Header image via wikicommons. Do you doomscroll frequently? Read to the end; I promise you’ll leave the page with at least one tool to help make you a calmer person during this global crisis and the election. You’re stressed about the coronavirus or the election. You jump online and start scanning headlines on your favorite news website or social media. With each headline, you’re feeling more stressed, not less. What is going on? This article will tell you. If you clicked through to this article, you’ve proven the central thesis of the article—scary headlines hijack your executive reasoning. THE HIJACK It is objectively false that most of the information you’re consuming during this crisis will help you deal effectively with the crisis. In fact, most of it is making you less able to deal with it. News organizations (and bloggers) grab your attention by deliberately hijacking your brain’s limbic system. Writers and editors are in an hourly arms race to see who can most quickly heighten the arousal of fear in the brains of their readers and TV watchers. It’s actually quite easy to bypass the executive part of the brain that is responsible for judgment and directly activate the emotional limbic system (also known as the paleo-mammalian cortex) without your awareness or consent. The simplest way to do this is to arouse FEAR (even putting that word in all-caps can arouse the limbic system of sensitive people). The human brain evolved to pay more attention to threats than to signals of safety. Paying attention to that which scares you will keep you alive. (Scandal and sex work really well to grab your attention too but that’s a different post.) “Yeah but this crisis is real!” Of course it is. But if you can’t be discerning about the information you consume, you’re putting your health and that of people you love at risk. There is a way to be more discerning and I’m going to share that later. ALL HEADLINES ARE CLICKBAIT I can hear you now: “I ignore clickbait headlines.” Umm, no you don’t, and I can prove it—you just clicked the headline of this article. Even I have a hard time ignoring hair-on-fire headlines, and I know how they work. All headlines are clickbait because they have to be. Your attention span is measurably shorter than it was before the advent of the web and the competition for your attention is savage, even on a single page. A check of one digital newspaper’s front page today revealed one hundred headlines. News is a business and the business is selling advertising. Informing the public is not a metric...
Read MoreCeremonial Maloka, Nimea Kaya, Peru Maloca Thoughts This is my gift to you all. I hope it’s enough. If it’s not or if it doesn’t resonate, then my gift to you is the vulnerability expressed in the giving. As we leave, let us not long for the protective, warm embrace of Nimea Kaya. Let us not seek only harbors. Instead, let’s carry the following. Let the sounds and feel and smells of the jungle seep into you. Don’t grasp at them or try to hold them fast. Open yourself to them and let go of remembering. In the days ahead, let your tears be agua de florida being gently streaked down your cheek by the shaman. Let your ears hear icaros in a birdsong, in the creaking of a floor beneath your feet, even in the whisper of a passing car. Let your pain remind you that the work is ongoing but that you already initiated it with intention and courage. Remind yourself frequently of the astonishing improbability of the fact that, between the infinity behind us and the infinity ahead, we are conscious in this singular moment. Remember to breathe. In the incomprehensibly vast history of the universe, there has never been a night exactly like last night in ceremony—and there will never be another. But we lived that one. We lived it. Our living it and our sitting this circle together today is our collective song to the universe—our...
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Meine Freunde, the web is a big sinkhole of the horrible (must be spoken with French accent, especially the German part). This is not news to you but we’ve become rather inured to it all. There is a solution for bad websites. It’s to make them more webular. Webularity is the quality of design and writing that characterizes those websites that help users answer questions and solve problems. In other words, your website’s value to your customer. There are many ways to create this value but it always start with the audience. This is hard, I know. It’s one of those things that few of us like to think about. It’s like trying to figure out the opposite sex, or even the same sex if you’re trying to have a relationship. But the reward is commensurate with the effort put in to understand them. Understanding an audience can begin with thinking about why you started your company or why your employer exists. It’s always about solving a problem. They don’t have to be this obscure: Let’s examine what problem solving is all about. Think about your own behavior on the web. When you do a search, you’re essentially looking for information or a product to solve a problem. Even when you’re looking for something funny to Tweet, you’re in a problem-solving mood. You’re goal-oriented. The same is true with anyone coming to your website. Problem solving When you conduct a search, you follow pretty predictable behavior, even if you’re a pretty unpredictable person. Google and Bing know this quite well. It’s not just the search algorithm looking for patterns. It’s search algorithms based on billions and billions of tracked behaviors and an understanding of how people conduct searches. In my book, I tell writers over and over to observe their own web behavior and buying behavior. Doing this will tell you a lot about human nature and will give you clues to how your commercial audience behaves. There are so many ways to search for something using words in a browser window. Let’s search for information about a vacation to India. travel to india traveling to india travel india travelling to india traveling india travel to india from usa immunizations for travel to india travel agents to india cdc travel india travel to india shots travel to india visa vaccines for travel to india cheap travel to india travel visa india travel agent india travels to india travel agency india That is just a small sample of things a potential visitor to India might type into Google or Bing. If you examine them closely, you see different intentions. Someone...
