The Art of Doing

Want To Find Love Online?
Flaunt Your Eccentricities

Image via Casais Tatuados

This advice may seem counterintuitive. When presenting yourself in the online dating world, isn’t the goal to reach the largest pool of possible matches? So you hide your quirks and put forth what you think will be the most widely appealing, least offensive version of yourself. Right?

Wrong.

The founders of OkCupid

When we interviewed the founders of OkCupid (the hippest online dating site with 7 million members) for our upcoming book, they told us this kind of thinking is an online dating “fatal flaw.” And they should know. These four math nerds from Harvard are the Nate Silvers of finding love online—number crunching their teeming mass of statistical data to provide insights into what really works in digital dating.

Sam Yagan, OkCupid’s CEO, enlightened us: [Expand ]

“Getting people to kind of like you is a waste of time.You’re looking for the two or three people who will love you as you really are. If Dungeons and Dragons is your thing you want that person who will say, ‘Oh my God! You love D & D? I do, too!”

In other words whether you’re like the pair above—iPhone-using, Mickey-Mouse-loving, tatted hipsters—or [insert truthiest description of yourself here], express who you really are in your profile and photo. Then your chances are better that someone who will be attracted to the real you can actually find you.

This idea of showing who you really are can also be applied to your work life. Most of us have faked it in a job interview, pretending to be the sort of employee we thought a potential boss was looking for. Predictably the results (if you even get the job) are disappointing to that employer and yourself. And if you’re selling a product or service why try to appeal to every demographic? Instead let people know what is truly unusual about what you’re selling to attract the core group of people that can’t live without it.

OkCupid Fact: The first time an OkCupid-paired couple sent in a baby picture OkCupid’s CEO thought, “We effected the creation of a human life!” But, now, he says, “We’ve done that tens of thousands of time over.”

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Erotic Filmmaker Candida Royalle:
An Artist’s Interpretation

The Art of Doing Artist’s Interpretation Project is a collaboration between us and imaginative artists we choose to depict superachievers from our upcoming book from Plume/Penguin coming out Jan 29, 2013. (Which you can preorder here!)

When we wondered who could best portray the trailblazing erotic filmmaker Candida Royalle, we immediately thought of fine artist Robert Piersanti who has devoted the last ten years of his life to painting a stunning cast of sensual and strongly independent women including rock n’ rollers, burlesque performers, barmaids and other locals from his Jersey City neighborhood.

Royalle (who we interviewed for our upcoming book in a chapter on How to Make Erotica that Turns Women On) was a porn star in the 70’s and early 80’s. She came to hate the way the business represented women as sex objects to serve male fantasies. So she quit. And then she struggled with what to do next. She believed in a cinematic sexuality that would celebrate the human body without demeaning women but she felt that the traditional male-centric adult film industry had gotten it wrong. The question she asked herself was:

“What would erotic films be like if they were made from a women’s perspective?”

[Expand ]
In 1984, when few believed there was a market for erotic films for women Royalle took the leap and formed Femme Productions. She opened up a whole new way of portraying women’s sexuality by producing films with realistic plots, believable actors and depictions of naturalistic lovemaking rather than the gymnastic, porn-by-the-numbers, money-shot-ethos of traditional pornography. Royalle was a game-changer in her industry and a godmother to women filmmakers who followed in her field.

Despite what you may think about adult films, Royalle can be a model for those of us who have become disillusioned by our workplace or the industry we work in. Rather than to wallow in the psychic space of feeling exploited and discouraged by working in a business whose values conflicted with her own, Royalle challenged the status quo. Of course, she had no guarantee of success. But just as with pioneers of other industries, if she hadn’t tried she never would have come up with a whole new way of doing things.

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Will the Better Storyteller Win This Election?

In most elections the partisans already know who they’re voting for—their votes are based on policies not necessarily politicians. But in an election as close as this one to persuade the small slice of “undecideds,” both Obama and Romney (and their army of supporters) have used every means to shape their story including advertising, stump speeches, visual presentation and robo calls. And just as much effort has been put into destroying the narrative of the other guy.

Although a thousand tangents have been taken and small bore arguments made by the candidates, Obama’s storyline could be summed up as, I inherited a mess that I’ve done a lot to fix and if you elect me again I’ll continue fighting for the Middle Class. And Romney’s might be summarized as: I’m a businessman who knows how to get this economy going.

When we talked to Richard Gerrig, an author and professor of psycholinguistics who’s researched the cognitive effects of narrative, he told us that anyone under the sway of a story can be transported: [Expand ]

“You are so immersed in the narrative and involved with the characters that you are not just identifying with them, you become part of their world and have a stake in the story.”

In other words, in the grips of a story, we experience the narrative in the same way we would if we were actual participants in that story. An effectively told story can so weaken our rational powers of cognition and reason that the story can seem to become proof of its own content.

And in this election both Romney and Obama are vying to be the one who tells the story that “transports” more voters than the other.

Storytelling, of course, is an art not just practiced by politicians. Many of the superachievers we interviewed for our upcoming book recognized the power of narrative. Whether it was to develop a brand or sell a product or even market a rock band, the men and women we talked to told us about how they had put great effort and thought into shaping narratives to communicate with their target audiences.

One of our favorite lines was uttered to us by Michael Sitrick, an L.A. crisis manager, who rehabilitates the tarnished reputations of misbehaving celebrities, CEO’s and elite athletes. In its brutal simplicity, his line could be the motto of any political candidate, party or operative hoping to win an election:

“If you don’t tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you.”

On Tuesday (or who knows when), we’ll see which candidate was the better storyteller. [/Expand]

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