I was recently tagged to do a “Six things” blog post. I understand that the point is to be more real to your audience — get naked as it were — but with all due respect to my good friends who have done one of these, I think this idea embodies a lot of what’s wrong with blogging. As a writer, everything I write is biographical in some respect — but it’s not going to resonate with you, dear reader, unless you find something about yourself in there as well. Otherwise, I may as well tell you six things about my dog.

So I’m going to turn this thing inside out, and write six random things about you. You may be astonished at my profound insight, or you may roll your eyes and call me a pretentious dork. Either way, I’m going to have fun with this. So here we go.

Six Things About You

  1. You’re a genius. There’s at least one thing that you’re brilliant at, something that no one else you know can do half as well. If you don’t know what that thing is, go find out.

  2. You care. You don’t want to just pay the bills or get by. You want to give back, live the dream, do something meaningful with your life, all that stuff.

  3. You’re distracted. You spend half the day answering emails and apologizing to people for not responding sooner. You follow 100 people you don’t know on Twitter. If it takes you ten seconds to read a post from each one — assuming there are no links to click on! — and each person posts several times a day… well, you do the math.

  4. You’re on the fence. You don’t know if you’re good enough to succeed at doing what you’re really good at, so you go on devoting less mindshare to the things that could really make a difference — to yourself and others. But you do need to pay those bills, and you may even have a family to support. You’re afraid it would take too much work and time to do both right.

  5. You’re a hypocrite. It’s OK, admit it. Everyone is. We can’t live up to our own standards, and that eats us up. Society loves to hate hypocrisy, so it’s easier not to even try.

  6. You suck. There, I said it. Thanks to #3-5, you aren’t doing your best at whatever it is you’re great at. You’re probably using less than 50% of your potential, and you know it. You’re sometimes plagued by self-doubt. The people who are successful at doing what you want to do must have more talent, right?

Did I get it right?

Or did I tell you six things about me after all?

Instead of ending this with a list of six random bloggers I know, I’m going to “tag” six superstars whose ideas I ripped off who inspired the above, and stated those points much better than I could. If you’re looking for solutions to the dilemma presented herein, go check them out.