A huge part of success is self-promotion. You have to know how to advertise yourself, how to network, and how to build up a reputation that precedes you. This is hard work, make no mistake, but it is essential to success.
What we’re effectively looking at here is marketing your self, or generating hype. Yes, I know I said a nasty four-letter word there, or at least that’s how a few of you reading this will interpret it. Hype is just marketing with glamour, really. Those who complain the most about it are the ones who got burned the worst by it because they weren’t clever or experienced enough to temper their enthusiasm with a touch of realism.
In other words, the people who are against hype are the rubes who fell for it. An unpleasant idea, but it’s a simple truth. We hate that which we perceive to be a threat and want it destroyed.
I understand that hype is still going to have certain negative connotations. So we’ll just call what we’ll be discussing today by a different name: mastering the delicate art of shameless self-promotion.
Let’s start with the first thing you can start working on: you personally.
Lesson 1 – Transform Yourself
We’ve all met braggarts. You know the type. The kind of moron who just has to tell you all about how much money he makes in a year, and how many push-ups he can do (always done when there are attractive young ladies within earshot), and how he used to live in LA, and how many countries he’s been to that you can’t pronounce… Don’t you just want to punch those guys? I mean like really punch them like Edward Norton did to the blonde guy in that one scene in Fight Club?
What’s the problem there? That’s rather shameless self-promotion isn’t it? Well, it’s shameless, I’ll give you that. But bragging isn’t self-promotion. It’s a desperate gamble for attention and validation. We brag because we want to justify our existence.
You can’t persuade people by fact-ing them to death. It just doesn’t work that way.
Humans are visual creatures, and spoken language is actually a highly inefficient means of communicating the complexity of our thoughts and emotions. This is why brevity is the soul of wit.
More to the point, humans respond better to spectacles, symbols, and action than any amount of words. That’s what you have to understand. To be successful, you must be larger than life not by your words, but by the image you inspire.
King Louis XIV, arguably France’s greatest monarch understood this exceptionally well. He said very little to his courtiers, and wrapped everything up in pomp and ritual. He was referred to as the Sun King, a title that had no true meaning, but was interpreted in countless ways by those who heard it. The symbol of the sun held a majesty, beauty, and power that no canned rhetoric could match. The symbol spoke louder than any words.
This is what you must do. You must reinvent your persona to be larger than life. If you read my Who Are You? articles, then you should already know something about becoming the best possible you. Now you need to project that to the rest of the world.
Why is David Blaine considered such a hero to the people of Manhattan? A number of reasons, really, not the least of which is his endurance stunts. He creates the image of a superhero. He’s something bigger than all of us.
Criss Angel understood this and exploited it early on, making himself out to be something superhuman and not quite of our world. But while David Blaine created the presence of a mysterious stranger, Criss was a dynamic and visually shocking spectacle. However, these days he’s started to ignore this principle and the mystique he once surrounded himself with has dissipated. Make no mistake, he still sticks with a distinctive persona, but one may argue that he’s risking over-exposure and is starting to shed elements that helped his rise to fame in the first place.
So how do you make this work for you? Think of the power of the symbol. As a personal illustration, I surround myself in the imagery of wolves. Even my singing voice, my stare, and the way I walk have been described as wolfish and lupine by friends and just random people I’ve met. My nickname on campus for about a year was actually Werewolf. My musical project is called Deus Lupus (translated: Wolf God). I play up the mystique of the wolf as a symbol for everything it’s worth.
How can you make that work? What symbols can you wrap yourself in to create a powerful spectacle?
The important thing is to maintain control of your persona. Many people are content to go through life in the roles that others assign to them. Though I’m a huge fan of heavy metal, I generally dislike hanging out with most metalheads. Why? Because they’re content to conform to the stereotype of being petulant, boorish, misogynists with an anti-mainstream attitude (despite shopping at Hot Topic), and borderline misanthropy. Don’t get me wrong, not all of them are like that, but stereotypes have to come from somewhere, sadly. The metalheads that I do hang out with are open to any music you put in front of them. They love metal, but they don’t let it dominate their lives.
Humans have something called the reticular activating system. This allows us to carry out involuntary reflexes such as breathing and also tune out that which is not immediately important to us such as the feeling of our clothes on our skin. Without it, we would suffer from sensory overload and most likely go insane. This doesn’t just apply to clinical stimuli, though. We tune out and ignore that which is average, mundane, banal, and just that flaming ordinary. Think about it. When you’re walking down the street, how many people do you actually remember the next day? As you’re reading this, did you consciously notice the gentle hum of the cooling fan in your computer?
The reason you have to create these spectacles is to avoid falling victim to the reticular activating system.
People flock to that which breaks the veil of the mundane. Biologists studying elephants have learned that the reason these creatures are almost perpetually moving or performing more complex tasks unlike other grazing animals such as wild cattle is because of their intelligence. Because they’re capable of more complex thought, they face a different kind of problem: boredom. Sentient creatures have to avoid boredom for the sake of their mental health. The lesson to learn here is that by creating a larger than life persona, you give people the chance to push back boredom a little longer.
Erik “Mystery” von Markovik is a modern master of this. He’s the kind of guy all heads turn to when he enters a room. People come to him because he’s something different, unexpected, and dynamic, and they hope to be able to catch some of that by hanging out with him, if even for just a few minutes.
Other examples of the power of symbolism and a dynamic self-image include Alice Cooper, The Misfits, Robert Rodriguez, and Marilyn Monroe.
So now you’ve created a powerful self-image that you project to the rest of the world. Now what?