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I know this might hurt your sensibilities, and I’m really sorry for that, but let’s say it out loud…there is nothing precious about paper books. It doesn’t matter what form a book is in before you put it into your head. What happens as it goes into your head is what matters. It’s just gross to romanticize paper books. Millions of trees are slaughtered, habitat destroyed, and dead dinosaurs spilled (ink). They take up a lot of room and they eventually fall apart. Saying you can’t make the move to e-books because you “…love the look and smell of a ‘real’ book in my hands” is like Guttenberg saying, “I love unrolling a scroll, and the crinkle and smell of papyrus. To hell with this press idea. It will ruin books as we know them.” Real books are in your head The reality of your relationship with a book is what happens in your head. Most of the time, if the writing is compelling, you don’t notice the way the content is delivered. The only way you notice the form is when your hand cramps and you have to switch to the other hand (unless the book is too big for one hand). I’ve been a convert to electronic print for over a year now. I used to be one of you. I said all the same things I hear over and over now from friends and family about their unwillingness to give up paper books. “I love the look of real books. I love how they smell and how they feel in my hand.” Now I hate paper books. They’re heavy. They cramp my hands and arms. I’m loathe to mark them up with a highlighter or pencil. I can’t search inside them quickly. I can’t take 20 paper books on holiday. I never thought it would come to this. Books have been a huge part of my life since I was able to read. Before then, I mostly used them to reach my brother’s toys so I could break them. I still own over 300 paper books that look nice on the shelves but rarely get opened. E-books are real books. Books happen in your head. You read a novel differently than your neighbor does. (But that doesn’t really count because your neighbor only reads pictures on the Interwebs. I looked through his window one night.) Great authors rely on your imagination, which currently resides mostly in your head, to fill in details about plot, story, and character that would be ridiculous for them to write for the same reason that we hate exposition in movies. It’s unnecessary. Write the...
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Business bloggers, why do you hate America? I know you have deadlines and a paycheck to justify but you’re creating fear in the damaged psyches of the easily influenced. A better solution for your readers is right here and nearly any writer can achieve the goal. Forbes has an article about 25 Things Influential People Do Better Than Anyone Else. This kind of article hurts the Interwebs and also my head as a writer and thinker. (I don’t necessarily do both of those at the same time. It’s hard. Like the Maths.) It’s one of those “list posts” that web writers have learned to conjure up when they can’t think of anything else to write. I shouldn’t slam lists, I use them myself and even recommend them in my book. But they’ve become a kind of “go to” post that often doesn’t do anything to help the reader. They’re just there to take up bandwidth and the world is rapidly running out of bandwidth. We are heading toward a global bandwidth crisis! If I had any influence, this paragraph would scare the shit out of you. List posts are…listful The best thing about “list posts” is that the headlines offer the reader the promise of easy consumption of the content. You know the article is offering steps that are easily scanned and might be capable of implementation. Although a list of 25 or a 101 of anything is generally more than the twitchy Internet audience wants to read. Seriously, if you can sit through reading a list of 101 of anything, you are desperate, my friend, to find SOMETHING to make your life better. Anyone offering you a list of 101 things is really reaching, really stretching their ability to…list things. There is unlikely to be much there that will change your life or your level of influence (or the specific gravity of nickel, which as we all know would benefit almost no one. I have no idea what that means but I like how it sounds on the page). You need to re-prioritize your methods of gathering useful information. In fact, Forbes’ list of 25 doesn’t really fulfill its promise. It provides few usable examples for each of the 25 characteristics of influential people. But it probably does achieve the goal of getting clicks because the target demo for the article is…people who don’t have influence but crave a portion of it scooped up like non-fat ice cream and delivered to them for free. That’s not how actual influence works. Real influence arises from having something useful to offer a specific audience. People like to say that someone like Guy...
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