Generation Meh

Whenever someone asks me about my personal brand, I’m tempted to give them a link to the scene below from The Wire. In it, Marlo Stanfield declares that he’s ready to take on all comers in order to defend his place on the street. “My name is my name,” he growls.

And my name is my name. Since launching Secret Agent Research, I’ve gotten a fair bit of advice – both online and in person – on how to market it and how to use my existing profile and platforms to demonstrate my credibility and my expertise and how to be on my very best behavior in order to get the nice men and women in the audience to open their wallets to me. Apparently, becoming an entrepreneur means that your life is now one never-ending first date during which you must constantly be on guard to make the best impression possible, while clenching your hands into fists under the table and praying to the late Helen Gurley Brown that you’ve done enough ‘right’ to qualify for a second date.

Well, I suck at dating. I’m too enthusiastic, too aloof, don’t ask enough questions, ask too many, inevitably drop food into my cleavage, etc. Instead of meeting for coffee, I once drove across the country with a stranger. When it comes to behaving in a strictly prescribed way in order to bring about a narrowly-defined outcome, I balk. This would also explain why I don’t diet and can’t knit.

What I can do pretty damn well is act like myself. I can show up, speak knowledgeably and enthusiastically about what it is that I do and my credentials, ask people questions about what it is that they do, brainstorm ideas, tell anecdotes, offer opinions, gesticulate wildly. And I can WRITE. I can tell stories, deliver analysis, draw lines in the sand, dole out witticisms and thoughtful perspective. If you don’t like the me that comes across in person or on the page, there is not a whole lot I can do about that. I can strive not to interrupt you when you talk or to avoid penning all of my articles in text speak, but there is no amount of judicious brand management or personal marketing that can make you like the person behind and under it if you just don’t agree with how I see the world and my place in it.

And ultimately, I don’t need to get better at marketing; I need to get better at prospecting. We all do. You can’t, as an entrepreneur, a writer, a job hunter or just a human being, sell a feeling of ease or trust. You can only sell yourself as you are and work to get increasingly more astute at identifying prospective buyers, readers, employers, friends and lovers from those who aren’t a fit with what you’re offering. It’s not about crafting the perfect message, it’s about talking (in your own imperfect way) to the right audience. And it’s about never ever forgetting your name and making sure you’re always willing to stand behind it.

I started a business. It’s called Secret Agent Research. This is how it happened.

A few months ago, I was sitting in my windowless office in the middle of nowhere. I had just received a stellar annual review and my boss was going to recommend that I assume more management duties, but he warned me not to get my hopes up – our company had exactly one female senior manager and only six female employees on the white-collar side. I had just finished almost single-handedly negotiating a $5M+ supply contract that was going to put us back in the black after a year of our facility standing idle and I knew this wouldn’t be reflected in so much as a dollar extra on my pay check. And I was dealing with the fallout of a break-up that came completely out of left field. Oh, and I had just fired my first therapist after he told me that my biological clock should be my biggest worry. Something snapped. I realized that I was hiding out from life and that the longer I continued to do so, the more difficult it would be to re-engage with it when I finally decided I was ready. I realized that I was too damn ambitious to put my future success in someone else’s hands or to pin my hopes on the possibility of a bigger, better job that I needed to convince someone to offer me. In addition to Forbes, I’d been doing client consulting/copywriting on the side for a few years and I decided that if I was ever going to take the plunge to be my own boss, there was absolutely no time like the present. It was never going to be easy or safe or pain-free and I was losing precious time waiting for it to be. I bought a domain, got a lawyer to set up my LLC and consulted the most pedantic tax accountant in town. And then I gave my notice. No drama, no hard feelings. It was just time.

I’m writing this from Montreal. After I left my job, I decided my life could use even more risk, so I embraced location independence. I found a cheap sublet in the most European city in North America, packed up what I could fit in two suitcases and haven’t looked back. It’s difficult to overstate what a difference working for myself makes in how I see my career. I walk a little taller and when someone asks what I do, I’m proud as hell to say that I run my own business. I’m happy to work outrageous hours and network like a fiend, because I’m working on projects that I’ve chosen and I’m connecting with amazing, like-minded people. No longer am I a petitioner, I’m a peer.

Not that I’m not scared out of my mind by times. Like when I saw what looked like a huge tarantula skitter across my living room floor and into the spare room (I locked the door and haven’t gone in there since and that was six weeks ago). Or when I can’t fall asleep at night because I’m alternately fretting about someone being able to shatter the glass in my front or back doors and walk right into my apartment and the possibility of growing old alone. Or when I realize that I have no idea where in the world I’m going to be after April 30 when my sublet is up. And not that I’m not really, really lonely by times. My French can charitably be described as cavemanesque and being unable to use words to conduct the basic interactions that lead to human connection kind of sucks. A lot. But the fear and the loneliness is manageable and it’s sort of the point. I feel it, it doesn’t kill me, I get up the next morning knowing that the next time I feel it, it probably won’t be as bad and even if it is, I survived it before and I can do it again. Lather, rinse, repeat. If there was a way over, under, around, or through something that didn’t involve just doing it, I would have found it long ago. There isn’t. There is only doing. Doing what you want to do, doing what you have to do, doing what will make you happy, doing what you know will hurt. That’s it.

