Alex Shippee

If you thumb through Twitter profiles long enough, you'd be amazed how many people identify themselves as, "Internet Marketing Gurus," "Best Selling Authors," and "Social Media Experts." I don't doubt that most of these are true from a certain perspective, but as Ryan Holiday wrote, "There are hundreds of these hollow shells whose meaning has fallen away while the demand for their association has risen dramatically. We need them badly."

One of my favorite books is Dante's "Inferno", for a lot of reasons. After Dante-the-Character treks all the way past the greedy, the thieves, the angry, and the tyrants, he reaches the single most corrupting thing you can do short of actively betraying someone: falsifying words. Diluting the truth. Lying. How can that possibly be worse than stealing or being violent?

Because the communities we all live in depend on bonds of credibility and trust. When somebody gets angry and shouts at you, you react to the aggressive disturbance immediately. You know what hit you and you can identify it, respond to it, and then move on.

But when somebody puts on a charming front, ensnaring your trust, it can take a lot of stress and heartache before you see reality. Lifeless weeks can drag on while you wonder where the time has gone.

I don't know why it bothers me so much. Maybe it's because I've been struggling to meet my own standards for so long. Friends of mine - who are better writers than I am - tell me about things they've submitted to various publications. Sometimes they've been accepted, sometimes not. All I know is is that I don't have anything that's up to their level yet. And that's fine. I'm in no rush to become a "published writer" because I know the mere act of publishing something doesn't make you a professional at it.

By the same token, anointing yourself as an "Internet Marketing Guru" doesn't make it so. It falsely broadcasts a level of expertise you don't have. If people don't see you as a fraud yet, they will when they realize you can't deliver results.

Everybody writes a little bit. We compose emails and business documents, papers for class and blog posts. When we have an assignment, it’s easy to say why we write: “My boss/teacher told to and I need to make the deadline.” But what about those people who are not being told when and what to write? Why do they do it?

If we’re talking about sustainability, the surest motivation is a personal need to express yourself. You write because, if you didn’t, your brain would fill with frantic, nebulous stars. You’ll walk around all day, but your mind is on a different planet. Your creative impulses overflow and your imagination runs wild. You crave what, in “Inception,” Ellen Page calls just...pure creation.

For me, ignoring writing isn’t something I can afford to do – although I may fear doing it – so I keep a journal. Or start a blog. Or write stories. Or gravitate, perhaps without thinking, to a career or major that rewards strong writing. And at the end of the day, when I close my eyes, it’s a welcome and comfortable sleep.

So that’s why I write. And it's starting to get easier to just keep going.

I had the chance to attend a pretty high class event the other week. A line of attendants waited patiently to take my orange ski-jacket, they served delicious food out of margarita glasses, and I got to hear a concert by someone I had only seen on television. It was made all the more absurd because I was invited at the last minute and was only dressed appropriately because I came from a meeting. Any other day, I would have been clad in jeans and a t-shirt. Instead, this one time, I fit the part of a young professional.

But the entire time, something was gnawing at the back of my mind. I couldn't remember what it was behind the glitz and glamor of the night.

Before I left work that day, I was a little depressed. I let myself get distracted when I was trying to read this article by Tim Ferriss and Tucker Max. Instead of reading it, I finished up work and went to that event. The thing is, that article is about something that's as true about internet marketing as it is about life: you can't fake quality. I let myself stop working just so I could go to a party and feel starstruck. If I read that article, I would have had a better handle on one of my projects.

There has been so much written about how best to use Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. to drive traffic to your website, but at the end of the day it's all secondary. If you're not putting at least half of your efforts into producing quality content, then all your time spent marketing is just adding more noise to a seemingly bottomless pit of nonsense. That's how I feel thumbing through blogs some days, and that's how I felt at that event.

Just because I was let in the door and was dressed the part doesn't mean I was a part of that wealthy and accomplished crowd. Just because you can use "SEO" and "SMO" to get your blog in the best places doesn't mean it's worth reading. That's how I felt about my first few entries here, but I kept writing, even when I knew I wouldn't hit "Publish."

That's the important part, and not the glitz and glamor that only distracts you from the important, but harder tasks of producing and contributing.

Those are the things that don't leave you depressed and hungry for distractions. They're good enough by themselves.

I had a professor while at Marist that shared the unhealthy, manic lifestyle of his students. He'd come into class - over caffeinated and wearing a four day beard - and tell us about the essay he was trying to finish on a tight deadline. He was very easy to relate to, although it didn't hurt that he was one of the younger professors at 32. I remember one time, before our first test, he had a review session at about 8 P.M., at least twelve hours since he got to work. The inspiring part wasn't that he was still working - anybody can do that - but that he was still gushing energy and happiness to perform the most fundamental part of his job: teaching students.

When I think about the perfect leader, I usually come up with an image that one of my favorite writers, Robert Greene, would call the "Hustler King," a leader that is still in tune with the daily struggles of his enterprise. That proximity is the source of his strength. The person grading his students' papers, learning their ideas, is the professor; the person solving the client's problem, sharing their frustration, is the CEO; the person behind the camera, explaining to customers what went wrong, is not the PR people, it's the person who was responsible for the mistake.

