Meet Brian Hall

We recently connected with Brian Hall and have shared our conversation below.

Brian, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.

I learned a ton about how the artists, musicians, and writers I most admire were received by critics and audiences of their time. It turns out that they get ignored and criticized just as much as anyone else … which to me says that being ignored or criticized doesn’t actually reflect on the quality of your work. Which means it’s best to ignore that stuff. Which I (usually) remember to do.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I’m writing a book about criticism!

Or really just editing a collection of criticism, designed to drive home the lesson that everyone and every work, even the greatest creations of all history, get torn apart by somebody or another.

It’s called One Star. More info here:

https://onestar.world/

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

This is kind of a weird one, but I spent years doing website experimentation and it taught me to be very skeptical of data. Sometimes data is misleading, or insufficient, in a way that makes it useless. Or worse than useless.

This experience led me to look at criticism as data and ask, “Is this good data?” (The answer is no.)

Another skill that’s helped a lot is just getting comfortable with writing—something I developed by emailing 5 friends, saying I was going to publish a daily newsletter for 90 days and asking if I could sign them up. They said yes, and I was on the hook to produce a new email every day. By the end of 90 days I had a whole blog, and I could sit down and produce a post in less than an hour.

And one last quality that I think has served me is skepticism. Not just about data, but about the bounds of my own knowledge. If you start out from the assumption that what you don’t know is much vaster than what you do know, you’re bound to discover something worth sharing.

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?

I still struggle with putting myself out there! As an author, it just makes sense for me to be doing regular podcast appearances, but I manage to find all kinds of reasons to avoid the simple act of sending a message to a host and asking if I can be a guest. I’m working on it by scheduling a specific time to do this outreach, and asking friends to help hold me accountable.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://onestar.world/
• Other: My personal site: https://briandavidhall.com/

Image Credits

Images are from Wikimedia Commons, annotations by me.