Fundamentally, this whole process isn’t about breaking free from my cubicle life (I actually had my own office) or embracing my true destiny as a captain of industry. It’s about building trust in my own judgment and faith in the fact that I’m capable of knowing and implementing what’s best for me. And right now, what’s best is launching a market research firm from the comfort (well, relative comfort; this place doesn’t have a couch) of a Montreal apartment, going to yoga in the middle of the day and working on projects and brainstorming ideas with other smart, funny, accomplished women (like her, her, her and her). And being okay with having a giant spider for a roommate (still working on that part).

My shoulders have always been a trouble spot. My sisters used to make fun of the way I would try on new clothes at Christmas – scrunch my shoulders all the way up to my ears and then ask if the hitched-up garment looked okay. I even sleep in that posture. Everyone knows that crossing your arms over your chest is a classic defensive stance, but I guess I’ve always figured there was no similar law against pulling up your shoulders and tucking your head down like a turtle. There should be – it looks weird and makes your joints ache.

Whenever the yoga instructor offers encouragement for everyone to drop their shoulders, I assume she’s specifically referring to my poor posture. And, indeed, when it’s time for hands-on adjustments, invariably the teacher du jour tries to push the tension out of my shoulder blades. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, they just spring right back up.

Yes, I do yoga now. I have gone 11 times in 14 days. It was very simple. I paid a fee and I go to class. Two weeks ago, I wasn’t someone who practices yoga. Now, I am. I don’t feel more spiritual. I don’t feel more in tune with my body. My legs frequently ache and my flexibility is laughable and I don’t like when other people put their mats too close to mine. No, I feel good because I made a commitment. I decided to do a thing and then I did the thing and I keep doing the thing. And I made it a thing that it would hurt me not to do. If I don’t go to yoga, where else will I get exercise? And if I don’t exercise, my health and fitness will suffer. If I don’t go to yoga, I will just work all day without interruption. And if I work all day without interruption, I will burn out quickly and it will get difficult to force myself to go outside even when I need to. So, I go to yoga.

Not all changes are so easy of course. Going from someone who isn’t a world-renowned neurologist to someone who is takes a whole lot more effort than mastering downward dog, but I like this principle. There is something hopeful in the idea that you can always add and subtract and try on and take off, that your story isn’t immutable. If you want to be a person who does yoga, do yoga. Congrats, you’re there! If you want to be nicer to your mother, you can just start being nicer to her. Maybe it matters why you weren’t nicer to her before and maybe it doesn’t, but even understanding that won’t help you to be nicer to her now. The only thing that will? Doing it.

So often, we get knotted up in trying to figure out why we aren’t A or we are B. And as valuable as figuring that out is to our understanding of ourselves, it doesn’t actually help us become A or stop being B. Knowing can’t substitute for doing or changing. There are probably some excellent reasons why you’ve been afraid to learn to drive, but if what you desperately want is to get your license and drive up the PCH, all the self-knowledge in the world won’t bring that to fruition. You need to get behind the wheel and practice. Understanding precisely why you’ve sabotaged all your previous romantic relationships won’t actually be much of a comfort to you when your current one goes south because you failed to work on it, will it? And there might be a well-sourced laundry list of explanations as to why you’re failing half of your classes, but being able to list them all in ascending order of importance isn’t going to wow your professors into passing you. What good is insight without application?

The only thing holding me back from being a person who did yoga was the fact that I didn’t do yoga. And that was a pretty easy fix. The shoulders will come with time.

You have to save yourself. Not Jesus, not Buddha, not Dr. Oz, not a new job or your next relationship. You can get help – get therapy, get a dietician, get an education – but you’re still the one who has to sign on the dotted line. It’s both liberating and terrifying to contemplate. I can rescue myself and if I don’t, I’ll sink to the bottom of the Atlantic faster than the Titanic.

And it comes down to choice.

There is a difference between choosing not to do something and being genuinely unable to manage it. Is my body physically capable of running a marathon? Yes. Have I chosen to commit the time and effort required to train it to perform this task competently? No.  It’s not that I can’t run one, I just don’t choose to do what it takes to run one. Most of the things we believe we can’t do and we tell ourselves we can’t do fall into this same category. There are very, very few examples of achievements or undertaking that are just impossible for us, end of story. I can’t fly. We can’t cure cancer. You can’t grow three inches taller as an adult.

