM (Digital Rights Management) or the Kindle.

Without making friends with this beast, my guess is that in 2-5 years we’ll see a publishing industry that looks like the music business does today: Super-downsized major companies selling a product line aimed at an older demographic and a jillion new companies creating the next generation of publishers, retailers, and readers. Just like in the music business, some in publishing will be mourning the death of the business while others will be wildly excited because all they see is opportunity.

At Tools of Change, Sara Lloyd of Pan-MacMillan nailed it when she said, “Publishers understand markets, but not customers.” As anyone in the music business could have told you years ago, the customer is now a human being, and publishers—who still see retail as their customers—don’t know how to build products for individuals who might want to discuss, interact with, congregate around, or add their own $0.02 to the content. The customer has stepped out of the bookstore and into the foyer of the publishing houses, they are knocking on the doors of authors, and asking to be addressed as individuals. They will consent to purchase, not when coerced by a front-of-the-store display or fabulous media coverage, but when their friends start talking about how awesome/helpful/inspiring/powerful the actual book itself is. And this—the book itself—is what publishing has lost sight of in the attempt to build market share. To change this kind of corporate culture will require super-human “change management” to flip a mega-entity staffed by people who are petrified of losing their jobs into a business that can be one step ahead (instead of ten steps behind) consumption trends.

Ultimately, the music business sacrificed music to save the business. Hopefully, publishers will realize that if books are similarly sacrificed, what will be left is an industry that doesn’t care about its product, focuses on creating grandiose supply chains instead of amplifying demand, has no idea what its customers want, sees value only in commodification, and has to keep spinning out hit after hit after hit just to keep the doors open. The result? A beast that consumes itself. I truly wish I had heard some mention of this at the conference. Maybe next year.

Spoke recently with Stephen Mitchell, internationally respected translator of the world’s great wisdom texts, who has published versions of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Gilgamesh. His wife is Byron Katie, author of Loving What Is, among other wonderful books about wakefulness and joy.

I talked with Stephen for my upcoming book, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, which will be out in Jan 2010. I wanted to talk to him about stuff like The Secret and the idea that thinking positively could effect outcomes. When your heart is broken, you want to rearrange your thoughts so that they’re not so ridiculously painful. You want to have faith in something, to believe that what you’re experiencing is leading you to something “better.” And I really believe that it is–but I also believe we can’t know what that something is, so imagining so-called positive outcomes as a way of escaping current pain could actually be more confusing. Not to mention dulling and silly. I mean who wants to ignore reality and instead insist everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine, if I only think the right thoughts, I can have everything I want. Yet gaining dominion over your thoughts is critical to working with heartbreak to end up wiser than when you went in.

So I couldn’t help but wonder (if I may pull a spiritual Carrie Bradshaw; cue words scrolling across computer screen):

What is the difference between positive thinking and wishful thinking?

Here is an excerpt from the chapter in my new book called “Have Faith.”

In this sense, faith is not so much a belief that everything is somehow going to work out for the best, which can be very, very difficult to imagine when your heart is broken, when you are literally—and understandably—desperate to believe that what you’re feeling is some kind of divine redirection away from what was bad for you and toward what is going to be way better than you ever imagined. This isn’t really a good state of mind to walk around in. First, it presumes that you know what’s best for you and, honestly, I’ve never found evidence that this is a big enough point of view.

I know that there is a lot of emphasis on thinking positively and believing that you can make good things happen by expecting good things to happen. Recently, I had occasion to speak to my friend Stephen Mitchell about this. He is an internationally respected translator of the world’s great wisdom texts, has published versions of the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, The Book of Job, and Gilgamesh. I asked him if, in his lifelong study of the core teachings of all religions, he’d ever come across this idea. I wrote down what he said, because it was so excellent. Here it is:

The teaching of every one of the great sacred texts is that control is an illusion. When you understand that ultimately you are not the doer, you can step back from yourself. That is the only path to serenity.  In other words, letting go of the illusion of control, and realizing that you never had it in the first place, allows you to live in the most dazzlingly intelligent, beautiful, and kind reality that you could ever have imagined—and beyond what you could have imagined.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll have what he’s having. When I thought about it, I realized that all the many things I had longed for throughout my life and had been lucky enough to get—like a good relationship, great friends, and a cool job—hadn’t exactly made me into Mahatma Gandhi. In a lot of ways, I was just as riled up and dissatisfied as ever. So maybe I wasn’t the supreme arbiter of all things good for me. Now what?

