Saturday, July 2, 2016

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Mystery writer Cristy Fifield wrote a great post on the subject of social fears versus the best path to achieving your goals. She uses an example from basketball, about how taking free throws underhanded, or "granny style," scores more points than throwing overhand, but most players throw overhand because it's cool, and they think granny shots make them look dorky. They want to look cool (and NOT look dorky) more than they want to score points for their team. Which is all messed up if you think about it.

It's a great post, with some interesting links, and the point of it all definitely applies to writers. Check it out. (Scroll down a bit after you click through to the page.)

Angie

4 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

I'll have to see the data on that free throw issue. Interesting.

Angie said...

Charles -- I thought that was pretty interesting too. One of the links from Chris's post is to a YouTube video where the granny-shot guy is demonstrating and explaining how it works.

Angie

Suzan Harden said...

Ah, the approval of the crowd. One of the best things I did as a writer was to stop participating in critique groups. No one likes being shamed, but some of the groups I was in would group-shame over some really stupid sh**. Once I started taking chances, then I started making sales.

Thanks for the link, Angie!

Angie said...

Suzan -- I learned a lot from workshops, mostly from critiquing other people, 'cause when you're pointing out someone else's mistakes, you do NOT want to be wrong, ya know? [wry smile] But yeah, some of the ideas swirling around the groups, often pushed by the most dominant cliques, are absolutely poisonous. :/

Angie