Today’s post is long and heavy. My intention in saying this is to deter you from reading on, but I am aware it might have the opposite effect. Still I feel I’ve done my duty by making this warning. So here goes:
In high school, I was friends with a girl I will call Caroline. Caroline and I liked the same music… liked the same movies… had the same sense of humor. It was like kismet.
Then one day, along with some friends including Caroline, I drank a bottle of gin.
I was not an expert drinker in those days, so I lost control. I started running around like a jackass… I made out with Caroline in a burrito shop bathroom… and then I blacked out for the rest of the evening. Eventually, I puked all over a friend’s car, was taken home, and passed out in my own bed, to wake up the next morning without even a hangover.
And here’s where the plot curdles:
I wasn’t pleased about the drunken burrito-shop makeout with Caroline, but I wasn’t ashamed either.
What I did find unsettling was hearing from several friends how Caroline was going around in the following days, elated that something had finally happened between me and her. She had been hoping for this for months, she said, and now it was finally here. It seems she had had a crush on me for a while.
And the weirdest thing happened. I began to really hate Caroline.
I guess there were two parts to it. One part I understood right then and there, back in 11th grade… the other I realized tonight. Let me tell you about both parts, and how they are strangely relevant to the world of copywriting and online marketing.
Back then, what I realized in a moment of insight was that Caroline had gradually adopted my personality.
I’m not sure how I didn’t notice this before. Maybe I was naive, or maybe I was egotistical.
But what became as clear as gin was that Caroline had picked up on the music I liked and then started listening to the same… she did the same with the movies I said I enjoyed… and she had mimicked whatever humor and mannerisms I had at that time. That was the explanation for the seeming kismet.
My 17-year-old self found this repulsive. The idea that somebody would abandon their own personality and adopt mine… it was the sign of a person who is weird and weak. Not somebody I wanted to be associated with. So in my typical fashion, I cut off all contact with Caroline, and didn’t talk to her for years.
That’s the part I realized back in 11th grade about why Caroline repelled me.
But I never took it one step further, until tonight. I never asked myself, what’s so bad about having somebody idolize you? Why not let them have their fun, and get what you can out of the relationship, which should in theory be a lot?
I’ll tell you what I discovered. The term of art for it is a “bossy bottom.” Or at least that’s what Michael Taft called it in an interview I heard with him today.
Taft teaches meditation, and he’s worked with lots of individuals as well as big corporations like Google and for all I know Halliburton. He has a best-selling book on meditation… he has a successful podcast on the same… and in this particular field, he’s apparently a bit of a celeb.
So Taft talked about how he won’t teach people who treat him as a guru and look up at him with glossy eyes. “I don’t want to teach people who are in a trance,” Taft said. “And plus, that’s not even the biggest issue.”
Because according to Taft, these entranced and enguru-ed people aren’t the passive followers they might seem. Taft believes they control the guru as much as the guru controls them.
These “bossy bottoms” can manipulate the guru by modulating what they allow to apparently affect them. “Oh when he does this thing, I won’t react… but when he does this other thing, I will react.”
So that’s part 2 of my repulsion for Caroline. It’s not that I found her weak and weird… but that I realized how she had actually manipulated me, controlled me, and influenced me, in a way that I was blind to. She had made me feel weak and weird.
Perhaps it’s now clear how this might apply to marketing. Because the high form of marketing is achieving guruship. It’s where you have the biggest and easiest influence. As Ken McCarthy said in a recent interview:
I don’t know where I first got the notion that being a celebrity was a great thing. And then somebody put it in my ear that really anybody can be a celebrity. It’s a manufactured thing.
And I’m like, wow, that’s interesting.
And then the next piece was, celebrity is relative. So you don’t have to be world famous to make a ton of money, you just have to be famous within a finite group of money-spending people, and you can have all the money you can handle.
And when those three items congealed in my brain, I was like: “Whoa, I’m going to be a celebrity.”
And it really can be easy. The steps to become a guru are by now well-known. There’s not much more to it than going outdoors, finding a soapbox no shorter than 6 inches in height, and standing up on it day after day.
Of course, there are other things you can do to speed up the process. But even with just your 6-inch soapbox, people out there will find you, listen to you, and start to follow you. And eventually, if you’re halfway decent and at least a quarterway successful, some of them will begin to idolize you.
As Ken says, it’s easy and it’s profitable. That’s the argument for it. And if you’re doing the Lord’s work or you really love your flock of followers, it can be the best thing in the world.
But if you are just looking to become a guru as a shortcut to freedom… or if you’re after power and control… then maybe today’s post will be an argument against becoming a guru. Because you can’t become a guru, not unless you agree to be completely and secretly manipulated in turn.
But if that don’t dissuade you… and you want to know in more detail what I mean by a 6-inch soapbox, you can see one here.