Are you a people pleaser?

I had an idea that I couldn’t forget.

What if you were meant to be very special, but you found a way to suppress it. Maybe you were sensitive and you saw your greatness  as something that made other people uncomfortable and that made you afraid to express yourself.

You could have been king Leonidas, but instead, you decided to quietly do what was expected. You went to school, you studied, you progressed along a mediocre path, fuelled by approval. You lived a life that was prescribed by Life As We Know It, never realizing that there is so much more out there for you and that other people’s approval (especially from authority figures) is tragically overrated.

Others’ approval is overrated. This could be you.

Now I pose the big questions: Are you a people-pleaser? Are you living for yourself or for somebody else?

Nobody says that you should go so far as to do a Tucker Max, but there is a lesson you can learn from his success. Being yourself is a uniquely empowering experience.

I wanted to share this idea, so I wrote about a man called Martin Short. Martin is repressed in the way that I’ve described, but he thinks that he’s happy. There is a trigger event, however, that sets him off and provokes change.

I wonder if you’ll experience an event like that. Maybe reading my book could be such an event. It may even help me one day outsell Tucker Max.

Maybe allegory doesn’t float your boat. Either way, I urge you to justify your major life decisions. The ones that seem to make the most sense are the ones that you should examine the most closely.

An unexamined life is not likely to be great. Go out and discover some different ways in which you could live before you fall into that traditional career or default lifestyle pattern. Here are three tips:

1. Open yourself up to new experiences

Other people live differently. Travelling and observing a different way of life can teach you a lot about what is possible. Eating different cuisine, using different soap. Small things will show you worlds you didn’t know existed.

2. Observe yourself thinking and deliberately disrupt your patterns

Ask yourself why you feel a certain way. When you normally do something defensive (like curl up and eat ice cream), force yourself to go out and do something else. This might surprise you.

3. Read some weird books/blogs/articles and expose yourself to new ideas

Could this be self-promotion? I’d better not say anything more.

-Nick

Shameless self promotion

Look at me on my soapbox

Like Frankenstein’s monster, my blog takes its first breaths.

It may be a characteristic of many writers, but I think of myself as a bit of an iconoclast. I like turning ideas upside down and inside out. My life hasn’t followed a conventional path thus far, so by necessity I have convinced myself that this somehow makes me special.

What do I mean by conventional? Probably being an accountant. If you’re an accountant, please drop me a comment so my readers can laugh at my attempts to demean you and your attempts to defend yourself.

Truth is, I’m a desperate man. I have to write. My thoughts are like wild animals, exotic specimens. Gorillas with beaks and dolphins with goat balls. I am reaching critical mass, so I am expressing myself forcibly through novels.

This blog might help a bit as well.

Oh yes, speaking of novels, I’ve written one called Timebomb for you to try out. I wrote it especially for you. That’s right, you. Don’t believe me? Read the novel and prove me wrong.

On this blog, in addition to shamelessly promoting my novels, I will air my thoughts about writing, life and whatever else I feel compelled to share.

Did I mention my book Timebomb? I’ll tell you more about it in one of my next posts.

-Nick