I’m trying to justify the amount of time I’ve spent today falling down the internet’s version of Alice’s rabbit hole. It started when I went on facebook to show Ian an old photo of me and my family when I was 18 and noticed an ad off to the side for crochet patterns.
I’m a sucker for crochet patterns, so I went to that web site which led to a crocheting blog in which the blogger was talking about how to keep a crochet blog interesting, which led to another blog about crocheting and creativity in general, which led to a bunch of different creativity blogs–some interesting and some not. I found a blog by Clay Shirky, a former guest blogger at Boing Boing and author of a book that I read a few month’s ago, called Here Comes Everybody, about the organizing power of social networking. I like the way he thinks, so I was interested in one of his posts linked to on another site–”A Rant About Women“. I was struck by a lot of what he had to say, which applies to everyone as well as to women. The following quote especially resonated with me.
Some of the most important opportunities we have are in two-sided markets: education and employment, contracts and loans, grants and prizes. And the institutions that offer these opportunities operate in an environment where accurate information is hard to come by. One of their main sources of judgment is asking the candidate directly: Tell us why we should admit you. Tell us why we should hire you. Tell us why we should give you a grant. Tell us why we should promote you.
In these circumstances, people who don’t raise their hands don’t get called on, and people who raise their hands timidly get called on less. Some of this is because assertive people get noticed more easily, but some of it is because raising your hand is itself a high-cost signal that you are willing to risk public failure in order to try something.
It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.
I like his point that raising your hand is a high-cost signal that you are willing to risk public failure in order to try something. I also like his comment that trying to stay under the threshold of public perception of jerkiness gives people veto power over your actions.
As someone who is often a timid hand raiser and strives to not be seen as a jerk, I could benefit from cultivating more of the attitude of not caring about other people’s judgments and being more out there with my opinions and ideas. Being willing to risk public failure, in even small things, is also something worth cultivating. It goes back to my post quoting Neil Gaiman, who exhorted all of us to make mistakes, treasure them and learn from them.
Now I need to work on a Clearwater blog post, so I’ll sign off now.
Tags: expectations, resolution