You Are Not All That & Why You Shouldn't Ever Believe It

I grew up in a unique position. My father was powerful - at least within our family's community - he was the minister of a 350-year-old church in Cambridge, MA. I sat at the "right arm of power" in that little realm. People liked me. I never trusted it because I knew it was due in part to where I sat in the community in relation to my father. To be fair, people were (for the most part) not explicit about this connection and didn't try to use it in a manipulative way but my position put me front and center.

I learned a few things from this:

• A person's position in a system is often more important than their own personality/skills/value in determining the amount of attention, influence, and popularity they get.
• Attention feeds on itself.
• People who get a lot of attention shouldn't take themselves too seriously - if you believe that you deserve the attention because of something you did yourself, you are often deceiving yourself.
• I really dislike obsequiousness - I'm not looking to form a posse - because it doesn't typically add any real value. It tends to be hollow because people are drafting on the attention you are getting.

The downside of this lesson is that I often discount people that genuinely want to connect with me but I think that is a fair trade for maintaining a realistic sense my own value. I've realized over the years that other people never learned this lesson and they feed off of the attention they garner because of their position vs. their value - essentially looking in a fun house mirror and believing that what they see is real. That reflection, of course, does contain elements of reality but it is deceptive.

Now that online social networks have enabled people to collect friends and followers far beyond what they would be able to do in the real world, it seems difficult for people to separate out the fun house mirror from the real mirror. For me, the real mirror is found in the in-person (i.e. offline) connections I make and the value I produce for which others are willing to pay or exchange for other value. It is perhaps why I distrust Facebook 'likes' and many freemium models - in those environments it is very hard to understand who really cares about what you are doing and people who are tailgating.

If you work in this space, it is worth evaluating both for yourself and for the organizations with whom you work how you determine what is real and what is drafting.

Picture by Susan NYC

Comments

[Bduhon]

Rachel, Excellent post and a point of view that I wholeheartedly agree with. It was amazing how many folks were very, very nice to me when I edited a magazine. Being an editor is sorta like being the bouncer at a great nightclub; you decide who gets in. You can easily fall into the trap of thinking you're brilliant, because most folks will flatter you endlessly.

After a while, you can tell a bit who's sincere and who's not; but, man, I sometimes felt like the smartest guy in the room; and I ain't that smart. It can be seductive.

I just always told myself if there were a monkey sitting in front of them, picking at their hair for mites, they'd be telling the monkey it was the best mite picker ever so long as it lead to coverage in print -- or online.

[Rhappe]

Bryant - that is a perfect illustration of my point and it is very seductive if you are not self-aware of it. It's very easy to believe that it really is all about you. And it's not to say, we all suck and are no good, just that you need to take the wider view of why people are paying attention to you.
Thanks for the comment!
Rachel

[SameerPatel]

Nice. True of communities as well as the traditional analyst business where many mistake the root cause of respect, admiration, popularity etc etc.

Nothing wrong with it - its the way the world turns. Just as long as they can be as smart about processing it as you were as a child. :)