What is Your Price For Success?
A few years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to find a comedian hotter than Dave Chappelle. His Comedy Central show was clever, at times completely vulgar and inappropriate, and a huge (HUGE) hit. It was certainly not a surprise at all that he came back with the cast to do a second season. Good money would have placed the bet on the Dave Chappelle show lasting many seasons, in fact.
But that's not what happened.
When it came time for work and discussions to begin on the third season, Chappelle quit the show, left Comedy Central, and in fact he even left the country. He spent a fair amount of time in Africa, leaving many of his fans (and many other people besides) to wonder what would cause an extremely successful man to drop ship and throw it all away. Was he crazy? Was he on drugs?
Chappelle appeared to answer all of these questions in a rather unlikely place – Inside the Actor's Studio with James Lipton. This clip, if you skip to about the 4 minute mark, is one of the most memorable statements you'll ever hear about both Hollywood and success:
To watch the video Click Here
In case you didn't click over to watch, essentially Chappelle makes the case that Hollywood is really sick. Really messed up. It can take people tough enough to make it to stardom and reduce them to insanity. Earlier in the interview, Chappelle said that when he told his dad that he wanted to be an actor, his father said, "Ok, but set a price you're willing to pay, and once it goes above that price, cut all ties." That is what Dave Chapelle did.
Sure, Chappelle had tons of success. Tons of money. But he also had strangers coming up to him quoting scenes with cuss words with Chappelle's children standing right there. He had too many expectations. He had to give up too much of his creativity. It expanded beyond the price he wanted to pay, even with all of that fame he got, even with all of that money.
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The 20 songs the Beatles wrote about Social Media engagement
I know that a lot of people comment on how far ahead of their time the Beatles were, especially John, who was one of the first rock stars I know of to use fame to actually try to change the world. However, what *very* few people realize is that the Beatles actually wrote a lot of their songs about Social Media, which seems weird since it didn't exist yet. Even weirder is that a lot of the songs they wrote dealt with engagement online, which I mean…it works out great for me and my Engagement Series, but who woulda thunk??
You don't believe they were that far ahead of their times, eh? Oh ye cynics. Well, alright. Let me lay this out for you.
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Why Social Media is like the ring of power
Are you a fan of Lord of the Rings? I'm quite a fan. Read all the books, even The Silmarillion (which I need to read again, to be honest). I loved the movies even though a lot of Tolkien purists had problems with them. I love the story, the different types of figures and characters that take part in the story. I just think it's all fabulous. So, when it occurred to me that Social Media is like the ring of power, you can imagine how thrilled I was and how excited I was to write this post!
Oh, you want me to explain this a bit more. Fair enough.
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Are you listening to yourself?
I had quite an enlightening experience the other day. I was (I'm sure you'll find this hard to imagine) talking to someone about what I had most recently read in the Mark Twain autobiography. I thought the content was entirely fascinating, of course, and well, there was no QUESTION that I was telling the story in a most engaging manner.
All of a sudden, the person I was talking to stopped me and said, "Um, are you doing a presentation? Is this a lecture?"
The comment was made lovingly, but it raised a good point. I had become so entirely involved in what I was saying that I had lost track of how long I had been raging on. That was live and in person.
When you're blogging, you can't see facial expressions of people who are reading. You can't hear the tapping of fingers or the exclamations of "OK, geeze, let's move on to something else!" That can be great for you on the blogging/writing side, but it can hurt you without you even noticing on the engagement side.
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Lets talk about favors
One of the more common topics out in the Blogosphere and in the world of Social Media can be summed up in one word – favors. On the one hand you have people who are asking for favors and rationalizing why they should be allowed to ask for favors. On the other side are people who feel like they are asked constantly for favors with no respect or civility.
From where I sit, everybody involved in this argument makes some good points, but I think frustration clouds over better judgment in these kinds of scenarios, so often we see posts or tweets that go a little beyond, "Here's what I think." I thought I would take a stab at kind of presenting both sides of the argument here in a pretty rational way, and then you can see if that helps you sort this issue out a bit.
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Engagement doesn't matter if you're not doing something with it
Have you ever heard of a woman named Olive Logan? I had never heard of her either, but I encountered her tale in Mark Twain's autobiography (by the way, this autobiography is close to 500 pages long, so get used to the Mark Twain references!) and her story really stuck with me.
Mark Twain met Ms. Logan when he was on the speaking circuit around Boston. She fancied herself a speaker too, for a short while. It all started because Olive had begun telegraphing newspapers around the country about every little detail in her life. "Olive Logan purchased a dress today." "Olive Logan is quite under the weather." Soon, people got really used to seeing these updates everyday, and Ms. Logan became a celebrity. This drove Mark Twain absolutely crazy because, obviously, she had not *done* anything. So, when people would say, "Oh, did you hear about what Olive did?" Twain would ask them, "Yeah, so, why is she famous? What did she do?"
He reported that his friends would become "dumbstruck." They had no idea why she mattered.
Could this fate be awaiting you?
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