According to Stephen, actually, all I had to do was relax, to allow the world to dazzle me instead of the other way around. So I’m trying. When I can relax enough, I see that, just like me, everyone—regular people, great superstars and profound sages—probably all started out worrying that the world was going to eat them alive or that they simply weren’t lovable enough. We are all just looking for some kind of happiness. Sometimes things work out for us and sometimes they don’t. It really doesn’t matter. Eventually, all our hopes and fears are going to dissolve and at the end of our lives, according to all the deathbed reports we’ve ever received, the only thing that will matter is how loving and brave we’ve been. I mean, come on, all those dying people can’t be wrong. They seem to be saying that all the things you want and all the things you dread are just like waves in the ocean. Eventually, they just become reabsorbed into the vast play of the ocean. And you know what? The ocean doesn’t care. It never gives up. It can accommodate it all, gentle waves that lap the shore and those that roil up ferociously, tiny tidal pools and great, freezing depths. The real secret, the great ones say, is that we are much more like the ocean than the waves. Underneath all our hopes and fears is profound stillness and the memory of how to return to it. You can bank on it.

Had the good fortune last week to interview David Allen, author of the deservedly sanctified Getting Things Done and the new book, Making it All Work. His Getting Things Done system is a brilliant strategy for making sense of all your inputs (e-mails, phone messages, professional directives, personal priorities), reconciling them with your intentions and priorities, and capturing it all in an organized way so you can use your mind for other purposes besides freaking out about how much you have to do.

I interviewed him for an article I’m writing for SELF magazine about how, according to Buddhist thought, being too busy, rather than a sign of success, is considered a sign of laziness. But how can being in-demand, committed, and loaded with responsibility be called lazy?! Because you’ve allowed your agenda to run you, not the other way around. The reasons for this go deep. It didn’t get this way because you lack willpower. It’s more likely a lack of self-awareness that turned your agenda into a raging beast. You’ve forgotten who you really wanted to be in this life. So it’s actually a spiritual question as much as a time-management issue. That’s what I want to explore in this blog post.

When I’ve spoken with David in the past—and from my long-time experience as a GTD-er—I’m always struck by the spiritual underpinnings of his point of view. In this system, spiritual doesn’t mean woo-woo, new age, navel-gazing, escapist crapola. Instead, it means unflinching, committed, humorous (the more serious the practitioner, the better the sense of humor, I’ve noticed) devotion to looking life right in the eye, figuring out the truth about who you are, allowing yourself to be affected by it all, and then going, clear-eyed, with the flow. Whatever flow looks like for you. Today. This is what GTD helps you do. Sometimes it feels great, sometimes it’s mighty uncomfortable.

The goal of his system is to create a precise, peaceful, and elegant daily experience, one that cultivates what he calls “mind like water.” No matter what you throw into water—a tiny pebble, a giant boulder, your boss and the horse he rode in with—water doesn’t care. It reacts appropriately, absorbs the impact, and returns to stillness as quickly as possible.

GTD organizes your outer life so that this stillness is possible.

So now you have some measure of stillness. This is where the lazy part comes in.

“Laziness,” David says, “is basically a lack of courage.” He describes being too busy and disorganized as a “pretty effective behavior to avoid the intensity of being alive. What you might find if you slow down is who you really are. (When you do,) you’re reminded of how magnificent you are.”  Dramatic pause. “Are you ready to stand up to that?”

I had to wonder: why is it so scary to see who you really are? Because, he said, people would then have to figure out “how you could realize your magnificence and still be a lazy slob who yells at your wife, etc…” In other words, a regular person who is also extraordinary. Meaning, once you glimpse your potential, your greatness, what some would call Buddhanature, it raises the stakes quite a bit and you can no longer pretend your life is going to begin sometime “later;” when you change jobs, meet the right person, lose 8 pounds, or whatever it is. The time to express your potential, suddenly, is Right Now. You see your gifts. There’s no more denying what you’re here to do. “The planet is wired to have you learn the lesson of being responsible for where you have put your creative attachments and energy.” So with stillness comes insight into the truth of who you are and how you invest your energy. Are you ready to stand up to that?

