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Your Past’s Role in Future Work

February 21, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I read a remarkable story today.

Pirated copies of the movie Argo are being viewed on TVs, laptops and at internet cafes across Iran, riveting almost everyone’s attention there on a shared history that has been difficult to recall with any clarity given the hardship of those intervening years.

What’s remarkable is that millions of Iranians seem to be using a Hollywood movie to come to terms with their past so they can stake a better claim to their future.

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Presenting truths that can set you free always has its consequences.  It will certainly provide a more reverential cast to Argo’s Oscar buzz this weekend. It may also prove to be far more worrisome to Iran’s current leadership than all the Israeli bombers, economic sanctions, and stuxnet computer viruses that can be hurled at them. However, Argo’s apparent truth serum in not just for countries that are intent on managing the hearts & minds of their citizens.

A deep dive into personal history can also bring with it the clarity of truth-telling when it helps us recall valuable information about ourselves that we can build upon today to make a better tomorrow. Argo’s impact on hearts & minds in Iran today provides a sense of the “kinds of truths” that are worth rediscovering, both collectively and personally.

Argo is a true story about a fake movie whose filming enabled several diplomats to escape from Tehran during the hostage crisis that engulfed the American Embassy in 1979. The film also captures some of the thuggish violence that characterized the early days of Iran’s revolution.

As depicted in Argo, today’s Iran didn’t arise the way state propaganda says it did. The land of ayatollahs and nuclear threats results, at least in part, from the fact that the thugs have been an essential ingredient in Iran’s revolution all along. The emergence of a new brand of religiously sanctioned violence is what Iranians are learning about in their past. Only it can explain the continued violence and hardship they are experiencing in their lives today—and what’s to be done about it.

The irony is that thuggish violence wasn’t the point of Argo. It merely provided a backdrop for the comically successful rescue of several endangered foreigners. On the other hand, perhaps it was the incidental portrayal of violence and zealotry—its matter-of-factness in a story that was really about something else—that has enabled Argo to strike a collective nerve among Iranians today. This is how.

Even more elemental than their current suffering is the fact that the Iranian people are, at their core, hospitable to strangers. From this perspective, the act of turning diplomatic guests into terrified hostages is now being recognized by many Iranians as the pivotal incident when things took a terrible turn for the worse in their country.  A woman named Shohreh explains it this way:

Violence entered our [recent] politics with the takeover of the American Embassy. Our leaders figured they could interact with the world with aggression and eventually this trickled down to the way they deal with their own people.

The people of Iran will eventually build a future for themselves that is better than anything their leaders are providing today.  Their future will be shaped by several factors, but perhaps none will be as important as reconnecting with their own basic hospitality.

In much the same way, we are hardwired to traits like “hospitality” or “curiosity” in our own personal histories. (For me, the sense of “gratitude” was particularly important.) Whenever we reach a fork in the road and need to make consequential life and work choices, reconnecting to our most basic impulses exerts a powerful influence. Of course, this is even more so when our experience over the intervening years has obscured what we were “most like” when we started out.

In his Shift: How to Reinvent Your Business, Your Career, and Your Personal Brand, branding master Peter Arnell uses a vivid image to describe how the past can propel the future vision we have for ourselves when we decide to make a change.

[C]reate a story line about yourself that you want to perpetuate. . .  Wire it into your personal DNA.  It should carry the energy and excitement of the ongoing change you want to make in your life.  Like DNA, it needs to be coded in a way that is simple and strong and won’t unravel at the first hit of challenge or trouble.

You succeed by hardwiring your game plan for the future into basic information about you that’s been there all along. When done right, it has the simplicity and the strength of DNA.

As we tune into the Oscars this weekend and see the cheering section for Argo, it is worth stepping back to consider some of the remarkable ways that the past can influence the future when we make the effort to tell our best stories.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Building Your Values into Your Work, Introducing Yourself & Your Work Tagged With: Argo, change, choice, core traits, decision-making, hardwiring, personal history, storytelling, the movie Argo

Putting Fake Spin On Your Own Work

October 23, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

If your readers on Amazon aren’t writing enough glowing reviews about your books, what’s an enterprising author to do?