What we’re effectively looking at here is marketing your self, or generating hype. Yes, I know I said a nasty four-letter word there, or at least that’s how a few of you reading this will interpret it. Hype is just marketing with glamour, really. Those who complain the most about it are the ones who got burned the worst by it because they weren’t clever or experienced enough to temper their enthusiasm with a touch of realism.
In other words, the people who are against hype are the rubes who fell for it. An unpleasant idea, but it’s a simple truth. We hate that which we perceive to be a threat and want it destroyed.
I understand that hype is still going to have certain negative connotations. So we’ll just call what we’ll be discussing today by a different name: mastering the delicate art of shameless self-promotion.
Let’s start with the first thing you can start working on: you personally.
Lesson 1 – Transform Yourself
We’ve all met braggarts. You know the type. The kind of moron who just has to tell you all about how much money he makes in a year, and how many push-ups he can do (always done when there are attractive young ladies within earshot), and how he used to live in LA, and how many countries he’s been to that you can’t pronounce… Don’t you just want to punch those guys? I mean like really punch them like Edward Norton did to the blonde guy in that one scene in Fight Club?
What’s the problem there? That’s rather shameless self-promotion isn’t it? Well, it’s shameless, I’ll give you that. But bragging isn’t self-promotion. It’s a desperate gamble for attention and validation. We brag because we want to justify our existence.
You can’t persuade people by fact-ing them to death. It just doesn’t work that way.
Humans are visual creatures, and spoken language is actually a highly inefficient means of communicating the complexity of our thoughts and emotions. This is why brevity is the soul of wit.
More to the point, humans respond better to spectacles, symbols, and action than any amount of words. That’s what you have to understand. To be successful, you must be larger than life not by your words, but by the image you inspire.
King Louis XIV, arguably France’s greatest monarch understood this exceptionally well. He said very little to his courtiers, and wrapped everything up in pomp and ritual. He was referred to as the Sun King, a title that had no true meaning, but was interpreted in countless ways by those who heard it. The symbol of the sun held a majesty, beauty, and power that no canned rhetoric could match. The symbol spoke louder than any words.
This is what you must do. You must reinvent your persona to be larger than life. If you read my Who Are You? articles, then you should already know something about becoming the best possible you. Now you need to project that to the rest of the world.
Why is David Blaine considered such a hero to the people of Manhattan? A number of reasons, really, not the least of which is his endurance stunts. He creates the image of a superhero. He’s something bigger than all of us.
Criss Angel understood this and exploited it early on, making himself out to be something superhuman and not quite of our world. But while David Blaine created the presence of a mysterious stranger, Criss was a dynamic and visually shocking spectacle. However, these days he’s started to ignore this principle and the mystique he once surrounded himself with has dissipated. Make no mistake, he still sticks with a distinctive persona, but one may argue that he’s risking over-exposure and is starting to shed elements that helped his rise to fame in the first place.
So how do you make this work for you? Think of the power of the symbol. As a personal illustration, I surround myself in the imagery of wolves. Even my singing voice, my stare, and the way I walk have been described as wolfish and lupine by friends and just random people I’ve met. My nickname on campus for about a year was actually Werewolf. My musical project is called Deus Lupus (translated: Wolf God). I play up the mystique of the wolf as a symbol for everything it’s worth.
How can you make that work? What symbols can you wrap yourself in to create a powerful spectacle?
The important thing is to maintain control of your persona. Many people are content to go through life in the roles that others assign to them. Though I’m a huge fan of heavy metal, I generally dislike hanging out with most metalheads. Why? Because they’re content to conform to the stereotype of being petulant, boorish, misogynists with an anti-mainstream attitude (despite shopping at Hot Topic), and borderline misanthropy. Don’t get me wrong, not all of them are like that, but stereotypes have to come from somewhere, sadly. The metalheads that I do hang out with are open to any music you put in front of them. They love metal, but they don’t let it dominate their lives.
Humans have something called the reticular activating system. This allows us to carry out involuntary reflexes such as breathing and also tune out that which is not immediately important to us such as the feeling of our clothes on our skin. Without it, we would suffer from sensory overload and most likely go insane. This doesn’t just apply to clinical stimuli, though. We tune out and ignore that which is average, mundane, banal, and just that flaming ordinary. Think about it. When you’re walking down the street, how many people do you actually remember the next day? As you’re reading this, did you consciously notice the gentle hum of the cooling fan in your computer?
The reason you have to create these spectacles is to avoid falling victim to the reticular activating system.
People flock to that which breaks the veil of the mundane. Biologists studying elephants have learned that the reason these creatures are almost perpetually moving or performing more complex tasks unlike other grazing animals such as wild cattle is because of their intelligence. Because they’re capable of more complex thought, they face a different kind of problem: boredom. Sentient creatures have to avoid boredom for the sake of their mental health. The lesson to learn here is that by creating a larger than life persona, you give people the chance to push back boredom a little longer.
Erik “Mystery” von Markovik is a modern master of this. He’s the kind of guy all heads turn to when he enters a room. People come to him because he’s something different, unexpected, and dynamic, and they hope to be able to catch some of that by hanging out with him, if even for just a few minutes.
Other examples of the power of symbolism and a dynamic self-image include Alice Cooper, The Misfits, Robert Rodriguez, and Marilyn Monroe.
So now you’ve created a powerful self-image that you project to the rest of the world. Now what?
. I read through about half of that and have to print the rest and give a more detailed response tomorrow. As for now, all I can relate this to is a "Job Interview". When giving an interview, you have to sell yourself. You have to promote yourself and make your possible future employer WANT to hire you. For self promotion, you have to make the people watching/listening to you want to see more of you, etc.