So on one hand, GTD is a way to organize your “stuff” and you can stop with that view and it’s totally fine. It is an amazing system. But on the other hand, it can be a powerful tool on the journey to discover who you really are.

“It all depends on how deep you want to go,” he says.

The way to start? As David said in such a simple way, it made me laugh: “All you have to do is pay attention to what has your attention.” Start with right now. Start by paying full attention to your next action. And the one after that.

A tenet of the system is to look at all you have to do, identify the very next action to take regarding each project you’re committed to, and then take it. The trick is to bring your attention with you. Problems arise when your body is doing the next action but your mind is five actions down the road, or in Tahiti, or wondering if you look fat. You get the idea. Synchronizing body and mind through the placement of attention is as spiritual an endeavor as I can imagine. Not to mention, it helps you get a whole hell of a lot done. A person who can command placement of attention is a formidable creature indeed…

So, I tell myself, the next time you find yourself wicked busy and out of breath, let yourself fill up with breath once again. Notice it as it streams in and notice it as it flows out. Ride the breath like a wave and watch as the waves begin to slow and deepen until you are reminded of the stillness that is always there. The mind knows how to return to this state.

Mind like water.

Stay tuned for Part 2, wherein we discuss a second aspect of laziness: losing awareness of the present moment and instead becoming absorbed in what ifs and oh nos.

The first President I remember is Nixon and that was not such a good experience. As a kid, I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I knew it wasn’t good, I knew the rest of the world was somehow laughing at us and, worse, even us kids knew that we had fallen from grace in our own eyes. Whether Watergate ignited a wave of thieving, scamming, outright two-faced politicians whose mask one could not see behind, or simply exposed what had always been there, I do not know. All I know is there hasn’t been a moment since when I did not feel that whomever was running for office was not lying to me. Still, as soon as I came of age I voted, trying to guess who was lying less or whose lies were telegraphing in pol-speak the reality I found least heinous. That, combined with weighing other political realities that might checkmate the candidate into the positions I supported—such as who was likely to control Congress or what political scam most recently backfired and therefore wouldn’t be tried again—was the formula I used to choose my candidate. Party affiliation never meant anything to me, I’ve been a registered Independent my whole life because I never trusted anyone enough to throw my lot in with them. I never in my life imagined that I would see a candidate for President that I would vote for because I believed what he said and, further, for what seems like moral fiber beyond professions of faith, wisdom beyond clever sound bites, and, most of all, for his palpable, tear-inducing love of the American people. It just never crossed my mind.

So now I’m in a state of crazy agitation waiting for election day, unable to sleep and unable to pull myself away from HuffPo, Fox News, MSNBC, Politico, CNN, and election.twitter.com. Like a man in the desert who thinks he sees water on the horizon, I can hardly believe my eyes yet I grow thirstier with each step. I’ve found the President I’ve been waiting for all my life. My heart is completely on the line, the whole damn thing, there is nothing held back and that is a very scary position to be in. I am so exposed that is simply impossible to shield against disappointment. The only protection is to shed all pretense of distance and run towards renewed of love country and faith in our people, something I’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t figure out how. If my heart breaks on election day, so be it. Just like any heartbroken person, I’ll simply have to find something else to do with all this love.

Barack Hussein Obama for President.

These are times of extraordinary polarization. In its final days, our election is deteriorating into vicious slander and purposeful manipulation that aims to convince us, not of the other’s poor policy positions, but of their evilness.

Undecided Americans are being baited into believing that Barack Obama is positioning himself to destroy what they hold valuable. As an Obama supporter, I can’t help but believe that the McCain camp is using slander, innuendo, and the most transparent playground antics imaginable to convince us to take refuge in fear as the basis for giving their ticket our vote. These tactics are vile. They are meant to draw out the worst in each of us. Ultimately, they are a shocking expression of cowardice.

