Brooke Allen, of whom I wrote before, sent one of his famous e-mails this morning, and I think it's worth quoting some of it. (He gave me his permission.) For those of you who didn't read the previous post on Brooke, or who can't be bothered to read it now, Brooke spent the month of February coming up with his own personal solution for failures in the job market - in particular, the job market for computer programmers. He offered to train 38 unemployed programmers in a programming language they didn't know, with the promise of hiring one (if one was good enough), and is still trying to find jobs for the rest of them. But along the way, he taught them a lot more than a new programming language. The lessons continue:
You are to the world a supplier of "youness". That is to say, whatever you do...then you want to work as hard as you can to be as much and the best you that you can be. (Some people call this self-actualization.) Don't be discouraged if at certain times, there doesn't seem to be a visible demand for "youness" and whatever happens, don't get pissed off that there isn't a demand, because other people, if they are to be free, must be allowed to make a choice.
When I read this, I immediately thought about blogging, which seems to me all about creating a market for "youness." As a writer, particularly a writer who's been paid by the word, putting out an endless stream of words on the internet, for free, is somewhat anti-intuitive. Why bother, some of my friends wondered.
There was the hope that it might lead to a paying column - a hope that was diminished by discovering how many really clever people were already out here writing great stuff, and not getting paid for it either. There was also the idea of creating a "brand" - and certainly, if Google juice is any measure, my brand has gone up in the world since January. I was amused to discover that Debra Galant Explains the Universe came up second - in the whole world - when somebody typed "black bear Sopranos" into Google the other day. ("Who beat you?" my husband asked. Actually, it was something called FootnoteTV. But I beat HBO. Ha!)
Maybe "brand" is just another way of saying "youness."
But I think it goes beyond brand and beyond Google juice. It's about getting my "me-ness" out there, in the world. And it's about figuring out what my "me-ness" is. It's about getting better at it - finding more about what I want to write about, and how I want to write it. It's certainly also about networking, which I didn't understand when I started, but do now: blogrolls, links, comments.
Here's something else Brooke wrote in his e-mail today:
- Work all the time (work every day except for play days).
- You can't control how much you are paid.
- You only control whether you participate.
- Work your network to try to build demand for you.
I interviewed a lot of the people who took part in Brooke's hiring experiment, and one of the things that most of them said was how much going into Jersey City, hanging out with a group of other unemployed programmers and learning a new language beat sitting around in their apartments waiting for the phone to ring. Even if it wasn't a job, it was being "out there" - making friends and contacts.
I think the blogosphere - for writers, artists, pundits and experts of all stripes - is very much the same. You could write in your journal and hide it in a drawer. Or you could write it here, and find yourself in the middle of the greatest interlinked free-for-all of ideas the world has ever seen.
Brooke would say: work for free, show the world how good you are, work for free for more than one person and if you're good, eventually one of those people will pay for your time so you stop giving it away to the other guy.
Write on, noble bloggers. Paint your personalities over cyberspace. Work your network to try to build demand for you.
And by the way, I am available for writing jobs, big and small.