God knows how it ended up on my desk, but I was watching some youtuber trying to ply his brand for...was it excercise? Was it self-branding? I don't remember, and it doesn't matter, but he was stuck having to improvise his way though the pandemic hawking his hucksterism from the comfort of his (comfortable-looking) home.
He's Australian, and I was taken with how universal this pandemic has been: even vapid assholes on the upside-down side of the world are having a hard time. And then I checked myself. I don't know him from Adam, and he's just a guy trying to make a living. No reason to call him names, no matter how empty his content appears. I mean, come on. Look at my comics. Who am I to judge?
But then he descended onto a tangent that tied me up, mentally. It was about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and how it was a metaphor for one's own exercise program, or branding, or learning Web design, or whatever it was that he was selling.
His take was that Maslow's levels were, like, levels. And that to move up a level, certain criteria needed to be met. If you want to succeed at a job, you first need to have shelter, and food, and clothing, etc. And the [whatever it was he was selling] is just like that. In order to do power lifts, or CSS sheets, or whatever, you need to master the basics first.
I mean, this is ok. It's not a groundbreaking concept, but he found an idea and built a talk around it - it's not even a bad idea.
It just seems that his revelation is kind of banal. The Maslow thing is ancillary to his concept. Maslow's Hierarchy uses the idea of levels because that's how our idea of levels works; we didn't get the idea of levels from the nature of our spiritual development.
And so it seemed kind of self-defining, and that felt half-baked. And that's what got my ire up. Trumping up half-baked, self-defining, preposterous ideas is _my_ brand, and he was stepping on it.
Anyway, the joke here is that the presenter doesn't have a well-conceived presentation, but he's moving ahead anyway. And the audience may-or-may not be buying it. If they're not, they're disappointed. If they are buying it, like the guy taking notes, then they're struggling to follow because, well, there really isn't anything to follow. Or they're struggling to follow not because there isn't anything to follow, but because they're not sure what to be looking for. In every conference or conferency-type class I've been to, this has been a thing on one, er, level or another.
An old friend appeared seriously impressed with this strip, declaring it 'Cathy good.' I can't tell if it's an honest compliment, it's always hard to know in which direction my friends' irony is travelling, but I like think it was straightforward. In any event, being compared to Guisewite's comic is a mark of distinction, even if that, too, has left me unsure of how I feel about it myself.
God knows how it ended up on my desk, but I was watching some youtuber trying to ply his brand for...was it excercise? Was it self-branding? I don't remember, and it doesn't matter, but he was stuck having to improvise his way though the pandemic hawking his hucksterism from the comfort of his (comfortable-looking) home.
ReplyDeleteHe's Australian, and I was taken with how universal this pandemic has been: even vapid assholes on the upside-down side of the world are having a hard time. And then I checked myself. I don't know him from Adam, and he's just a guy trying to make a living. No reason to call him names, no matter how empty his content appears. I mean, come on. Look at my comics. Who am I to judge?
But then he descended onto a tangent that tied me up, mentally. It was about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and how it was a metaphor for one's own exercise program, or branding, or learning Web design, or whatever it was that he was selling.
His take was that Maslow's levels were, like, levels. And that to move up a level, certain criteria needed to be met. If you want to succeed at a job, you first need to have shelter, and food, and clothing, etc. And the [whatever it was he was selling] is just like that. In order to do power lifts, or CSS sheets, or whatever, you need to master the basics first.
I mean, this is ok. It's not a groundbreaking concept, but he found an idea and built a talk around it - it's not even a bad idea.
It just seems that his revelation is kind of banal. The Maslow thing is ancillary to his concept. Maslow's Hierarchy uses the idea of levels because that's how our idea of levels works; we didn't get the idea of levels from the nature of our spiritual development.
And so it seemed kind of self-defining, and that felt half-baked. And that's what got my ire up. Trumping up half-baked, self-defining, preposterous ideas is _my_ brand, and he was stepping on it.
Anyway, the joke here is that the presenter doesn't have a well-conceived presentation, but he's moving ahead anyway. And the audience may-or-may not be buying it. If they're not, they're disappointed. If they are buying it, like the guy taking notes, then they're struggling to follow because, well, there really isn't anything to follow. Or they're struggling to follow not because there isn't anything to follow, but because they're not sure what to be looking for. In every conference or conferency-type class I've been to, this has been a thing on one, er, level or another.
An old friend appeared seriously impressed with this strip, declaring it 'Cathy good.' I can't tell if it's an honest compliment, it's always hard to know in which direction my friends' irony is travelling, but I like think it was straightforward. In any event, being compared to Guisewite's comic is a mark of distinction, even if that, too, has left me unsure of how I feel about it myself.