I can point to dozens of examples of McCain’s deceit, flip-flopping, and, worst of all, attempts to distract Americans from the issues that will impact us for generations. Instead of convincing us to vote for him based on his wisdom, statesmanship, commitment to our country, and devotion to its citizens, he is trying to portray himself as a “maverick” who will “shake things up” because he is a Washington “outsider” who has chosen a “hockey mom” who is “just like you and me” and between the two of them, they’ll clean up all the messes we find ourselves in. None of these labels mean anything. Anyone who calls himself a maverick is automatically disqualified as one, just as anyone who says they are spiritually enlightened is not. These are sickeningly shallow gambits meant to reinforce the image of a human being rather than the substance of one.

People of sanity! Yes, I’m talking to you! We suffer from image-poisoning. We have become dangerously confused about what is an image of substance and what is actual substance, to the point that we believe that how things appear is how they are. Our election right now is a case of dueling brands, not dueling human beings. We are therefore subject to manipulation by slogans, posturing, and emotionality. It is understandable. There is far too much complexity to wade through to comprehend who and what we are voting for, and from a collective sense of exhaustion and an inability to fight contrived media messages, we crave simplicity: This guy is bad. This guy loves terrorists. You can tell by his lapel pin. It’s simple.

People who play upon this exhaustion to achieve their ends (even if they truly believe it’s in our best interest) are exhibiting exceptional degradation of the human condition. They are cowards.

And it makes me angry. It’s so tempting to either attack back with equally sleazy means; become emotionally unhinged and try to out-scream “them;” or avoid the whole thing by throwing up my hands or pretending that because I’m a Buddhist I’m all Ms. Equanimity. (Hello? Bullshit.) If I respond in any of these ways, I am a coward too.

So what to do instead?

One solution is to look at what is underneath the anger because no matter how angry I am, what lurks just below the surface is tremendous sadness. I ache for the confusion that creates fundamentalism. I mourn the dissolution of our education system that produces shallow thinkers. I cry for anyone who would hope to help our country but has to fight so hard to do so honestly. And on my good days, I even try to feel a little sad for John McCain and Sarah Palin even though I always, always fail because, well, I don’t have to explain why.

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. There are so many more ways to respond to sadness than there are to anger. Anger makes me dangerous to myself and others. It narrows my scope of responses down to a few very sorry possibilities. Sadness opens me up. It makes me look at what’s going on honestly, even though it is SO PAINFUL. Still, there are options. For example:

“The best thing for sadness is to learn something,” says Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “that is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. –T.H. White from The Book of Merlyn

I will remain a human being who cherishes other people and life itself, no matter how confusing it all becomes. I will hold my mind to this world and its sorrows and never give up. But I need your help. All of you.

Starting with Barack Obama.

He read my comment on air like 5 minutes ago!

Click to read!

I moved to Boston about 6 years ago, from Manhattan. Before that, I lived in Austin, TX. I grew up in D.C.

I would move back to Manhattan or Austin in a millisecond. I’d also relocate to D.C. because of my parents and other family. But I do not, repeat, do NOT want to live in Boston.

Everyone who knows me is sick of knowing how much I don’t like Boston. (Apologies to those who do. It’s just a matter of chemistry, I’m convinced.) I simply don’t fit in here and not fitting in is actually painful. It’s more than not liking the scenery or the food or the weather or the architecture—none of those things really matter all that much when you feel at home. I’m not at home.

I moved here to live with my husband. We lived apart for the first three years of our marriage, me in NYC, him in Boston but eventually I ran out of excuses to maintain two households. Very expensive. And I ran out of non-financial excuses as well; he had enough of hearing about my sensitive nervous system and unremitting introversion—he wanted a shared life, not two concurrent ones. And I thought, if I’ve always lived on some kind of experimental edge (within myself), then what could be more daring than to attempt a conventional lifestyle? What could be more avant garde than pushing myself beyond my comfort zone when it comes to love?

(Let me tell you, it’s been very difficult. I love Duncan way more than I ever though possible, in large part due to this nutty experiment of compromising on “my needs” which are bullshit anyway. Mostly just excuses to avoid the discomfort of love. But as the love has deepened, so has my neurosis about being too close to anyone. I do have a sensitive nervous system. I am wildly introverted. But I digress.)