We always have choices; it’s just that some of the choices are difficult or time-consuming or unpalatable or labor-intensive, so we’d rather pretend they don’t exist. We do a quick mental cost-benefit analysis, decide we’re not willing to spend what is required and deem whatever it is beyond the scope of our abilities to tackle and then we sleep easier at night. Harsh, but true. I genuinely worried that removing that safeguard of being able to say I simply couldn’t manage X from my own thinking would lead to a tidal wave of guilt. If I could do all the things and I wasn’t doing all the things, clearly I was slacking.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, in recent weeks, I’ve started shifting my mindset away from looking a life as a capricious and overwhelming storm and me as a rag doll it tosses around. I’ve been realizing that I’ve been giving away my power and my agency by telling myself a story in which I have no choices and all of my actions are reactive and instinctual rather than deliberate and thoughtful. I have to do X. I wish I had the strength for Y, but I just don’t. Contrast that with I could be doing A, B or C, but for the present, X meets my immediate needs. This doesn’t mean it is a long-term commitment; I can reassess its value whenever I want and/or change course. How much more empowering is it to say, “My immediate needs are shelter, food and student loan payments. My job provides me with the capacity to meet these needs, therefore I choose to commit my time to working at it” than it is to say, “I hate my job, but I can’t find anything else. The economy sucks and I’m just stuck here.”

In both cases, you’re working at a job that is less than ideal, but in the first example, you’re asserting your agency and acknowledging this is a choice you make in order to derive certain benefits and in the second, you’re denying your agency and casting yourself as a victim of circumstances who needs outside intervention to succeed. Guess which version of you sleeps better every Sunday night?

Waiting around for rescue is demoralizing and anxiety-inducing. You feel as if your happiness is at the mercy of the universe’s benevolence and a dose of blind luck and you have no way of predicting when or even if you’ll ever be graced with either. The best you can do is squint at the horizon and hope to see the Coast Guard. And that’s why it’s just as maddening as it is relieving when you snap out of it one day and realize that this whole damn time you’ve been sitting on the pile of boards that you could jury-rig together to make a raft to float yourself off this sad desert island for good. Sure, you might have to use a coconut as an improvised hammer, but you have the carpentry skills to make it work.  We all do. You have to save yourself. No one else will do it for you. Start building.

My parents have two dogs. The old one is lethargic and entitled, but the younger one is a survivor. She can left herself out of the house, do her business and then come back to the door and bark to be let in. She can use her paw to sweep food scraps from the counter directly into her mouth. You can throw a single popcorn kernel 10 feet in the air and she can catch it. My parents joke that they could go away for a week and leave the dog to fend for herself and she’d not only have fed herself the entire time, she’d probably figure out how to start a fire in the fireplace, too.

I’m like that dog. Exactly, like that dog. I have always been self-sufficient. The little girl who never needed help with her math homework grew up to be the young woman whose boss frequently jokes that she’ll steal his job. I always have money in the bank. I am a model employee. I will give you reasoned, practical advice about your problems and I will never ask for anything in return. Get rewarded and lauded for your ability to take care of business enough and you start to believe that’s the value you bring to relationships. You start to believe that your self-sufficiency is what people must like best about you and if you take that away or let it slip, that people will abandon you. If you are not able to solve all your own problems and theirs too and to do it all with a smile on your face, you aren’t worth bothering with. Your value is in doing and not just being and if you stop doing, there goes your value. It’s a sad, miserly way to look at human relationships and absolutely impossible to live up to. Just because I never ask, doesn’t mean I don’t need support or attention or help, as much as I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise.

But because I’ve never learned to ask for support or attention or help, I’m laughably bad at it now – a time when I could badly use all of them. A lifetime of training myself to jury-rig a solo solution has left me pretty ill-equipped to request a little emotional assistance. Where someone else might be able to communicate, “I’ve had a terrible week. I just want to veg out. Do you want to come over and watch movies?” in actual words, I can only do the equivalent of an infant wailing in her crib. Why yes, I am teething, but I can’t get that point across. All I can do is scream myself red in the face and hope that people can parse the true meaning from these often non sequitur outbursts. Not very healthy and not very effective.

I’m getting better, though. Yesterday was a pretty terrible day, but I managed to reach out to two friends, one old and one new. The old one reminded me that we’ve been close for a decade and she has my back no matter what. And the new one asked me if I wanted to talk. Instead of brushing it off and telling her I was fine, I said that yes, actually I WOULD like to talk. We chatted for an hour about personal branding BS, the journo life and Jeffrey Dahmer. It helped.

I keep reminding myself of eulogies when I struggle with being able to ask, to expect, to accept. Have you ever heard the recently deceased praised for his self-sufficiency? Bob was a man who always handled his own business. Bob never asked anything of his fellow man. Bob never burdened others with a need for companionship or support. Of course not. Being an island is not a praiseworthy quality. Being too proud or scared to ask for help is not something to be celebrated; it’s something to be pitied. We relate to each other on the basis of our flaws, our weaknesses and our needs even more than we do our triumphs and our successes. I have just as many of the former as the latter. And it’s about time I shared them. In fact, I need to.