At some point in time, every job gets delegated down to somebody else. Professors have TAs, CEOs have employees, and companies have PR firms. This is the typical way organizations develop and grow. It's average. It's normal. It works. But with that delegation comes an almost aristocratic distance. Being far away from your students, your customers, your clients, your audience...it robs you of that intimate knowledge that breeds real intuition. That's what I want for myself one day.

I see that professor as an example of a Hustler King, jubilant to still be helping his students learn at 8 o'clock at night. What other Hustler Kings are out there? Do you know any that inspire you?

When you're on Twitter everyday, it can seem like a very impersonal tool. I recently read this post titled "Learn From Your Friends To Make The Most of Twitter." He mentioned my company's Twitter, @tcgagency, but this was my favorite part:

"By now, there’s been plenty of blog posts written about the various ways to effectively use Twitter, so I’m not going to bother writing what they are. Instead, I wanted to give some “props” to the people who have helped me build my Twitter account and communication skills on the site. They exemplify what I feel to be the foundations of a successful Twitter profile: community, value, authenticity, and sharing."

This is a smart and very communal idea. Behind this, is something very similar to Follow Friday (#FF) - where users recommend people whose content they enjoy - but with more authenticity and expression. Anyone can tweet a few account names, but it takes more time and thought to write something about them. It's a gesture that shows you've been paying attention to someone and it makes for stronger bonds.

Twitter makes it easier than ever before to communicate with someone, but with that ease comes laziness. A lot of accounts will just tweet links to articles - it's amazing how many places you can get the latest from Mashable - without any indication that they read or even something away from them. These pusillanimous accounts are half way between nonsensical spam and users that really try to build relationships.

There's a good amount of talk about just how powerful bonds built over social media are. I think a good rule of thumb is that you're more likely to build a relationship if you feel like you behave and communicate similarly offline and if you take chances, even if you are a little shaky (fast forward to 12:42 where his company, that made a video amidst a PR crisis received playful, sociable responses). Because if you don't show people that you're human and trying to get involved in the conversation, than how are they going to find out?

New York City is endless. It seriously never stops. When I returned from a week long vacation one day I was amazed that the massive, amorphous crowd still had the same nuanced looks of stress and hurrying on their individual faces. It was like returning to a city thousands of years later and finding all the buildings intact. Why doesn’t anybody slow down?

Commuting into the city isn’t the same as living there. You get to see all the massive buildings and hear the tangled conversations on the street, but you don’t get to enjoy it. You don’t get to stand still, with a whole day stretched before you, and do all those New Yorker things. I don’t know exactly what they are because, well, I’m not a New Yorker. I’m from a small town in Connecticut actually. Life is very different there. Instead, I get off at Platform 112 at Grand Central and take the 6 Train to Canal Street and walk to my office before I’m late.

For a few days in a row, I passed the same woman walking her tiny little dog who happened to have three legs. It broke my heart and, one day, I asked her about him (his name is Lick-Lick) and why he had only three legs (he got into a fight with a coyote) and we got to talking.

I told that woman about a farm cat I know, named Super-Cat, that also got into a fight with a coyote and lived to tell the tale. We agreed that that was awesome. Lick-Lick peed happily on a tree and it didn’t seem so sad anymore. I said goodbye to my new friends and headed off to work, smiling happily.

The thing is, I like people. And in New York there are more lives taking place, concurrent and intertwined, than I can even imagine. In just three months of working there I met a three-legged dog, debated Harry Potter with a mother of two, got into an argument at an Internet Café, and just, in general, enjoyed the busyness of it all . I don’t live there, but when I walk to work, I like to imagine the entire space of Manhattan stretched out around me; all the people packed homes, the dogged determination of the businesses, the melody of all those cultures mixing together and that strange swath of life it must look like from afar.

I hope we can agree that that is awesome.

I wrote a guest blog for one of my bosses a little while ago and you can find it here. Since then, I’ve been thinking about what I was trying to say and wanted to elaborate on it.

Social Media isn’t a place. You don’t really go to Facebook or Twitter or even this blog. You may navigate from one website to the other, but you’re really just sitting at your computer (or using your phone) and gaining access to a tool. If anything, the place is the tool.

People have been using different tools to reach an audience for thousands of years. If the average person, from any time period and place, was told to share a message with, say, twenty people, of course it’d be different. Somebody in Ancient Greece might travel to the nearest city-state and start talking to people. Somebody in Medieval Europe might post a bulletin in a public space hoping people will read it (providing they all could read). Somebody in America during the 19th century might send out fifteen telegraphs with the hope that a few people will share the message. Now, all somebody needs to do is send out one tweet.

The tools may be different, and Socrates and Martin Luther knew how to communicate their message given the conventions of the day, but there’s no substitute for genuine content and a relevant audience.