It’s all been well and good, but I just don’t like Boston. It’s not a home for me. I’m sort of reaching my breaking point about tolerating it, in no small part because winter is approaching. So I’m putting out an APB to the world: Please help us move within the next 12 months. At this time next year, I want to have relocated to Manhattan, Austin, D.C., or somewhere currently unknown to me but just as perfect as a home. I want to go home.

If you’ve read this post to the end, please join me in wishing for home, for yourself, for me, for all beings everywhere.

I was at the gym this morning, on the treadmill. I was listening to my iPod and not the television in front of me, but every once in awhile I glanced up at it. I saw several images of Martin Luther King, commemorating, I imagine, the 40th anniversary of his death. There were shots of him orating. Walking with Coretta. Marching arm in arm with fellow protesters. And, finally, the heartbreaking photo of those who stood with him when he was assassinated, pointing up at the direction from which the shots came. I felt myself well up with tears. It was not hard to touch in immediately with the tragedy of hate and its grievous consequences. Just then the screen shifted to footage of Reverend Al Sharpton and others walking arm in arm in obvious homage to the spirit of Martin Luther King.

I don’t have anything against Rev Sharpton. But there was something about the staginess of the shot that made my heart sink. It just didn’t seem real. The series of thoughts that then cascaded in my mind had nothing to do with Sharpton, King, or racism. They were about how grossly deceived we are about the difference between authenticity and image. I imagined that Sharpton and his friends had, at least in part, staged their walk for the media and for the message it would send about their viewpoint. There’s nothing wrong with that. We live in a marketing-intensive culture. But somehow we’ve collectively forgotten to separate reality from its marketing campaign. The consequences are dire: Not knowing whether you love someone or the idea of them; not knowing how to choose a career that suits you beyond looking successful; not being able to make up your mind on the issues of the day because all you’ve been given to build on are facades and postures.

What I’m trying to say is that the inner connection to self, your very own, very unique inner landscape has been abandoned. Why, I can’t tell you. But I can see evidence of it everywhere: Kids who say that what they want to be when they grow up is famous. Not President. Not an astronaut. Not a doctor or a poet or a father or mother. Famous. For me, music is the most devastating example of the loss of authenticity. Everything I hear sounds posed. I’m not saying there aren’t countless talented, clever people making music today—there are. Pyrotechnics—yes. Technique—yes. Smart, interesting, inventive—yes. But soulful? No. No amount of overwrought emoting or derivative imaging can conjure the soulfulness of listening to a person who is also listening to themselves—as opposed to looking at themselves from the outside in. No matter how many unusual influences you blend together (Cambodian-surf for example), you will never create anything new. The only thing that is new is what arises on the spot.

Another example of this horrible illness that I call image-poisoning (when we believe that the image of a thing is the thing itself) is the idea of a “personal brand.” I actually feel sick to my stomach at when I hear this phrase. I’m not kidding. Actual nausea. But, again, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be super conscious and pragmatic about the image we project and the way people perceive us. But the idea that you would brand yourself like a carton of milk or a glossy magazine is just sick. It’s like saying to yourself, who do I want to pretend to be and how can I get others to see me that way? It’s bullshit. If you are yourself instead of trying to project yourself, you will find yourself in possession of personal magnetism and power. My friend Michael says we’re so busy trying to get somewhere that we have forgotten how to be somewhere. We have. We’re so busy trying to brand ourselves that we’ve forgotten how to be ourselves.

Do you know the difference between your image and yourself? Please ask yourself this question. Are you trying to seem like someone or be someone?

Please stop branding yourself, unless you’re very, very clear about the difference between your brand and yourself.

The TV piece on MLK closed with a shot of Obama giving a speech. Although I couldn’t hear it, it was easy to guess that the fact of Obama’s candidacy for President was being touted as an indication of just how far we’ve come. YAY. We have come a ways, although there is a tremendous distance still to go—but this isn’t what made me so sad as I watched the piece wind down. It was that we’re electing a President based not on character, not on values, not on statesmanship, but on the image of these things.