Well if you’re British crime writer R.J. Ellroy, you start anonymously writing and posting those glowing reviews yourself. And why stop there? While he was busily embellishing his own critical commentary, he also was posting anonymous slash’n’burn lines about authors and books he viewed as competitors—for over 10 years, apparently—until he was outed recently by a fellow author.

R.J.Ellroy

Submitting a bogus review in your favor is so common these days that it’s been given a name: Sock-Puppeting. When you’re not getting the reviews you wish you were getting from real people, you “anonymously” give yourself the review you’d like to have.

A few words about Ellroy.  He wasn’t a new writer, looking for a fair shake and a couple of kind words (although just starting out would hardly take him off the hook). Instead, he is the author of many highly successful books, some of which have won major book awards. So even successful people can be fakers if, for whatever reason, they still don’t think they’re being held in high enough regard.

How highly regarded did Ellroy want to be?  For a glimpse of what he wished others were saying about him, take a look at an excerpt from one of those “anonymous” reviews he posted.

I don’t need to really say anything about the plot of this book. All I will say is that there are paragraphs and chapters that just stopped me dead in my tracks. Some of it was chilling, some of it raced along, some of it was poetic and langorous and had to be read twice and three times to really appreciate the depth of the prose…it really is a magnificent book.

I’ve got to admit. If I read that customer review, I might go out and buy Ellroy’s book.  That’s because we often trust what supposedly “regular people” have to say about a book or restaurant or hotel stay more than what the “experts” are telling us.  Which, of course, is why Sock-Puppetry is so rampant: it seems so credible, and the puppeteers rarely end up being caught.

There are fines and penalties imposed for writing fake reviews by regulators like the Federal Trade Commission. And if your colleagues already view you with suspicion (some already thought Ellroy was “self-aggrandizing” and “chippy”), they may provide the kind of policing that recently brought Ellroy’s mischief to light. Experts are also getting better at detecting suspicious word and phrasing patterns in on-line reviews through linguistic analysis.  But this isn’t principally about being caught. What I’m wondering is: why aren’t all the fake reviewers stopping themselves before they put those socks on their hands?

Because, of course, this not just an isolated instance of an author like Ellroy extolling his “poetic and langorous” prose.  It’s faker after faker, with lots of writers being exposed for submitting bogus reviews.  And that doesn’t begin to capture all the “non-professional writers” who are anonymously celebrating their own “amazing” products or “kid-glove” services.

While some review-hosting organizations like Expedia are trying to reduce the problem by ensuring that the reviews they post are by “real” consumers, the questions remain. Why is there a near epidemic of fake customer reviews today, and what’s to be done about it?

Why it‘s happening is because in book selling (as in all forms of retail), we’re in a period of rapid market change. Authors simply have less control over their books and their income as the traditional publishing model breaks down.  Indeed, every bricks-and-mortar store or restaurant or salon is facing new challenges when a customer’s smart phone can scan for more competitive on-line prices while she’s standing in your store, or be guided to your supposedly “five-star” establishment while she’s walking down the street.  In a retail climate like this, the pressure is on to give yourself every advantage you can get.

During anxious times, those with a weak grasp of their moral compass find it easier to cast ethics aside and do whatever they can get away with in order to succeed.  So what’s to be done about this?

Almost everyone writing his first fake review must wonder at some point: “Should I submit it?”  It may be a split second of wondering, but it’s a pause that leads to a soul-search in almost all of us whenever we’re presented with an opportunity to improve the odds in our favor in a dishonest way. Sometimes we don’t come up with much when we dive into our souls—but in and of itself that may be the wake-up call that gives us pause. An empty soul search can also plant the seed that it’s a skill (like lots of others) you can acquire.

In my childhood days at the shore, taking those first dives down for the striking shell or scuttling crab, I always came up empty handed. But with practice I learned. Soul-searching is like that.  It takes practice to understand what the choices are, and thereafter, how to make them.

You probably won’t be caught if you submit a fake on-line review, despite Ellroy’s experience and that of a few of his fellow sock-puppeteers. But better to refrain from doing so altogether because you’ve made the most out of that pause before you hit “post.”

(This piece appeared as an Op-Ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer on October 14, 2012.)

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, The Op-eds Tagged With: choice, conscience, cynical, Ellroy, fake spin, on-line reviews, sock-puppeting

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David Griesing (@worklifeward) writes from Philadelphia.

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