Here are seven simple steps, because I like prime numbers. Do them in exactly this order:

1.) “Stay home. Read a book.” -Nomeansno.
2.) Post a blog, not about the book, but about your own personality traits. Wonder if everyone will see through it.
3.) Forget about it for 3 years while no one cares.
4.) Overnight, get 23,000+ hits after being reposted on Stumbleupon.
5.) Receive sincere emails every day about how your blog made people cry and changed their lives. Try to keep up, then realize it’s not possible to sustain a genuine tone responding to that many people. Feel guilty, but instead spend your time on making more stuff.
6.) Get reposted on Wired.com and Owl City.
7.) Reach 1,000,000 views as Introversion becomes trendy at Forbes, TED, and Time Magazine.

There you have it. I never expected 10 Myths About Introverts to be looked at a MILLION times. But it’s officially the most popular / famous thing I’ve ever made. At the time I’m writing this, I’m the #3 Google Result for “introverts” — after Wikipedia and About.com.

Pretty impressive these days for something that requires reading.

For the techies:
90% Unique Visitors
Average of 5 Minutes on Page
84% Bounce

Most of those one million views took place between April 2011 and April 2012. Before that, the page was getting under 10 views per day. The biggest day was December 13, 2011: 26,000+ views.

I might seem irreverent about this topic, but it’s because the process of creating and releasing material to the public is absurd. It can’t be taken seriously by an artist. I wrote 10 Myths About Introverts in an afternoon. By comparison, I spent a whole year investing my soul in a fiction book called Cuyahoga! Sometimes people care and sometimes they don’t.

Why?

“We don’t know!” as Jim Rohn once yelled, in his Idaho farm-boy accent.

He also said: “The things that are easy to do, are also easy… not to do.”

For 3.5 years, I offered my entire discography for free download, through the (now gone) Dr. Zoltan website.

Here’s what I was thinking:

1.) I don’t care about my music career.
2.) It’s better for 1,000 people to hear my music for free than it is for 100 people to pay for it.
3.) Most of the great experiences in my life came from handing someone a CD or cassette for free.

Decided not to do it anymore.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the capitalist system of paying for music should be maintained, even in the absence of physical products.

Two simple reasons:

1.) $1 per song is a fair and acceptable system of exchanging value for value. It’s an absurdly low price to pay for a potentially-timeless piece of art.

2.) Free downloading devalues music. In the same way that Netflix devalues movies, and Facebook devalues friendship. The result is endless, superficial browsing rather than a wholesome experience.

I’ve never been a free downloader. I like to pay living artists for their work. When I buy music, I usually buy it on iTunes. It works well. And I’ve enjoyed getting a constant stream of payments from CDBaby over the years, for all those iTunes sales.

Spotify seems to be an OK system. I’ve gotten checks from it already. It’s nice that they keep track, rather than simply exploiting creative people.

I don’t expect the money from my digital sales and streams to ever be impressive, and it’s rarely noticeable. I stopped making “real money” from music in 2007. I just think paying an artist is the honest thing to do. So thank you to the few who have sent me donations over the years. And if you’re one of the people who has downloaded and enjoyed my music for free, PayPal me: mutantmall@mutantmall.com.

From now on, if you want my stuff, you can find out how to pay for it at http://www.carlkingdom.com/music

[Photo from Oxford Daily Photo.]

This morning, I was horrified to see several large signs in my neighborhood:

BORDERS CLOSING SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!

What a HUGE mistake.

(Because now I won’t be able to walk down to the corner and see my new book on the shelf, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Really.)

I do know Borders had been planning this closure for a long time, but I was in denial. I noticed probably a year ago that they did a store-wide inventory — they even put a total dollar value on each shelf. Never a good sign.

But the businessmen behind Borders were wrong about one thing all along.

A book store is not about selling books. “That’s the simpleton’s view,” as Eman Laerton would say about other topics.

These aren’t just widgets we’re talking about here.

A bookstore is An Environment For Discovery. A Gallery of Written Ideas.

For those of us who have been disillusioned by formal education, book stores have offered an escape: a place to stumble onto new shit.

Since way back in high school, when I’ve needed creative juice, I’ve take a random stroll through a book store… to raise my awareness, study independently, and find inspiration in unexpected places. I’d sit down with 4 or 5 books at a time and dig through them. I’d usually go home with at least one.

I’ve purchased around 500 non-fiction books in my lifetime. I can’t put a price on how much I’ve learned from them. It’s millions of dollars worth of knowledge. And it wasn’t only the time I spent turning pages and moving my eyeballs. It was the time I spent staring into space, sitting on the floor of the book store, digesting alien ideas, wondering if this was the book that was going to reveal its secrets to me.

Say what you want about how “books are old media.” But there’s still something special about printing words on paper. It says “these words deserve to be here.” Anyone can make a PDF. It’s when you realize that even the copied words are worth killing a tree or squeezing an octopus.

But it’s not just the book, it’s the experience of being in the book store that matters. Instantly ordering and downloading exactly what you want with one click is not the same — and if you think it is, you’re one step closer to living in the fucking Matrix.

So long as people have physical bodies, GOING TO PLACES and DISCOVERING NEW THINGS THAT YOU CAN TOUCH will matter. That can’t happen when everything is linked and indexed and blurbed and reviewed and meta-tagged into sterility. 5,278,945 people Like this? Who cares?

Chaos must be involved. The element of surprise.

Me? I go to the book store to find what I’m NOT looking for. I want the book that I see out of the corner of my eye, just a few letters of the spine showing on the top shelf. Way up there, hiding from me. Probably in the wrong section, something I’ve never heard of. I don’t know who else has read it, and I don’t care. (Coincidentally, while writing this blog entry, I used some writing techniques I learned from The Art of Nonfiction by Ayn Rand — which I discovered during the above experience last weekend.)

