Seth Godin recently wrote an entry about marketers falling into two categories: the first being the few who benefit when they make their customers smarter and the second being the majority who benefit when they make their customers dumber. The key points here are that few marketers choose to make their customers “more informed, inquisitive, free-thinking and alert,” and essentially provide more information even though betting on an informed decision of your customer is more risky unless you have full confidence in your product. Most choose to withhold and/or manipulate facts because it’s easier and more likely for you to buy their product.

In the century of idea diffusion and knowledge generation (as in, to generate, not generation), I think it’s an absolute worthless strategy to withhold your creativity; not only do you lose out on the exchange, but who knows who you may inspire. The goal, or at least mine, is to create and share. Sitting myself down to actually write out a complete thought is a feat in itself, but when it materializes with friends referencing or asking about what I wrote in conversation or quoting something that struck a chord with them, it inspires me to continue writing and sharing my ideas and thoughts.

I say this often, but I’m lucky to have creative friends, people who challenge themselves to be absorbed in, experience, enjoy and share their talents, in whatever medium that may be: writing, dancing, painting/drawing, photography, or even just curating interesting things. They propel me to seek out the absurdities, the outliers (Oh, Malcolm Gladwell*…) and the unexplored. I challenge everyone to find those creatives around them and be inspired because inspiration never dies so long as we are passionate and communicate those passions.

I caught up with a friend who I hadn’t spoken to in nearly a year over shoe shopping. There is something so ridiculously romanticized about shoes and good friends that I blame on Sex and the City for imprinting into my world view. Needless to say, trying to catch up on a year’s worth of happenings while trying to look for the perfect walking shoe — anyone can find a sexy shoe, but it is damn near impossible to commit to a shoe for daily life — was also damn never impossible. Perhaps then, filling in all of those details isn’t as important as figuring out where we both were now and those paradigm shifts in between.

Anyway, our conversations are usually too theoretical for our own good and usually not grounded in anything concrete aside from her horror stories involving a chimney scam and the moving of a couch in Paris**. We talked a bit about the fear of not fully committing to something. She and I both like to dip into every aspect of “culture,” trying and digesting everything. We couldn’t conclude whether that was an end in itself, in that our passion is knowing everything, which we are aware is impossible, or if this phase is simply that, a phase for us to find our true passion. After two floors of shoes at Galleries Lafayette and Printemps and every shoe boutique in between, we concluded that, like our shoes and our current repertoire of interests, we are stuck in the paradox of choice. There is too much, we are greedy and I have no answers.

To return to my previous point about idea generation, Frank is right about in that, if I may quote and append, the only responsibility as a writer is to write in a compelling and thoughtful way, that it shouldn’t matter who is reading because the content and readability will attract the appropriate audience. That’s true in any creative field, just do what you do, make and create & the quality of the content will speak for itself.

*I’ve never read Outliers and really have no desire to, but I started a seemingly similar book called “The Black Swan” that approaches the idea of highly improbable events (read outliers) from a more philosophical, historical and economic angle. As far as I’m concerned from the few excerpts I’ve read by Gladwell, Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, has a more ironic tone and his writing is more conceptual than anecdotal. Anyway, my thoughts on the book thus far is another entry in itself.

**Aren’t you curious? That’s too bad because I had to travel half-way across the world to find her. Those are her stories & you’ll have to find her for yourself. It’ll be worth it, I promise.