The last few things I’ve written about were the best ways to avoid answering important, nagging questions. As always happens, somebody more experienced than me said it better. It helped me solidify what I was thinking: any form of escapism – including aimless travel, being overly critical, and everything in between - is easier than making hard choices in the present. This is why the damned in Dante’s “Inferno” can only see the future and have to ask the living for news: in life, they lived corruptly to escape the present moment, and so that is the law their spirits conformed to. After all, if you’re lying when you say you want to improve your life, it can always wait until tomorrow.

I don’t know that it applies to everyone, but I know that it’s important for me to figure out. Because it’s with me when I go into New York City for work each day and it’s with me when I go home to CT each night.

In case you haven't read the first two parts (they're short) here they are. Part 3 won't make sense without them:

Tiny Cosmic Figure, Part 1
Tiny Cosmic Figure, Part 2 (Acedia)

My friends would say stuff like, “Darby’s is cool, but it’s nothing compared to this bar I went to in Spain,” or, “Don’t get me wrong, I like our friends here, but at home – where I’m from – we just have more in common.” I’d zone out when people start talking about that stuff and the tiny cosmic figure would scratch his head. He didn’t know how to react either, so we’d just wait.

The thing is, it’s all just a way to fight off some kind of spiritual torpor (Dante would call this acedia). That’s what I’m doing when I try to make a moment awkward instead of being polite. That’s what I did when I took an internship that demands 70 hours a week between work and travel. I knew it would be tough, but the tiny cosmic figure was silent when I was considering it. He didn’t comprehend what that entails because all it meant was that I wouldn’t be bored.

That’s why I don’t buy all that, “I was happy back when I was somewhere else,” or “I went to this place and it changed me.” That stuff may be true, but it’s always inflated. I think that’s why everybody talks about travel and why I instinctively tune it out.

But now that I’ve graduated, I don’t want to just keep living in Connecticut. I want to travel, but before that happens I’m going to take my tiny cosmic figure aside. I’m going to invite him outside my head and into the real world. We’re going to talk it through first.

I just don’t want to turn a good moment into a bad one by regretting where I am now.

My favorite moments are awkward moments. If I can’t make a situation enjoyable, the best I can do is to make it awkward. Generally, there are thousands of pounds of pressure pushing me to ruin something or to make something weird. Every so often though, I’ll see what I need to do – to be awkward and to keep people sufficiently distant from me – and I won’t do it. What happens in that moment is nothing short of miraculous.

Somebody will have said something that I think is dumb or obnoxious and I can prove it. I open my mouth to respond, but then I stop. A door in my head opens and some tiny cosmic figure invites me to enter. There, he shows me the consequences of my actions. What it looks like differs form moment to moment, but usually it’s people looking uncomfortable or kind of dazed or pissed. That tiny cosmic figure watches as I see this and makes a face like, “What do you think? Is it worth it?” I meet his gaze maturely, unsmiling and say, “No, I guess it’s not.” And I leave.

Back in the moment, I’m happy. I look around at the conversation going on around me and I chuckle to myself. “They have no idea,” I think. “I could have ruined this moment for them, but I decided not to.” I smile. “You’re welcome,” I think.

Other times, he gives me the go ahead, but not just a little. The tiny cosmic figure only comes out in big moments, so when he’s encouraging me, he’s not just looking up from a paper and saying, “Sure. Go for it, I guess.” He’s running from deep in my mind all the way to the front, waving his arms and yelling, “Do it! Holy fuck! Do that shit! Come on!” So, invariably I do it. He has about a 50-50 success rate (depending how the little guy’s doing that week) but I always follow his advice when he shows up because he never tells me to lie.

If he did, I promise I would stop.

Late last week, my manager and I were brainstorming ideas for a prospective client when I stopped to ask her how we got this opportunity. Why were we getting this chance to pitch ideas to this specific company? She told me that our CEO, Clare, has all these contacts - politicians, best-selling authors, or executives of companies that are household names. A good number of our contracts start with a relationship Clare has built. My manager, half-jokingly, called this supernetworking; it's like the networking you or I do, but with famous people and executives.

The core of this, though, is still just the process of building a relationship. In the short two weeks I've interned here, Clare has instructed multiple times that 'We're all not that different." It's something I've heard before, but seeing that philosophy in action is helping to drive it home for me. We may tend to see a person's gender or notice their race or hear their accent and react in a way that's almost scheduled, but I don't think that's necessary.

When I first meet people, I usually follow a certain protocol until I've built up enough of a rapport to the point where I can show a little more personality. This has served me pretty well up until now. Its helped me to mix with people I might not otherwise have gotten to know, but it can also be alienating.

Networking with companies or employers can be very intimidating because they usually have all the power in the relationship. Career Fairs are the best example of this dynamic: a handful of companies wait around for huge swarms of students to hurriedly make a impression so their resume won't be immediately thrown in the trash. You stuff one more mass-produced business card in your pocket and you move down the line. Nobody behaves genuinely until you all leave the gymnasium and stop walking on egg shells with people you don't even know.

Remembering that each of us isn't so different as to deserve that instant bubble around them is something I want to start doing. It's a more human way to interact with people whether it's in our daily lives, networking, or even SUPERnetworking.