If I only read books that I’m looking for, they’ll tell me what I already know. What good is that?

I admit… that was getting harder to experience, because there are too many published books to keep in one store. Only the cheesiest, pot-boiling easy-sellers were kept in stock. I’d see several square miles dedicated to a bullshit biography on Lady Gaga (or some other pseudo-celebrity that’s “famous for being famous”) while anything published more than a week ago was in Clearance. That is, unless it happened to be on a required reading list — and we know all those books are time-honored crap for conformists.

Sad.

Why not go to the library, then? Because their collection is made of whatever people decide to abandon, stuff they couldn’t even give away.

There must be a solution, right?

Boutique shops like Writers Store in Burbank have figured that one out. Nurture a community (give seminars, panel discussions), stock the best products and tools for a particular profession (writing), and most importantly — make people feel inspired. I always think, “Just by walking in here, I’m a real writer.” Makes me wanna go home and get to work, but not before I buy something to thank them.

I think Private Libraries are another fantastic business idea. Old books, new books, it doesn’t matter — as long as they’re personally-selected for a devoted audience. Instead of coffee shops, why not pay to hang out in a media library personally selected by the Coen Brothers or Kevin Smith? Go there and study all day. I think we’ll be seeing those popping up in the future. If I’m lucky.

Let’s hope that the businessmen behind book stores grow to understand what a book store is really about, and can turn this all around. I repeat: it’s not about selling widgets. I’d hate to see book stores go extinct because they can’t understand that simple premise.

R.I.P., my local Borders. It’s too bad you couldn’t make it work. You were a corporate whore, but I loved you.

I worked at an Advertising Agency on and off for 8 years. My boss and I would spend hours and hours focused on the issue of H.R. It was our Holy Grail. (It wasn’t part of my official job description, but it was an area that fascinated me, so I’d try to sneak into his meetings all the time. He always valued my input, because I’m judgmental and paranoid.)

We were hiring Salespeople, and the talent and skill combination we needed was essentially Acting Plus Specialized Technical Knowledge. It was the most difficult combination to find in people.

As a result, the sales department was a core of two or three immensely talented and self-managing people, and a revolving door of newbies that just didn’t have the gift. The best salesmen would spend their valuable sales time trying to fix the salesmen who were broken. It would infect the entire company.

Even the graphic artist and secretaries would be distracted by this problem. We’d have company meetings, analyze everyone, tell them to read books, try to figure out why they couldn’t do it. We’d make up rules, give them quotas, try and counsel them. No amount of micromanagement and training ever helped.

The squeaky wheel was getting too much grease.

Jim Collins has this concept called First Who, Then What — better known as “Getting The Right People On The Bus.” Since reading his book in 2001, I have followed this principle and it’s always worked like magic. 

The problem is that it can take a long time.

How long should you hold out? As long as you can. Having just one of these gifted, self-managing people will make up for the time and energy you would have wasted on the other fifty.

When you’re looking for The Right Person (whether it’s an employee, band member, co-writer, creative partner, or mate), you can try to quantify and measure it, but the truth is:

You will know it when you see it.

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This is my public blog. You can also Join My Cult!

People love to argue about Capitalism and Socialism as if they’re sports teams. It’s tribal mentality that over-simplifies and encourages chanting. Everyone on the other side of the line is evil, and we must destroy them.

Capitalism: The Government says, “OK, People. Here’s the Money. We’ll entertain the idea that you won’t screw it up. ”

Socialism: The People say, “OK, Government. Here’s the Money. We’ll entertain the idea that you won’t screw it up.”

Unfortunately, both teams screw it up.

I see the concepts of Collectivism and Individualism as valid techniques to be applied to different situations on different scales. Sometimes one guy should do the job, and sometimes we need group input. Somewhere between the extremes, there’s usually a holistic, realistic approach for achieving goals.

For my own creative career, I’m a believer in what I call Lemonade Stand Capitalism.

While $2 is better than $1… as you scale it, making the pile infinitely bigger is not inherently the best goal. I choose to keep it small and sell the best lemonade possible. Leave me alone, and I’ll figure it out. I won’t piss in it. I take my lemonade craft personally.

I agree that private enterprises are typically run more efficiently than government institutions. It’s because The Post Office can’t go out of business if they suck — the government will keep paying old women to fall asleep on piles of phone books in the back room. There’s nothing at stake. Let people stand in line all day long outside the DMV. If they’re unhappy, it’s not like they can find a better deal down the street.

A monopoly is a monopoly, regardless of how it happened. Lack of competition tends to lower the value of goods and services. But so does competition itself. Two companies will fight to create the cheapest, most toxic, malfunctioning bags of shit and call it Fast Food.

Team Public or Team Private… Who cares? It doesn’t change the fact that whoever has the money and power needs to take their jobs personally.

When we focus too much on making $1 turn into $2, we depersonalize the work, ignore the big picture / long-term consequences, and do stupid things.

So whether it’s a politician invading a foreign country without Congressional Declaration of War, a doctor prescribing Quinolones and SSRIs without having studied bio-chemistry, or a business executive dumping almost 100 million gallons of oil into the water, some actions affect too many people to let one madman call the shots.

On the other hand, have you been a diligent CEO in your own universe? Do you agree that your own personal disasters could have been averted if you had exercised a greater degree of concern for your safety?

If everyone, everywhere made better decisions, we wouldn’t need these reversible mascot suits for good and evil, and we could focus on higher-level problems.

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This is my public blog. You can also Join My Cult!