I wrote about influence earlier. Drinking from the same font sometimes looks like influence, but is decidedly not.
Several years ago, when I first began blogging, I was constantly compared to a certain well-known blogger. It was uncanny how similar our topic focuses were. It irked me to no end that I was so often compared to her, because part of my core identity is authentic uniqueness. I am not happy being one in a million. I want to be one for all time. I want there to be no one remotely like me now, in the past, or the future. A pattern unrepeatable. So, you can see that, even though those people were just trying understand me, they pissed me off.
The comparison caused me to go more underground. If I had joined forces, I could have become one in my own right (and I did some secret collaboration).
In retrospect, I realize we were drinking from the same font. There was no cross-pollination. No cross-influencing. We each arrived at the same font from different paths.
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