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LM: #339: Your work is not yours
You hope your work will have an impact. You dig into the depths of your being, open old wounds and bleed through new. But the message you send will rarely be the message received.
A reader once thanked Liz Gilbert for writing, Eat, Pray, Love, saying she felt especially encouraged by the part of the book where Gilbert put a restraining order on her violent husband. But, Gilbert wrote, “A restraining order? Violence? That never happened! Not in my book, nor in my actual life!” The reader found courage to leave her own abusive marriage by inventing something that wasn’t there.
You have no control over how your work will interact with people’s experiences, personalities, or current mental states. This goes not only for people whose lives are positively impacted by your work, but also the haters.
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Viktor Frankl can have his book destroyed by the Nazis, spend years in concentration camps, then survive to re-write it as Man’s Search for Meaning, and some guy can go on Amazon and call it, “disappointing,” “a waste of time,” or simply complain about the print quality of the book.
It sounds unfair, but it’s not. What you create is a blank canvas on which everyone has the right to project their dreams, desires, fears, insecurities, and prejudices.
Once your work reaches someone else, it is no longer yours.
Aphorism: “Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect.” —Steve Jobs
Book: Blink (Amazon) is Malcolm Gladwell’s classic exploration of intuition.
Best,
David
P.S. You’ll have a better idea how your work might hit others if you know the mechanics of media.
